night-fall,' was the warning which Thorgill had given to his companion Jostein and his followers, and keep to your faith.' Much was imported by this counsel; for Thorgill knew of the spectral foes who might assail them. Jostein and the rest came in with noise and merriment, and at length they laid themselves to rest, when a loud knock was heard at the door of the hut. 'Good

tidings! exclaimed one, and rushed out of the hut; when he came in again, he was raving mad, and on the following morning he died. On the next day the knock was heard again at the door, and another of Jostein's men went out, and fell stark mad, and died; but just before he gave up the ghost he recovered his wits, and told them how he saw the man who died yestermorn flitting before him. And then a pestilence came amongst Jostein's men, and six of them, together with Jostein himself, died, and were buried in the frozen snow. After Yule-tide the vampire corpses all rose out of their graves. The pestilence broke out afresh, and Thorgerd and all the survivors of Jostein's men fell sick and died before the end of the month Goe. These also became vampires in their turn, and swarmed day and night about Thorgill and his followers; they were mostly seen in that part of the hut where they had dwelt while living. At length Thorgill dug the bodies out of the snow, and burnt them in a bale fire, and the living were then at rest.

And I

Now Thorey dreamt a dream. She saw fair groves and flowery gardens, and glorious shapes clad in bright garments. hope,' said she, when she told it to Thorgill, that we shall soon be freed from our hardships.' 'Good indeed is thy dream,' answered Thorgill, for it points thee to that home where good shall alway befal thee, and where, amongst the holy ones, thy spotless life and patient sufferings shall meet with their reward.'

Thorey often besought Thorgill to devise some means of escaping from this land of desolation, but he answered that he could find none. One day, however, he said that he would go up the ice-mountain to see if the ice were loosening itself from the land, which he did with his companions Thorlief, and Kol, and Stackard, leaving Thorey in the care of the slaves. They came back in the afternoon, and as they approached their hut they observed that the boat was no longer drawn up on the land. On entering the rude dwelling it was empty. Thorgill now apprehended that evil had happened. They stood still, and a slight convulsive sob was heard from Thorey's couch. They went up to it in eager haste, but she was breathless, and the little child was still sucking at the breast of the corpse.

Thorgill built himself a canoe; the ice now began to drift away from the land, and he and his men were able to row along the coast to Salone. There they remained during the following

winter. They continued advancing with caution until they reached a part of the coast bordered by steep icy mountains, and here they drew their canoe on shore and pitched their tent. Fresh trials awaited them. When morning dawned the canoe had disappeared. Thorgill now despaired; but at night he was visited by dreams of joyful import; and he knew that better fortune was near at hand. A loud voice was heard summoning the Icelanders to receive their boat again; and two gigantic women were seen for an instant by the Icelanders, then disappearing: these beings had carried off the canoe, and by them it was restored. And in this frail bark Thorgill and his men coasted along, till at length they reached first some straggling tents, the dwelling-place of one who had forfeited his law,' and then the settlements of Erick the Red, the main Icelandic colony. The remaining adventures of Thorgill, though highly interesting, are beyond our purview, and therefore, to borrow the usual phrase of the Icelandic historians when their personages make their exit, ' he now goes out of the Saga.'

That Thorgill Orrabeen was really wrecked on the coast of Greenland there is little reason to doubt. With respect to the marvels with which the Saga is embellished or disfigured, they are such as, in au age of credulity, arise out of natural causes and the workings of the human mind. Of these none are more credible in their way than the ominous appearances of the thundering deity: they give a lively and strong attestation of the inward struggles with which our hero received the new faith, at the same time that they prove the sincerity of his conversion.

The gigantic women seen by Thorgill are perhaps magnified in no small degree by the mists of Greenland; but they may be conjectured to have been the wives or sisters of the cannibals of Egede, a people akin to the Jatters, so often mentioned in the Icelandic Eddas. By the followers of Odin, the Jatters were represented as a race of savages towering in height above the rest of men. They dwelt in caves, forming no community, but dispersed in single families; they lived by fishing or the chase, but they despised the food thus earned when human flesh could be procured, which they considered as a greater delicacy. Jotunheim, their chief seat, was a large tract situated in the very north of Asia, including the Siberian coasts of the frozen ocean and the adjoining countries, stretching westward as far as Finmark, and bounded on the east by the river Oby; though the Jætters frequently wandered, both to the east and west, far beyond each frontier.

Under the names of Thursi and Hrymthesse they were also found dispersed amidst the mountains of Scandinavia where they long continued the hatred and terror of the more civilized Asi, by whom, like the other primitive inhabitants of the north, they

were

were invested with a supernatural character. Such was the giant Thrym from whom Thor recovered his hammer; and who, stripped of fable, was probably only a griesly savage.

High on a mound in haughty state

Thrym the king of the Thursi sate,

For his dogs he was twisting chains of gold,

And trimming the manes of his coursers bold.'

We shall not at present enter into the question of the affinity between the tremendous Jætters and the modern Russians; but it is thought that the people of Jotunheim extended themselves, after passing the Oby, along the north-eastern coasts of Asia, and that they crossed over to America, still keeping on the frozen shores, till at length they reached Labrador, the Hellulland of the Icelandic navigators; and from this country they might cross into Greenland. This itinerary has been marked out for the giants by Professor Thorlacius, a learned Icelander, descended from Thorgill Orrabeen, and to whom we owe the publication of Thorgill's Saga; but it must be received as mere guess work, perhaps as a learned dream; for the migration of the Jætters can only have taken place when the American continent received its inhabitants from the older portion of the globe. Saabye tells us, almost in the words of his grandfather, that he has known Greenlanders who affirmed that they had been far up the eastern coast where they saw hideous bearded men of uncommon height, who without doubt are cannibals.' Professor Thorlacius is also of opinion that the Jætters have yet a settlement on the coast of Greenland. This is a supposition coinciding in some measure with Egede's accounts, with which the Professor seems to have been unacquainted, and is grounded upon the following facts: implements of wood of unusual magnitude, amongst others a walking staff fit to support the steps of a tottering giant, have, as they say, been cast by the sea on the shores of Iceland; together with fragments of vessels of strange and unusual construction, of which the planks are neither fastened together with whalebone like the boats of the Greenlanders, nor sewed together with sinews according to the custom of the Laplanders, but fastened by wooden pins, and all of which are attributed to these scattered descendants of the ancient foes of the Asi.

These accounts come rather in a questionable shape, yet it is just possible that the northern hemisphere may have its Patagonians as well as the southern one: besides which, nature seems to have sported in gigantic creations in the vicinity of the polar circle. The north pole is the holy mountain of the eastern natious, the fabulous Meru of the Hindoos, the Kaf of the Arabian mythologists, and perhaps the real prototype of the Grecian Olympus. It is in ages anterior to history that we must seek the origin of these opinions.

May

May not the Hindoos have been induced to give the North Pole to Bramah, god of gods, with four faces, greatest of those who know the Vedas,' in consequence of the awful and unparalleled vividness of the apparitions of the Aurora Borealis on the coasts of the Frozen Ocean between the mouths of the Jenisei and the Lena Gmelin's description of it as seen there is exceedingly ?* remarkable. The shafts and flickering beams of ethereal light run from the north, multiplying themselves around and darting across the heavens with incredible swiftness, till they assemble in the zenith. The entire sky glitters and sparkles with ruby and sapphire and golden fire. Beautiful as the appearance is, no one can see it for the first time without terror. It is accompanied with loud hissing and crackling noises, resembling the discharge of the loudest fireworks. The wild beasts are alarmed, the dogs howl and crouch on the ground, and the Ostiack hunter exclaims, Spolochi chodjat!' The spirits of the air are rushing by!' Gmelin calls this tract 'the very birth-place of the Aurora Borealis.' In other words one of the electric poles of the globe is situated there. Such phenomena may well have led to the belief that Meru was the home of the gods, where they dwelt enthroned in light and power.

Kaf, according to the Arabians, was once inhabited by the preadamite kings, a primeval race of gigantic and monstrous forms who have yielded the world to the sons of man. These traditions were

afterwards applied to the Caucasian ranges: but in truth they point us to the North Pole, the centre, as it were, of races of animals of appalling bulk. The whale, the sea-snake, in whom perhaps we recognize the serpent of Midgard, and the kraken, yet encumber its waves; while the adjacent continents are heaped with the bleached bones and frozen carcasses of the mammoth and the megatherion; and the feathers of gigantic birds, the prototypes of the roc, the simorgh, and the garuda, who once soared above the eternal snow, There is no spot on the globe in which these relics of former creation are equally copious as in that portion of Asia which was deemed by the Asi to be the country of the giants the Siberian never sinks a well without discovering the tusks or bones of the arctic elephant or rhinoceros. The islands at the mouth of the Lena are described by Adams as almost composed of the bones and horns of the mammoth; and remains of the same species are very abundant in those latitudes of America into which the Jætters are supposed to have strayed. Without laying

Captain Wilford places Meru in the highlands of Tartary: these remarks would be equally applicable if we were to agree with him: we are not satisfied, however, that the abode of the gods is to be removed from the 'pistil' of the worldly lotus, and placed upon one of its petals—although he certainly has maintained his opinion with his usual learning and ingenuity.

any

any great stress upon these coincidences, they are sufficiently remarkable. The discoveries of modern science seem almost to enable us to lift up the ancient veil of allegory and fable.

The scenes presented by the arctic world are such as tend to exalt the fancy and nourish the superstitions of untutored man. In the thirteenth century the wonders of Greenland, its monsters of the deep, and its floating icy mountains, drew many a Norwegian thither, anxious to verify the strange tales of the wayfarer who had returned from this distant region. Their rude philosophy was exercised in contemplation, and the solutions which they attempted of these marvels form an entertaining portion of their descriptions. The north pole, said they, is the extremity of the world, and the northern aurora flashes from the sphere of fire which surrounds the globe. The wonders of the polar ice are detailed at length in the Speculum Regale, in which the inquirer is told that there is more there than in all the world besides. When that work was compiled, and it appears to have been written in the early part of the thirteenth century, the barrier had already begun to accumulate round the eastern coast. It (the ice) lies more towards the north or north-east than towards the south or south-west or west;' and many ships had then perished by being entangled in it.

The ice offers many strange phenomena, which deserve to be investigated by a philosophical observer. As recounted by the navigator, with all their terrors yet fresh in his recollection, they evidently formed the foundation of many a romantic tale of the middle ages. According to Saabye, the ice-islands possess an attractive power, so that large ships are driven against them, if they do not take the precaution of remaining at a proper distance. Others may calculate whether it is probable that a ship can gravitate towards an insulated mass of ice: but be that as it may, it must be recollected that there is generally a current setting in towards the ice, which at least produces the appearance of attraction. These translucent and attractive islands remind us at once of the mountains of adamant of Sinbad the Sailor, and of Huon of Bourdeaux, and of Duke Ernest of Bavaria. The fantastic shapes and brilliant colours assumed by the ice are well known; from these we have the fables of palaces of gems and diamonds. The mountain of glass upon which Brynhilda was placed by her father, and from which her suitor Sivard the Swift brought her down, was probably modelled in the lay of the minstrel from an arctic ice-island. The mouth of the bay Witte Blink' is even crossed by a tremendous glassy bridge, reaching from shore to shore; the largest ships might sail through its huge arches. This fairy structure gleams like the aurora, and the ice blink' is reflected afar into the air. Sound is conducted and multiplied in a remarkable manner by the