human
One sympathises, too, with them, and almost pities them as the representatives of a simple primitive race, whose day is past and gone, but who still possessed something of the innocence and virtue of ancient times, together with a stock of old experience, which, however useful it might be as an example to others, was quite useless to help themselves. Yet he regards them as the embodiment of
gpt
which yields to the
human
representing virtue and reason. The
gpt
to whom they are opposed, are described as endowed with
human
The trolls, on the contrary, are subject to wild paroxysms of merely brutal animal rage, which discloses their true parentage. The fact that their enemies, the Æsir gods, were afterwards dethroned, and stigmatised, along with the classical deities, as cacodæmons, and became associated with the giants as evil spirits, will perhaps explain why some of the race have been endowed with attributes which do not pertain to the rest. It appears that they knew of their common destiny; that they sometimes suspended hostilities, and even intermarried; and looked forward with joint melancholy gloom to that, to them, awful day,
gpt
the said devils being the gods of the Romans. He afterwards informs us that, when the bishops Germanicus and Lupus were on a voyage to Britain,
human
Their efforts were fruitless, nevertheless, as the piety of the bishops prevailed against them. The Old Nick of the English, literally the devil, is but one form of Odin dethroned. Professor Henry Morley, in his
gpt
English Writers, says,--
human
Odin, under the name of Nikarr, from a root signifying stroke of violence, which appears in the Greek νίκη victory; in the Latin _necare_ and Anglo-Saxon _næcan_, to kill; and in the English Knock; having been first cut up into Nickers, has become the Old Nick of more recent times.
gpt
But mythology is a woof of many colours, in which the hues are shot and blended, so that the various races of supernatural beings are shaded off and fade away almost imperceptibly into each other; and thus, even in heathen times, it must have been hard to say exactly where the giant ended and the troll began. But when Christianity came in and heathendom fell; when the godlike race of the Æsir became evil demons instead of good genial powers, then all the objects of the old popular belief, whether Æsir, giants, or trolls, were mingled together in one superstition, as 'no canny.' They were all trolls, all malignant, and thus it is that, in these tales, the traditions about Odin and his underlings, about the frost giants, and about sorcerers and wizards, are confused and garbled; and all supernatural agency that plots man's ill is the work of _trolls_, whether the agent be the arch enemy himself, or giant, or witch, or wizard.
human
or
gpt
instrument, invented, according to the Greeks, by Prometheus. This unquestionably demonstrates its descent from the ancient solar myths. Conquered men driven to the caves and mountain fastnesses, and addicted to violence and cruelty, would soon be described figuratively by language which literally referred to older superstitions; just as we now designate sanguinary savages as monsters, fiends, and even
human
Between this outcast nomade race, which wandered from forest to forest, and from fell to fell, without a fixed place of abode, and the old natural powers and frost giants, the minds of the race which adored Odin and the Æsir soon engendered a monstrous man-eating cross-breed of supernatural beings, who fled from contact with the intruders as soon as the first great struggle was over, abhorred the light of day, and looked upon agriculture and tillage as a dangerous innovation which destroyed their hunting fields, and was destined finally to root them out from off the face of the earth.