with the more old-fashioned god Thor:[1] the former, we are told in one of the Eddic poems, owned all the gentlefolk that fall in fight, but Thor the thrall-kind, which would seem to refer to an ancient custom of sacrificing thralls on Thor's altar.[2] This last is described in a well-known passage which speaks of a place called Thorsness; and, in its allusion to the blood, it reminds one of the Snowdonian stone called the Red Altar. "There," says the writer, "is still to be seen the doom-ring wherein men were doomed to sacrifice. Inside the ring stands Thor's stone, whereon those men, who were kept for the sacrifice, had their backs broken, and the blood is still to be seen on the stone."[3] As to Woden, those who fell in battle were regarded as belonging to him, but it may be doubted that men were sacrificed by the Old Norsemen to him in the literal and ceremonial sense in which they were to Thor.
Were one inclined to draw a parallel in the spirit of Casaubon or Bishops Lowth and Horsley, one might point to the rise of the figure of the Man-god in Celtic and Teutonic heathendom, as helping to introduce a cult less given to the shedding of human blood than that which went before; and with it one might compare the worship of a very different kind of Man-god who abolished for Christians all the blood sacrifices in which the Jewish
- ↑ It is right, however, to note that with the ancient Germans human sacrifices to their Mercury were, according to Tacitus, not unusual; see his Germania, ix.
- ↑ Corpus Poet. Bor. i. 120. Criminals also of the worst kind were sacrificed to Thor: see the same work, i. 410.
- ↑ See the Eyrbyggia Saga, cited by Vigfusson and Powell in the Corpus, i. 409, where they call attention, by way of comparison, to the Blood-stones in the Fiji Islands.
