giants and rime-ogres. Vengeance was wreaked on the slayer of Balder; for Woden was told when he went to the sibyl about the dreams that haunted his son, that Höᵭr bearing the fatal branch would be his death, but that Woden's son Vali, born of Vrindr in the Halls of the West, would avenge his brother when he was only one night old; 'He shall neither wash his hands,' was the reply, 'nor comb his hair, till he has borne the murderer of Balder to the funeral fire.' Such was the horror in which Balder's murder was held among the Anses that they never wished to hear the name of Höᵭr ever mentioned afterwards. The vengeance inflicted on Loki was very terrible: when he saw how angry the Anses were at what he had done, he fled, and finally sought refuge in the form of a salmon in a waterfall; but the Anses made a net and caught him. They then took him into a cave, where they left him bound with bonds of iron on three jagged pieces of rock, one under his shoulders, one under his loins, and the third under his knee-joints, while a terrible serpent hangs over his body distilling venom in his face. Loki's wife stands by with a cup to receive the venom, and when it is full she empties it; but while she is doing that, the venom drips on Loki's face and then he writhes, causing what men call earthquakes; and this goes on till the doom of the gods. That is one account; but another makes Loki, before his doom, appear among the Anses to bandy words with them, and even to boast to Frigg that he was the cause why Balder no longer rode into the hall. He is then reminded by Woden that he had already undergone disgrace eight winters underneath the earth in the form of a woman and milkmaid, and another of the Anses told him
