es and trees. At nightfall they noticed a
house; and as the door, which indeed formed one whole side of the house,
was open, they entered. It was a simple habitation--one large hall,
altogether empty. They stayed there. Suddenly, in the dead of the night,
loud voices alarmed them. Thor grasped his hammer, and stood in the
doorway, prepared for fight. His companions within ran hither and
thither, in their terror, seeking some outlet in that rude hall: they
found a little closet at last, and took refuge there. Neither had Thor
any battle; for lo! in the morning it turned out that the noise had been
only the snoring of a certain enormous, but peaceable, giant--the giant
Skrymir, who lay peaceably sleeping near by; and this, that they took
for a house, was merely his glove thrown aside there: the door was the
glove-wrist; the little closet they had fled into was the thumb! Such a
glove! I remark, too, that it had not fingers, as ours have, but only a
thumb, and the rest undivided--a most ancient rustic glove!

Skrymir now carried their portmanteau all day; Thor, however, who had
his suspicions, did not like the ways of Skrymir, and determined at
night to put an end to him as he slept. Raising his hammer, he struck
down into the giant's face a right thunderbolt blow, of force to rend
rocks. The giant merely awoke, rubbed his cheek, and said, "Did a leaf
fall?" Again Thor struck, as soon as Skrymir again slept, a better blow
than before; but the giant only murmured, "Was that a grain of sand!"
Thor's third stroke was with both his hands (the "knuckles white," I
suppose), and it seemed to cut deep into Skrymir's visage; but he merely
checked his snore, and remarked, "There must be sparrows roosting in
this tree, I think."

At the gate of Utgard--a place so high, that you had to strain your neck
bending back to see the top of it--Skrymir went his way. Thor and his
companions were admitted, and invited to take a share in the games going
on. To Thor, for his part, they handed a drinking-horn; it was a common
feat, they told him, to drink this dry at one draught. Long and
fiercely, three times over, Thor drank, but made hardly any impression.
He was a weak child, they told him; could he lift that cat he saw there?
Small as the feat seemed, Thor, with his whole godlike strength, could
not: he bent up the creature's back, could not raise its feet off the
ground--could at the utmost raise one foot. "Why, you are no man," said
the Ut