eaves in
autumn and leading to Valhalla the half of the warriors who, as
heroes, had died. Her vision enabled her to look over all the earth,
and she could see into the Future, but she held her knowledge as a
profound secret that none could prevail upon her to betray.

"Of me the gods are sprung;
And all that is to come I know, but lock
In my own breast, and have to none reveal'd."

Matthew Arnold.

[Illustration: FREYA SAT SPINNING THE CLOUDS]

Thus she came to be pictured crowned with heron plumes, the symbol of
silence--the silence of the lonely marshes where the heron stands in
mutest contemplation--a tall, very stately, very queenly, wholly
beautiful woman, with a bunch of keys at her girdle--symbol of her
protection of the Northern housewife--sometimes clad in snow-white
robes, sometimes in robes of sombre black. And because her care was
for the anxious, weary housewife, for the mother and her new-born
babe, for the storm-tossed mariner, fighting the billows of a hungry
sea, for those whose true and pure love had suffered the crucifixion
of death, and for the glorious dead on the field of battle, it is very
easy to see Freya as her worshippers saw her--an ideal of perfect
womanhood.

But the gods of the Norsemen were never wholly gods. Always they, like
the gods of Greece, endeared themselves to humanity by possessing some
little, or big, human weakness. And Freya is none the less lovable to
the descendants of her worshippers because she possessed the so-called
"feminine weakness" of love of dress. Jewels, too, she loved, and
knowing the wondrous skill of the dwarfs in fashioning exquisite
ornaments, she broke off a piece of gold from the statue of Odin, her
husband, and gave it to them to make into a necklace--the marvellous
jewelled necklace Brisingamen, that in time to come was possessed by
Beowulf. It was so exquisite a thing that it made her beauty twice
more perfect, and Odin loved her doubly much because of it. But when
he discovered that his statue had been tampered with, his wrath was
very great, and furiously he summoned the dwarfs--they who dealt
always with fine metal--and demanded of them which of them had done
him this grievous wrong. But the dwarfs loved Freya, and from them he
got no answer.

Then he placed the statue above the temple gate, and laboured with
guile to devise runes that might give it the power of speech, so that
it might shout aloud the name of the impiou