_A Norway legend showing the folly of contending against the forces
of nature._
The next day Thor and his friends came to a large city, very gloomy
and silent. They walked up to a high building where the gates stood
wide open. They crossed the threshold and found themselves in an
immense hall where there was a long table with many giants seated
about it on stone thrones. They looked very cold and solemn, but
Thor’s men were not at all afraid. The head giant said:
“You are Thor, and very welcome, but what can you and your friends
do to entitle you to enter here?” Loki spoke up and said:
“I am famous for eating; I can beat any one at that.” The head
giant ordered the table filled with food, and told a long, lean,
hungry man to begin at one end, and Loki to begin at the other.
Loki ate to the middle of the table and met the other man half way;
but Loki had only eaten the food, while the other man had devoured
bones, plates, table cloth and all.
“What else can you do?” said the head giant. This time the
countryman who had cracked the goat’s bone spoke up and said:
“I can run faster than any one here.” Then the head giant took them
all out to a great field, and selected a slender lad and started
him and the countryman on a race. The countryman ran like the wind
in a gale; but the slender lad ran past him on around the field and
past him again and again.
“You must do better than that,” said the head giant, “or we shall
think you are mere braggarts. What can you do, Thor?”
“I can drink more than anybody here,” said Thor.
Then the giant had a huge horn brought on and told Thor to drink
three times. Thor drank and drank and drank, but the more he drank
the more the horn would fill, until at last he had to give it up
with great mortification.
“You cannot even lift my old cat off the ground,” said the giant.
Then Thor seized the cat and pulled and pulled, but the cat’s feet
never left the earth. Thor was very much mortified at the failure
of his friends and himself. But the head giant said:
“Thor, you have some lessons to learn yet. Loki is indeed a great
eater, but he was contending with fire that consumed all things;
the countryman was running against thought that is swifter than the
wind; you were drinking from a horn the other end of which is in
the ocean, and my old cat’s legs engirdle the earth.”
When Thor heard these things he went back home and told his father,
Odin, that there were some things he could not do after all.