The giants now resolved to attack Ansegard; and Woden, under the name of Yggr, warned the gods, who recall him after ten years’ exile.

But for Saxo this part of the story of the wars of the gods would be very fragmentary.

The “Hildiger story”, where a father slays his son unwittingly, and then falls at his brother’s hand, a tale combining the Rustam and the Balin-Balan types, is one of the Hilding tragedies, and curiously preserved in the late “Saga of Asmund the Champions’ bane”.  It is an antithesis, as Dr. Rydberg remarks, to the Hildebrand and Hadubrand story, where father and son must fight and are reconciled.

The “story of Orwandel” (the analogue of Orion the Hunter) must be gathered chiefly from the prose Edda.  He was a huntsman, big enough and brave enough to cope with giants.  He was the friend of Thor, the husband of Groa, the father of Swipdag, the enemy of giant Coller and the monster Sela.  The story of his birth, and of his being blinded, are lost apparently in the Teutonic stories, unless we may suppose that the bleeding of Robin Hood till he could not see by the traitorous prioress is the last remains of the story of the great archer’s death.

Great part of the troubles which befell the gods arose from the antagonism of the sons of Iwalde and the brethren Sindre and Brokk (Cinder and Brank), rival artist families; and it was owing to the retirement of their artist foster-parents that Frey and Freya were left among the giants.  The Hniflung hoard is also supposed to have consisted of the treasures of one band of primaeval artists, the Iwaldings.

Whether we have here the phenomenon of mythological doublets belonging to different tribes, or whether we have already among these early names that descent of story which has led to an adventure of Moses being attributed to Garibaldi, given to Theodoric the king the adventures of Theodoric the god, taken Arthur to Rome, and Charles the Great to Constantinople, it is hard to say.

The skeleton-key of identification, used even as ably as Dr. Rydberg uses it, will not pick every mythologic lock, though it undoubtedly has opened many hitherto closed.  The truth is that man is a finite animal; that he has a limited number of types of legend; that these legends, as long as they live and exist, are excessively prehensile; that, like the opossum, they can swing from tree to tree without falling; as one tree dies out of memory they pass on to another.  When they are scared away by what is called exact intelligence from the tall forest of great personalities, they contrive to live humbly clinging to such bare plain stocks and poles (Tis and Jack and Cinderella) as enable them to find a precarious perch.