The name of this divinity
is Glooskap, meaning, strangely enough, the Liar, because it is said
that when he left earth, like King Arthur, for Fairyland, he promised
to return, and has never done so. It is characteristic of the Norse
gods that while they are grand they are manly, and combine with this a
peculiarly domestic humanity. Glooskap is the Norse god intensified. He
is, however, more of a giant; he grows to a more appalling greatness
than Thor or Odin in his battles; when a _Kiawaqu'_, or Jotun,
rises to the clouds to oppose him, Glooskap's head touches the stars,
and scorning to slay so mean a foe like an equal, he kills him
contemptuously with a light tap of his bow. But in the family circle he
is the most benevolent of gentle heroes, and has his oft-repeated
little standard jokes. Yet he never, like the Manobozho-Hiawatha of the
Chippewas, becomes silly, cruel, or fantastic. He has his roaring revel
with a brother giant, even as Thor went fishing in fierce fun with the
frost god, but he is never low or feeble.
Around Glooskap, who is by far the grandest and most Aryan-like
character ever evolved from a savage mind, and who is more congenial to
a reader of Shakespeare and Rabelais than any deity ever imagined out
of Europe, there are found strange giants: some literal Jotuns of stone
and ice, sorcerers who become giants like Glooskap, at will; the
terrible Chenoo, a human being with an icy-stone heart, who has sunk to
a cannibal and ghoul; all the weird monsters and horrors of the Eskimo
mythology, witches and demons, inherited from the terribly black
sorcery which preceded Shamanism, and compared to which the latter was
like an advanced religion, and all the minor mythology of dwarfs and
fairies.
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