Survive the Jive

A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.

—Thomas Carlyle (via lostmystory)

A kind of vacant hugeness, large awkward gianthood, characterises that Norse System; enormous force, as yet altogether untutored, stalking helpless with large uncertain strides. Consider only their primary mythos of the Creation. The Gods, having got the Giant Ymer slain, a Giant made by ‘warm wind,’ and much confused work, out of the conflict of Frost and Fire, determined on constructing a world with him. His blood made the Sea; his flesh was the Land, the Rocks his bones; of his eyebrows they formed Asgard their Gods’ dwelling; his skull was the great blue vault of Immensity, and the brains of it became the clouds. What a Hyper-Brobdingnagian business! Untamed Thought, great, giantlike, enormous; — to be tamed in due time into the compact greatness, not giantlike, but godlike and stronger than gianthood, of the Shakespeares, the Goethes! – Spiritually as well as bodily these men are our progenitors.

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 Thomas Carlyle -On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History -  1841

Balder, the White God, the beautiful, the just and benignant (whom the early Christian Missionaries found to resemble Christ), is the Sun, - beautifullest of visible things; wondrous too, and divine still, after all of our Astronomies and Almanacs!

— Thomas Carlyle -On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History -  1841