Note XX.—(Thr. 31.)

The burying of the hammer eight miles deep in the earth, and its recovery, Grimm connects with the old belief, in Germany and the north, that the thunderbolt plunges so far down that it takes seven or nine years to rise again to the surface—"Every year it rises a mile." See "Die Edda," von Karl Simrock (4th Edit., Stuttgard, 1871): Grimm's Mythol., 165. M. Handbuch, p. 57, §28. For the mythical signification of the whole lay, Simrock refers to Uhland 98, and Karl Weinhold Leitschrift, 7, 22.