came a mighty sea-rover by night and slew Frodi and carried
away the maids and the quern. When he got well out to sea, he
told them to grind out salt, and so they did with a vengeance.
They ground the ship full of salt and sank it, and so the
quern was lost forever, but the sea remains salt unto this
day.

Mr. Kelly rightly identifies Frodi with the sun-god Fro or
Freyr, and observes that the magic mill is only another form
of the fire-churn, or chark. According to another version the
quern is still grinding away and keeping the sea salt, and
over the place where it lies there is a prodigious whirlpool
or maelstrom which sucks down ships.

In its completed shape, the lightning-wand is the caduceus, or
rod of Hermes. I observed, in the preceding paper, that in the
Greek conception of Hermes there have been fused together the
attributes of two deities who were originally distinct. The
Hermes of the Homeric Hymn is a wind-god; but the later Hermes
Agoraios, the patron of gymnasia, the mutilation of whose
statues caused such terrible excitement in Athens during the
Peloponnesian War, is a very different personage. He is a
fire-god, invested with many solar attributes, and represents
the quickening forces of nature. In this capacity the
invention of fire was ascribed to him as well as to
Prometheus; he was said to be the friend of mankind, and was
surnamed Ploutodotes, or "the giver of wealth."

The Norse wind-god Odin has in like manner acquired several of
the attributes of Freyr and Thor.[63] His lightning-spear,