The fact of Thor receiving Thralls in battle whilst Odin claimed the Jarls, looks as if Thor had fallen at one time from the first to a second place. Simrock says that Tyr answers to Zeus, and that perhaps he was the oldest of the Asgard gods; but he says also that Odin has gathered up into himself all the highest attributes of the gods. The only allusions that can be relied on as genuine which the _Eddas_ contain to a higher god than Odin is one very obscure strophe in the Voluspa which says speaking of Ragnarök,-- "Then comes the Mighty One, To the great judgment, The powerful from above Who rules over all. He shall doom pronounce And strifes allay, Holy peace establish Which shall ever be." Another still more difficult to understand in Hyndla's lay, "Then shall another come, Yet mightier, Although I dare not His name declare. Few may see Further forth Than when Odin Meets the Wolf." Simrock, however, thinks that he sees some gleams of a higher unseen Hidden Power very faintly here and there, and between this Being and Odin he also fancies that he can trace some connection. But he is very uncertain on the point. Simrock says of the goddesses in the Scandinavian mythology that they most of them represent only one side of the original Earth Mother, dividing the double nature between them; so we see some personating the fruitful, beneficent, life-giving renovating earth, whilst Hela has only the dark side left in her nature. It is, however, to be observed that whilst half a corpse she is half a woman. Gerda and Idūna are mixed in nature, also Rinda and others of Odin's giantess wives. He says, also, that Hela is the eldest of the goddesses, and that the root idea remains with her,--a receiver of the dead, as earth is,--though she became so degraded. Odin gave her power over nine worlds, and here we see a trace of the old idea of her being the great Earth Mother. "From a goddess of the underworld to a goddess of death is one step. A goddess of the underworld should be life-giving as well as destroying; but soon the heathen horror of death appears, and the destroyer is looked upon as the ender only, not the fresh begetter;" she becomes a hunger that will not be satisfied, and hence Hela is a daughter of Loki.