"Valhalla" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so lustily. His laughter is the laughter of one watching his darling stripped for the rods. He who would be "in harmony with Nature." with those "murderous ministers" who, in their blind abyss, throw dice with Chance, must be in harmony with the giants of Jotunheim, as well as with the lords of Valhalla. He must be able to look on grimly while Asgard totters; he must welcome "the Twilight of the Gods." To have a mind inured to such conceptions, a mind capable of remaining on such a verge, is, alone, to be, intellectually ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... the Chief had done her more good than the doctor, and from that day Malcolm Sage had occupied chief place in Mrs. Tims's valhalla. ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... was intense scarlet. He hankered for the sparkling cups of life, being alive in every part—to ride and fight and burn in the sun, to revel in strife, to suffer, struggle, and quickly strike and win, or as quickly get the knockout blow! Valhalla and its ancient fighting creed were the hunger in his blood, and how to translate that age-old living feeling into terms of Christianity was a problem to which Jim's reason found no adequate answer. He talked of a better world, of peace ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... mantling Channel mist Dim your distant decks and spars, And your flag that victory kissed And Valhalla hung with stars— Crowd and watch our signal fly: ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... his watch-tower throne for the great Council Hall where the twelve Asas sat and took counsel together; but his favourite seat of all was in his own palace of Valhalla, or the Hall of the Chosen Slain. This palace stood in the midst of a wonderful grove of trees, whose leaves were all of red gold, rustling and shimmering in the breeze. Five and forty doors opened into it, each wide enough to allow eight hundred warriors ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... with other human faculties and powers. Odin was the Jupiter, the chief, of the northern gods. He is the god of song and of war, and was the inventor of the Runic characters, or alphabet. He was the ruler of Valhalla, the home of heroes slain in battle. There is much more that is curious and interesting in the mythology of the Scandinavians, which I must ask you to ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... Vasari's life of Brunelleschi is there, bolted together in successive beams. Last of all, a long, straight staircase, straight because without turn to right or left, curves upward like an unradiant, bowed Valhalla-bridge to a great burst of daylight, and the climber is upon the top ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... were Valhalla, the abode of the heroes whom death had found on the battlefield, and Niflheim, "the misty realm," secure from the cold outside, ruled over by Queen Hel. Valkyries, warlike women who rode through the air on swift horses, seized the heroes from the field of slaughter, ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... of Woerth succeeded that of Weissembourg; Forbach that of Woerth; and then came Vionville and Gravelotte to add their thousands of victims to the valhalla of victory. The surrender of Sedan followed, when the Germans passed on their way to the capital; but the brave general Urich still held out in besieged Strasbourg, and Bazaine had not yet made his last brilliant sortie from the invested Metz. ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... famous Englishmen, from every rank and creed, and every form of genius. It is not only Reims Cathedral and St. Denys both in one; but it is what the Pantheon was intended to be to France—what the Valhalla is to Germany—what Santa Croce is to Italy. . . It is this which inspired the saying of Nelson—Victory or Westminster Abbey. It is this which has intertwined it with so many eloquent passages of Macaulay. It is this which gives point to the allusions of recent Nonconformist statesmen, ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... they might pop as they liked; Peter hid a better thing in his inmost soul. Urquhart had said, "Sorry to hurt you, Margerison. You were jolly sporting, though." In the night it seemed incredible that Urquhart had stooped from Valhalla thus far; that Urquhart had pulled in his arm with his own hands and called him sporting to his face. The words, and the echo of the soft, pleasant, casual voice, with its unemphasised intonations, spread lifting wings for him, and bore him above the aching pain that ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... true Valhalla of Mediocrity, the libra d'oro of the onymi-anonymi, of the never-named authors who exist only in name,—Parson Adams would be here, had he found a printer for his sermons, Mr. Primrose for his tracts on Monogamy,—and not merely such nominum umbroe of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... and yet, he too died. Then I passed a Potter's field and I looked upon the graves of the unknown, graves of the pauper and the pleb, and I realized that they were at last equal, those who slept in Valhalla and those who slept in the common burying-ground, and that they would each and all hear the first or the second trump of the resurrection "according to the deeds done in the body and the flesh, according ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... indeed, the little shrub mistletoe, which grows, you know, on the west side of Valhalla, and to which I said nothing, because I thought it was too young ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... any of the dictionaries. I do not know if it was a Yule drink of our Viking ancestors in the days of paganism. I do not know if there was any truth in the tradition that it was the favourite drink of the dwellers in Valhalla, gods and heroes, when they kept their high Yule festival. But this I know, there never was, in the old house, a Yule breakfast without it. It had come down to us from time immemorial, and was indissolubly connected with Yule morning. That is all I am able to ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... This flash, which was like lightning in its intensity, together with the roar of the falling case, transported me—it's monstrous what jumps we take when the fit is on us—to the slopes of dim mountains in the night, to the heights above Valhalla with the flash of Valkyrs descending. And the booming of the case upon the slide—God pity me—was the music. It was thus that I was sent aloft upon the mountains of the North, into the glare of lightning, with the cry ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... hall called Valhall, and thither he transported the souls of the brave; hence the name Valhalla. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... admired remark, the flutter of affectionate approval. They demand more atmosphere and exercise; "a gale upon their spirits," as our pious ancestors would phrase it; to have their wits well breathed in an uproarious Valhalla.[30] And I suspect that the choice, given their character and faults, is one to be defended. The purely wise are silenced by facts; they talk in a clear atmosphere, problems lying around them like a view in ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Thus, the Arab, when covered with wounds, saw nothing but the dark eyes and the green kerchief of a beckoning Houri. The Northern warrior laughed in the pangs of death when he thought of the mead of Valhalla. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and the darkness and silence of the long winter's sleep. For if the gem-like green of the verdure proclaims its short life, it proclaims at the same time its richness,—and in winter the very darkness seems made to let the starry vault shine through with a glory of Valhalla and Gimle. Indeed, in our North, the winter possesses an impressiveness, a freshness, which only we Norsemen understand. Add to these strong effects of nature the loneliness of life in a wide tract of land, sparingly populated by a still ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... cry through sad Valhalla go For Balder, pierced with Lok's unhappy spray — For Balder, all but spared by Frea's charms; And still does art's imperial vista show, On the hushed sands of Oxus, far away, Young Sohrab dying in ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... upsetting a shaveling priest! We managed such wild young colts better, we Vikings who conquered the Danelagh. If Canute had had a son like Hereward—as would to God he had had!—he would have dealt with him as old Swend Forkbeard (God grant I meet him in Valhalla, in spite of all priests!) did by Canute himself when he was young, and kicked and plunged awhile at being first bitted ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... Woden made the leaves come and the flowers open. No one knew the true God then. Everyone said that Woden lived in a beautiful city in the sky, north of our own Northland. All the houses there were gold and silver, and the most splendid one was Woden's royal palace. This was called Valhalla. To reach it one had to ride or walk the whole length of the rainbow, as it arched from land to land. But there was a sharp-eyed watchman at the gate who stopped anyone who had no right ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... lengthy nights had led to their working up those myths that had always been common to the whole race into a beauty, poetry, and force, probably not found elsewhere; and that nerved them both to fight vehemently for an entrance to Valhalla, the hall of heroes, and to revenge the defection of the Christians who had fallen from Odin. They plundered, they burnt, they slew; they specially devastated churches and monasteries, and no coast was safe from them from the Adriatic to the furthest north—even Rome saw their long ships, and, ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Germans, and one which would tell powerfully on their childish imagination. Did not one single Kemper or Teuton return from Marius' slaughter, to spread among the tribes (niddering though he may have been called for coming back alive) the fair land which they had found, fit for the gods of Valhalla; the land of sunshine, fruits and wine, wherein his brothers' and sisters' bones were bleaching unavenged? Did no gay Gaul of the Legion of the Lark, boast in a frontier wine-house to a German trapper, who came in to ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... of their number would die! Some people thought that the legend had some connection with the Lord's Supper, the twelve Apostles bringing the number up to thirteen, while others attributed it to a much earlier period. In Norse mythology, thirteen was considered unlucky, because at a banquet in Valhalla, the Scandinavian heaven, where twelve had sat down, Loki intruded and made the number thirteen, and ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... sunset. My life for it, Jarl, thy ancestors were Vikings, who many a time sailed over the salt German sea and the Baltic; who wedded their Brynhildas in Jutland; and are now quaffing mead in the halls of Valhalla, and beating time with their cans to the hymns of the Scalds. Ah! how the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... his character that caused him to be identified with Mercury. In the Eddic theology he is a patron of war, as becomes the chief god of a warlike people. He arranges battle and dispenses victory; the heroes who fall in battle he receives into his heavenly army; they live with him in Valhalla or Valhoell, the hall of choice. Odin chooses those who are to go there; he is assisted in this by the Valkyries or choice-maidens. Life in Valhalla is a constant round of fighting, the wounds of which are healed at once, and feasting, the materials for which are ever renewed. Odin, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... burnish'd walls of Valhalla, In cleft of the mist stood the chieftain, And up to the blue shield of Heaven, Flung the ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... answered," said Helgi with a laugh. "And I can read my fate yet further. When I part from my foster-brother Estein, then shall a man go to Valhalla. What say you ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... great palace stood the old King Bele and his friend, Thorsten the faithful. Both had lived brave lives and longed for Valhalla, the home ...
— Northland Heroes • Florence Holbrook
... Carlyle's monumental work, and it is as an Englishman that he must be judged.... With Cromwell's memory it has fared as with ourselves. Royalists painted him as a devil. Carlyle painted him as the masterful saint who suited his peculiar Valhalla. It is time for us to regard him as he really was, with all his physical and moral audacity, with all his tenderness and spiritual yearnings, in the world of action what Shakespeare was in the world of thought, the greatest because the most typical Englishman of all time. This, in ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... strength and were armed with helmet and shield and spear. Like Woden, they rode unseen through the air and their horses were almost as swift as Sleipnir himself. They swiftly carried Woden's favorite warriors to Valhalla, the hall of the slain. The walls of Valhalla were hung with shields; its ceiling glittered with polished spearheads. From its five hundred and forty gates, each wide enough for eight hundred men abreast to march through, the warriors rushed every morning to fight a battle that lasted till nightfall ...
— Famous Men of The Middle Ages • John H. Haaren, LL.D. and A. B. Poland, Ph.D.
... times might have greeted the sudden sight of Vulcan's smithy blazing on Olympian hills. But the clang of iron on iron would have attended the flash and gleam of those unexpected fires, and here all was still save for that steady throb never heard in Olympus or the halls of Valhalla, the pant of the motor eager for flight ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... throne of God; presence of God; inheritance of the saints in light. Paradise, Eden, Zion, abode of the blessed; celestial bliss, glory. [Mythological heaven] Olympus; Elysium (paradise), Elysian fields, Arcadia^, bowers of bliss, garden of the Hesperides, third heaven; Valhalla, Walhalla (Scandinavian); Nirvana (Buddhist); happy hunting grounds; Alfardaws^, Assama^; Falak al aflak [Ar.] the highest heaven (Mohammedan). future state, eternal home, eternal reward. resurrection, translation; resuscitation ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... for a similar purpose in the hand of a deceased Irishman. The Greenlanders bury with a child a dog, for they say a dog will find his way anywhere. In the grave of the Viking warrior were buried his horn and armour in order that he might enter the halls of Valhalla fully equipped. ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... maps now, and find this wild north land. It is called Scandinavia, and comprises Norway and Sweden. The home of these Northern gods was a city called Asgard, built above the clouds, in the midst of which stood Valhalla, the hall of the chief god, Odin. Such a marvellous place as this was! It had a golden roof that reflected light over all the earth, just like the sun, and its ceiling was supported by spears, while millions of shields formed ...
— Harper's Young People, August 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... apparently, was dark and deep-set. Oddly enough, the chin, to the length of which he had himself referred in the Champion, does not appear abnormal. [Footnote: In the bust of Fielding which Miss Margaret Thomas has been commissioned by Mr. R. A. Kinglake to execute for the Somerset Valhalla, the Shire-Hall at Taunton, these points have been carefully considered; and the sculptor has succeeded in producing a work which, while it suggests the mingling of humour and dignity that is Fielding's chief characteristic, is also generally faithful to Hogarth's ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... upon his Cross; the sight which melted the hearts of our fierce forefathers, and turned them from the worship of Thor and Odin to the worship of 'The white Christ;' and from the hope of a Valhalla of brute prowess, to the hope of a heaven of righteousness and love. Look at Christ upon his Cross, and see there, as they saw, the true prowess, the true valour, the true chivalry, the true glory, the true manhood, most ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... France. The courage and example of a private soldier, who there fell, contributed much to the success of the charge. Ever after, at the parades of his battalion, the name of Latour d'Auvergne was first called, when the oldest sergeant stepped to the front and answered, "Died on the field of honor." In Valhalla, beyond the grave, where spirits of warriors assemble, when on the roll of heroes the name of Jackson is reached, it will be for the majestic shade of Lee to pronounce the highest eulogy known to our race—"Died ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... only true Bohemia. Every day and night we repaired to one of those palaces of marble and glass and tilework, where goes on a tremendous and sounding epic of life. Valhalla itself could not be more glorious and sonorous. The classic marble on which we ate, the great, light-flooded, vitreous front, adorned with snow-white scrolls; the grand Wagnerian din of clanking cups and bowls, the flashing staccato of brandishing ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... by her in those gloomy regions. To her came also all those who had died, not on the battlefield, but of old age or disease. And though these were treated kindly enough, theirs was a joyless life in comparison with that of the dead warriors who were feasting and fighting in the halls of Valhalla, under the kindly rule of ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... men, like Cunningham, who have heard the drumming of the hoofs behind them as they led their first un-apron-stringed unit out into the unknown. The one kind of man has tasted honey, but the other knows what fed, and feeds, the roaring sportsmen in Valhalla. ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... question in his turn; first about the creation of Earth and Sky, the origin of Sun and Moon, Winter and Summer, the Giants and the Winds; the coming of Njoerd the Wane to the Aesir as a hostage; the Einherjar, or chosen warriors of Valhalla. Then come prophetic questions on the destruction of the Sun by the wolf Fenri, the Gods who shall rule in the new world after Ragnaroek, the end of Odin. The poem is brought to a close by Odin's putting the question which only himself can answer: "What did Odin say in ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... compensation for lost youth, I fear." She said it without sentimentality, but, as she spoke, lightly touched the delicate theme of the "Golden Apples" that brought eternal youth to the gods, passing into the sublimity of the Valhalla motive. Looking up, she met Mark's comprehension and smiled, then, bringing her chord to a resolution, rose from the piano stool. Mark watched her as she paused to turn over the pages of his "Sun-dial," ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... recognized thousands. Yet as men's Gods have varied between the Infinite Creator and a monkey, so in relation to this article of a 'future life,' it must be confessed that there is a little difference between the Heaven of a Christian, the Paradise of a Mahometan, and the Valhalla of an ancient Goth. Still, as you say, it is true that, in some shape or other, nations have more distinctly recognized the idea of an after existence, than any ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... dies indeed; but his work lives, very truly lives. A heroic Wallace, quartered on the scaffold, cannot hinder that his Scotland become, one day, a part of England: but he does hinder that it become, on tyrannous unfair terms, a part of it; commands still, as with a god's voice, from his old Valhalla and Temple of the Brave, that there be a just real union as of brother and brother, not a false and merely semblant one as of slave and master. If the union with England be in fact one of Scotland's chief blessings, we thank ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... history and old romance, and it made him think of Valhalla. Here certainly was the dusk of the gods. Auersperg was one of the last representatives of the old order that troubled Europe so much in its going, for to John, a keen and intense lover of freedom and of the career open to all the talents, the present war was in its main feature a death ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... stream of youthful humanity flows sluggishly as between the banks of a canal, but once beyond the school limits it returns to nature. It is a bright, foaming torrent. Not a moment is wasted. The little girls are at once exchanging confidences, and the little boys are in Valhalla, where the heroes make friends with one another by indulging in everlasting assault and battery, and continually arise "refreshed with blows." There is no question about their being all alive and actively interested in one another. All the natural ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... know full well, and knew for many a year in the flesh! Is there an American who sees the bust of Longfellow among the effigies of the great authors of England without feeling a thrill of pleasure at recognizing the features of his native fellow-countryman in the Valhalla of his ancestral fellow-countrymen? There are many memorials in Poets' Corner and elsewhere in the Abbey which could be better spared than that. Too many that were placed there as luminaries have become conspicuous by their obscurity in the midst ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Herbert Spencer be erected in the Abbey, or rather in what journalists love to call the 'National Valhalla,' the 'English Pantheon,' or the 'venerable edifice,' where, as Macaulay says, the dust of the illustrious accusers, et cetera——? The question was once agitated in a daily paper. It seems that the Dean, when approached on the subject, acted like one of his predecessors in the case ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... of the old Viking who had been converted to Christianity, and who, just as they were about, with much joy, to baptize him, paused and asked: "But what—if this, as you tell me, is the only way to the true Valhalla—what has become of my comrades, my friends who are dead, who died in the ...
— Evergreens - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... issue of the sword, went by the very manner of his death to a better place. The Father of the Slain wanted him, and he was welcomed by the Valkyries, by Odin's corse-choosers, to the festive board in Valhalla. In every point of view, therefore, war and battle was a holy thing, and the Northman went to the battlefield in the firm conviction that right would prevail. In modern times, while we appeal in declarations ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... theory, one of the Trojan wooden horses made in Germany, was clearly intended to "Indo-Germanize" the world, when suddenly the twilight of the Gods swooped down upon the Berlin Valhalla. Nevertheless it has succeeded in seducing many minds, obscured by prejudices. It was hailed by "immanent" philosophers and anti-Semites out of political considerations and psychological predispositions, as well as by Christians mindless of their kin, by anti-church people ...
— The Shield • Various
... tragedy and consequent wandering,—pointing backward to the fabled siege of Troy and the flight of Aeneas,—"profugus" from Asia to Italy,—and forward to the quick-coming footsteps of the Northern profugi, who were eager, even this side the grave, to enter the Valhalla of their dreams. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... eagerly browsing upon the motives. "That is the motive of the Ride; that, dear, is the motive of the Fire; that is the motive of Slumber in the Fire, and that is the motive of Siegfried, the pure hero who will be born to save Valhalla." The class above had some knowledge of the orchestration. "You see," said a young man, pointing to the score, "here he is writing for the entire orchestra." "Three bars farther on he is writing for three violins ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... concentration, like a two-bit swami. Cam noticed a tiny, rodent-type nose thrusting itself up from Everett's side pocket. "Fear ... I detect great apprehension—panic—hysteria verging on the loss of reason ... third booth this side of the runes ... Valhalla." ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... with his voice vibrating as when a thick rope is strained by a ship swinging from her moorings, "here is the chosen one, the eldest son of the Chief, the darling of the people. Hearken, Bernhard, wilt thou go to Valhalla, where the heroes dwell with the gods, to bear a ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... true for all that. Free speech was first due to the Pantomimi. A proud boast that. They hymn Tell and chant Savonarola and glorify the Gracchi, but I doubt if any of the gods in the world's Pantheon or the other world's Valhalla did so much for freedom as those merry mimes that the children scamper after upon ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... saying that they cheered. It is likely that the warriors up in Valhalla heard, and thought it a battle-cry. Olaf raised his drinking-horn and said, 'Hail to you, Leif Ericsson! Health and greeting! Victory always follows your sword.' Then he drank to him across the floor, and bade him come and sit beside ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... to thee. I, living amongst men, have wed the daughter of a hero. My son shall live as a mortal amongst mortals. Sigi his name shall be. From him shall spring heroes who will fill Valhalla, my own hall in Asgard, with heroes against the day of our strife with the Giants and with ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... and descending to a graver tone of address—"I'm not sure that I can go quite so far as that. If we had no war at all, perchance our swords might rust, and our skill, for want of practice, might fail us in the hour of need. Besides, how could men in that case hope to dwell with Odin in Valhalla's bright and merry halls? But I agree with thee in wishing that we had less of war and more ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... House were certain bedaubed walls, in the basest style of imitation, which made him feel faintly sick, not to speak of a lobby adorned with artless prints and photographs of eminent defunct Congressmen that was all too serious for a joke and too comic for a Valhalla. But Pandora was greatly interested; she thought the Capitol very fine; it was easy to criticise the details, but as a whole it was the most impressive building she had ever seen. She proved a charming fellow ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... middle was the field of Ida, the gathering-place of the gods, with Odin's throne, Lidskialv, from which he views the whole world. Odin is the highest and the oldest of the gods, and all the others honor him as their father. Odin's hall is Valhalla. The ceiling of this hall is made of spears, it is covered with shields, and its benches are ornamented with coats of mail. To this place Odin invites all who have fallen in battle, and he is therefore called Valfather, i.e., the father of ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... mistletoe, which Lok the Accuser gave To Hoder, and unwitting Hoder threw— 'Gainst that alone had Balder's life no charm. And all the Gods and all the Heroes came, And stood round Balder on the bloody floor, Weeping and wailing; and Valhalla rang Up to its golden roof with sobs and cries; And on the tables stood the untasted meats, And in the horns and gold-rimm'd skulls the wine. And now would night have fall'n, and found them yet Wailing; but otherwise was Odin's will. ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... one, Philip. I feel already as if my name were written high upon the walls of my country's Valhalla. Tell me how great a fund you will require, and I will proceed at once to build the golden ladder upon which I am ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... specks move, flags signalling the arrival of the Vicomte de Bonnemain with the "grosse cavalerie," the splendid cuirassier regiments destined in a few hours to join the cuirassiers of Waterloo, riding into that bright Valhalla where all good soldiers shall hear the last trumpet ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... proper comprehension of 'Der Ring des Nibelungen.' The gods of Teutonic legend are not immortal. In the Edda the death of the gods is often mentioned, and distinct reference is made to their inevitable downfall. Behind Valhalla towers the gigantic figure of Fate, whose reign is eternal. The gods rule for a limited time, subject to its decrees. This ever-present idea of inexorable doom is the guiding idea of Wagner's great tragedy. Against the inevitable the gods plot and ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... management. And now I was back in harness again, and Peter was turning out brilliant political stuff at spasmodic intervals. He was not capable of any sustained effort. He never would be again; that was plain. He was growing restless and dissatisfied. He spoke of New York as though it were Valhalla. He said that he hadn't seen a pretty girl since he left Forty-second street. He laughed at Milwaukee's quaint German atmosphere. He sneered at our journalistic methods, and called the newspapers "country sheets," and was forever talking ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... were valiant in war, but they held that a lie was not justifiable under any pressure of an emergency. Their Valhalla heaven was the home of those who had fought bravely; but there was no place for liars in it. A fine illustration of their conception of the unvarying duty of truthfulness is given in the saga of Fridthjof. Fridthjof, ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... malady of the century. He is its chief spokesman. After the vague, mad, noble dreams of Byron, Shelley and Napoleon, the awakening found those disillusioned souls, Wagner, Nietzsche and Chopin. Wagner sought in the epical rehabilitation of a vanished Valhalla a surcease from the world- pain. He consciously selected his anodyne and in "Die Meistersinger" touched a consoling earth. Chopin and Nietzsche, temperamentally finer and more sensitive than Wagner—the one musically, the other intellectually—sang ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... phantasm of the brain? Was it the incarnation of the last vision of the lost Volunteers? Was it a Valkyrie assuming that lovely likeness to perch upon this eyrie, waiting to bear their heroic souls to Valhalla, or—was it Miss ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... piping voice—now scarcely heard an arm's length away—was potent in the contentions of the great hall when he was the honored associate of men whose public service reached back to the formation of the Government. In the old hall near by—now the Valhalla of the nation—he had sat with John Quincy Adams and contemporaries whose names at once recall the Revolutionary period. After serving as Vice-President of the Confederacy, whose rise and fall he had witnessed, Mr. Stephens, with ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... also a leading article, in which it was made perfectly clear that England would stand ashamed among the nations, if she did not inter her greatest painter in Westminster Abbey. Only the article, instead of saying Westminster Abbey, said National Valhalla. It seemed to make a point of not mentioning Westminster Abbey by name, as though Westminster Abbey had been something not quite mentionable, such as a pair of trousers. The article ended with the word 'basilica,' ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... back, for Cornelius James, the hilt of the sword grasped firmly in two small hands, had passed into the Valhalla of Childhood. ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... to arm these warriors who will seek Valhalla with you, my grandfather. You were wont to arm the friends who would be ready to fall ...
— A Sea Queen's Sailing • Charles Whistler
... cheerfully, he knelt at the block and said in a clear voice, 'O Lord, reward my friends, forgive my enemies, bless Prince Charles and his brother, the Duke, and receive my soul.' His arms dropped for the signal, and Arthur Elphinstone of Balmerino passed to the Valhalla where ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... says Hogni, "to bring it to my father, that he may bear it with him to Valhalla, and have it with him when the ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... and finally he allowed her to have her way. She quitted his side and approached Giovanni, her fine countenance wearing a bewitching smile as seductive as that of a Scandinavian valkyria ministering at the feast of heroes in the fabled Valhalla. ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... the dispute beat the air; they worry their own shadow; for they pass from Nature into the domain of speculation, where their dogmatic grips find nothing to lay hold upon. The shadows which they hew to pieces grow together in a moment like the heroes in Valhalla, to rejoice again in bloodless battles. Metaphysics can no longer claim to be the cornerstone of religion and morality. But if she can not be the Atlas that bears the moral world she can furnish a magic defense. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flint's Pond, where the trees, covered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the usnea lichen hangs in festoons from the white spruce trees, and toadstools, round tables of the swamp gods, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... countenances, the digestive silence, the admired remark, the flutter of affectionate approval. They demand more atmosphere and exercise; "a gale upon their spirits," as our pious ancestors would phrase it; to have their wits well breathed in an uproarious Valhalla. And I suspect that the choice, given their character and faults, is one to be defended. The purely wise are silenced by facts; they talk in a clear atmosphere, problems lying around them like a view in nature; if they can be shown to be somewhat in the wrong, they digest the reproof ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... little twig which grows to the east of Valhalla, which is called the mistletoe. Of that I took no oath, for it seemed to me too young and feeble to ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... again," said to one another the gods. And looking downwards, for my dreams had taken me to some fair and far Valhalla, I saw below me an iridescent bubble not greatly larger than a star shine beautifully but faintly, and up and up from it looking larger and larger came a flock of white, innumerable swans, singing and singing and singing, ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... question in the mind of a convert, but severe persecution and the responsibility of every misfortune that may occur in his village will be his, if he defy public opinion and introduce an orphan spirit to the Valhalla where his ancestors, for countless generations, have never failed to receive ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... between ancient systems of religion, and Gray, in his letters to Mason in 1758, when "Caractacus" was still in the works, takes him to task for mixing the Gothic and Celtic mythologies. He instructs him that Woden and his Valhalla belong to "the doctrine of the Scalds, not of the Bards"; but admits that, "in that scarcity of Celtic ideas we labor under," it might be permissible to borrow from the Edda, "dropping, however, all mention of Woden and his Valkyrian virgins," and "without entering too minutely on particulars"; ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... conveyance and their home. Gray-haired priestesses tramped along among them, barefooted, in white linen dresses, the knife at their girdle; northern Iphigenias, sacrificing prisoners as they were taken, to the gods of Valhalla. On they swept, eating up the country, and the people flying before them. In 113 B.C. the skirts of the Cimbri had encountered a small Roman force near Trieste, and destroyed it. Four years later another attempt was made ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... card down that takes the trick. Suddenly he thinks of all the lives that must, in these last three years, have ended in that grand gesture. It is too silly. He seems to see their poor lacerated souls, clutching their greasy dog-eared cards, climb to a squalid Valhalla, and there, in tobacco-stinking, sweat-stinking rooms, like those of the little cafes behind the lines, sit in groups of five, shuffling, dealing, taking tricks, always with the same slam of the cards on the table, pausing now and then to ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... Wagner could make us feel the awful tragedy of Siegfried's death, the calm of the primeval elements, the pompous yet somewhat venerable character of the Mastersingers, the agony of Tristan's delirium, the superb majesty of Valhalla, or the free, noble nature of Parsifal? Even when Wagner uses motives comparatively little, writing rather "freely," as in Tristan und Isolde, he always has the power of imprinting an idea with the utmost clearness upon our souls. He will sometimes ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... ran down the steps to the Casino terrace, coming upon it near the clump of nymphlike palms, and the marble bust of Berlioz that Mary could see from her window. Hercules' Rock was on fire with sunrise, and the Prince's palace looked in the magic flame like a strange Valhalla. ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... ghost. She heard his faint war whoop, his spectre voice, and only escaped with her life because his war club was but a shadow wielded by an arm of air. The Slavonians sacrificed a warrior's horse at his tomb.47 Nothing seemed to the Northman so noble as to enter Valhalla on horseback, with a numerous retinue, in his richest apparel and finest armor. It was firmly believed, Mallet says, that Odin himself had declared that whatsoever was burned or buried with the dead accompanied them to his palace.48 Before ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Greeks beheld it when they saw it as the bridge of Iris, messenger of the Gods; and similarly the Germanic mythology speaks of it as the pathway along which the souls of the fallen warriors draw near to Valhalla. By recovering this old conception in a new and scientifically grounded form we are enabled also to rectify the misunderstanding from which the ancient bridge-conception of the rainbow has suffered in later days, when tradition had begun to replace ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... and cold. And here the reflection again returns, what an inexpressible poverty of the mind there is, when the people have no longer a mythology, and yet have not obtained in its place any knowledge of the true religion. The martial vagrants of Scandinavia glowed with the vivid anticipations of Valhalla; the savages of the western continent had their animating visions of the "land of souls;" the modern Christian barbarians of England, who also expect to live after death, do not know what they mean by the! ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... in peace, like the warriors of old time, over whose tomb they slew many victims and cut many throats. I believe in no creed, but the old one of our ancestors suits me best, and I hope I shall find my way to Valhalla, if Valhalla there be." ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... liked being different. Alan Donnell loved space, and the ship, and life aboard it. His father, Captain of the VALHALLA, lived for nothing but the traditions of the Spacers. But his twin brother, Steve, couldn't stand it, and so ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... the funnel-shaped Inferno, the steep mountain of Purgatory crowned with its terrestrial paradise, and those concentric spheres of Heaven wherein beatified saints held weird and subtle converse, all went their way to the limbo prepared for the childlike fancies of untaught minds, whither Hades and Valhalla had gone before them. In our day it is hard to realize the startling effect of the discovery that Man does not dwell at the centre of things, but is the denizen of an obscure and tiny speck of cosmical matter quite invisible amid the innumerable throng of flaming suns that make up ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... from the ends of the earth, jewelled and plumed were we. I was Lord of the Inca race, and she was Queen of the Sea. Under the stars beyond our stars where the new-forged meteors glow Hotly we stormed Valhalla, ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... Valhalla of victories, the walls of the chief of staff's room, personified the military inheritance of a great nation; their names shone in luminous letters out of the thickening shadows of the past, where those of lesser ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... locusts of the north. Each vessel bears a deadly freight; Each Viking, fired with greed and hate, His axe is whetting for the strife, And counting how each Christian life Shall win him fame in Skaldic lays, And in Valhalla endless praise. For Hamble's river straight they steer; Prayer is in vain, no aid is near— Hopeless and helpless all must die. Oh, fainting heart and failing eye, Look forth upon the foe once more! Why leap they not upon the shore? Why pause their keels upon the strand, As checked ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... foolish laughter. "You cub! Will not even being killed cure you of your tricks? If you who have been in Valhalla do not know what Odin intends about my life, how can I know, who have stayed ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... worshipped the god Odin, and was taught from two absurd books called the Eddas. He wished to fight and die on a battle-field, so that his soul might cross a rainbow-bridge, and dwell in the beautiful halls of Valhalla. There—so the Eddas say—are the chosen heroes, who are forever fighting all ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... to our memory; and when a Pantheon or Valhalla is piled up to commemorate the names and guard the effigies of the great and good, the bright and burning genius, the haughty and faithful hearts, and the victorious hands of Ireland, let not the men of that time—that time of glory and misfortune—that ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... up to the table where I sat in the room with the beautiful Adam's fireplace and the ceiling like an architrave of Valhalla, and said, 'Do you mind—for one minute?' and he reached out ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... suit our friends, but where do we come in?" My answer is: "Apart from any boom Islam secures by sealing England's doom, We shall, if we survive the coming clash, Collect papyrus notes in lieu of cash; And, if we perish, as we may indeed, We have a goodly future guaranteed, With houris waiting in Valhalla's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... unchanged the problem of the relations which shall be sustained by the disembodied soul to time and space, the question as to the locality of the spirit world, the scene of our future life. Sheol, Hades, Tartarus, Valhalla with its mead brimmed horns, Blessed Isles, Elysium, supernal Olympus, firmamental Heaven, paradisal Eden, definite sites of celestial Worlds for departed souls, the Chaldee's golden orbs, the Sanscrit Meru, the Indian ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... blood, and what was lacking at birth came to him in the north-easter which hurled the waves of the Northern Sea in unavailing fury against the Northumbrian coast. He lived at a tension too great to be maintained without incessant stimulus. It was an existence like that of the heroes of Valhalla, who recruited at night the energies dissipated in the battles of the day by quaffing bumpers of inexhaustible mead. In these essays we have the Berserker in his milder moods, his savagery all laid aside, with but here and there a glint, as of sun-ray ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... Hope said contentedly; "it's good to be free from the everlasting Belviews and Wavecrests. Valhalla isn't trite; Babe and I will be the Valkyries, and we have caught one hero already." She smiled at her ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... Mephisto, the only radiant one, flits across it, and mocks the poor broken-hearted girl clinging to the church door. There is a dungeon, the chanting of the procession of tonsured priests, the passing-bell. Seldom appears the golden bridge over which the baffled and tired pass into Valhalla. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... have dreamed of a heaven, and they have imagined all kinds; they have put houris in the Mahometan's paradise, and swords in Valhalla. But in spite of having carte blanche they have never invented a ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... could find stored-up wealth along the coasts of Western Europe. The Northmen were heathen still and their religion was the old religion of force. They loved battle even more than they loved plunder. They held that the warrior who was slain in fight was received by the god Odin in Valhalla, where immortal heroes spent their days in cutting one another to pieces, and were healed of their wounds in the evening that they might join in the nightly feast, and be able to fight again on the morrow. He that died in bed was condemned to a chilly and dreary existence ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... cohorts. The conflict of good and evil is almost as fully dire. But Odin is a colourless reflection of Ormuzd. The aesir, the angels of the Scandinavian sky, are paler than the izeds. The figure of Baldr, the redeemer, faints beside that of Mithra. Valhalla, though perhaps less fatiguing than Garo-demana, was more trite in its wassails than the ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... that our shade departs this life in the best of form, young, married, with the lobes of his ears pierced, not dangerously handsome and a slayer of at least one human being. He starts upon the long journey to the Valhalla of Fiji. Soon he comes to a spiritual Pandanus at which he must throw the ghost of the whale's tooth which was placed in his hand at time of burial. If he succeeds in hitting the Pandanus, he may then wait until the spirit of his strangled wife ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... had deserted her, and the utter hopelessness of his own deep passion, blightingly, horribly forced itself upon him . . . Ootah asked himself all the questions men ask in such a crisis . . . and he demanded with wild weeping their answer from the dead rejoicing in the auroral Valhalla. But there was no answer—as perhaps there may be no answer; or, if there is, that God fearing lest, in attaining the Great Desire, men should cease to endeavor; to serve and to labor has kept it locked where He and the ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... conflicts. But careful enquirers, who would disdain to condemn Macaulay on passages selected by undiscriminating admirers from his Essays, or Carlyle for his frank admiration of Thor and Odin and the virtues of Valhalla, will ask for a more satisfying explanation. Even if all that were said about Treitschke and Nietzsche were true, it would still remain an unsolved question why they and their ideas should have taken intellectual Germany by storm. But it is not true. ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... was tried (the Valhalla motif). At first it seemed to produce the opposite effect, for the pulse was lowered. Later it rose to a rate double the normal, and the tension was diminished. The impression described by the subject afterward was a feeling of "lofty grandeur and calmness." ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... is right in him personified Bids all creation bend before the insatiate Teuton pride, Which, nourished on Valhalla dreams of empire unconfined, Would make the cannon and the sword the ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke |
