"Valhalla" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 Wallace withal that it was not the chief curse. Scotland is not ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... publication of 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 ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... was carolling in some near thicket, and pigeons passed and repassed with the whisper of soft winds in their wings. The light on the Palace windows had died away, and the dome of the Pantheon swam aglow above the northern terrace, a fiery Valhalla in the sky; while below in grim array, along the terrace ranged, the marble ranks of queens looked out into ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... And have left him there alone, With his anchor ready weighed And his snowy sails displayed To the favouring wind, once more Blowing freshly from the shore; And have bidden him farewell Tenderly, Saying, "King of mighty men, We shall meet thee yet again, In Valhalla, with the monarchs ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • 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
... Nymphs, who had counted the slain, in cups which were made of the skulls of their enemies. When they were wearied of such enjoyments, the sprites of the Brave exercised themselves in single combat, hacked each other to pieces on the floor of Valhalla, resumed their former shape, and returned to their lard ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... the Col du Pigeonnier I saw tiny 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 ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... "to bring it to my father, that he may bear it with him to Valhalla, and have it with him ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... 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 ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the night of ages, to last and be transmitted. I feel as if I ought to 'tip' some custode for my glimpse of it. She has been told everything in the world and has never perceived anything, and the echoes of her education respond awfully to the rash footfall—I mean the casual remark—in the cold Valhalla of her memory. Mrs. Wimbush delights in her wit and says there's nothing so charming as to hear Mr. Paraday draw it out. He's perpetually detailed for this job, and he tells me it has a peculiarly exhausting effect. Every one's beginning—at the end of two days—to sidle ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... mountain tops, above the clouds, was built the wonderful city of Asgard, home of the gods. In the center was the palace Gladsheim, of pure gold, within whose precious hall there were set golden thrones for all the gods. Odin had, too, a great palace of his own, called Valhalla, and each god and each goddess had a home built of precious metals and adorned ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... gas-jets to the sun. And there are others. There are 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
... in our own sensations. 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
... 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 of Valkyrs above ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... changed at birth, the fraud was discovered by the cowardice of the latter and the courage of the former, when grown.[846] In the heroic age a conqueror could set a princess to work at the qvern. In Valhalla the hero set thralls to work for his conquered victim, to give him footbath, light fire, bind dogs, groom horses, and feed swine. Thrall women became concubines. They worked at the qvern, and wove. Love could raise them ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... 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 in the ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... 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.[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 nature; if they can be shown to be ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the cliffs a mat and tangle of green that had shut us in. On this dull December evening, with its vines and shrubs and gaunt trees bare, its pointed cedars and hemlocks the only green, its dark water swirling under overhanging rocks, it had become an entrance to Valhalla, the dim abode ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... he said. We filled all the chambers of our revolvers and fixed the weapons on to our belts, wondering what killing men would feel like, and how soon it would begin. "It'll be curious," Doe suggested, "going through life knowing that you killed a man while you were still nineteen. Perhaps in Valhalla we'll be introduced to the men we've killed. Jove! I'll write a ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... fawns 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 and a flute. He withdraws his instruments in a couple of bars; it would take anyone ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... only one 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 do ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... of Valhalla, In cleft of the mist stood the chieftain, And up to the blue shield of Heaven, Flung the load shaft ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... 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, cover the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... 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, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... 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 ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... emerges from its retirement to consist of a sham fight. Although the legends containing this account are not all found among Teutonic peoples, it cannot be deemed irrelevant to draw attention to the fact that similar fights are mentioned as the daily occupation of the heroes who attain to Valhalla, just as the nightly feasts of that roystering paradise correspond to the refreshments provided for the warriors around the tables of stone in their subterranean retreats. Whatever may have been the creed of other European ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... at our raw edges? One, probably; at the best, not more than two. And that takes us back to screaming savagery, when, gross of body and deed, we drank blood from the skulls of our enemies, and hailed as highest paradise the orgies and carnage of Valhalla. And before that time, think you, how many thousands of years of savagery did we endure? and how many myriads of thousands in the long procession of life up from the first vitalised inorganic? Two thousand ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... rest. Does it astonish thee that I should wish Quickly to rid myself of such a foe? That I deceived a dreamer who despised The mighty gods,—does that astonish thee? Does it astonish thee that I approved My warrior's purpose, since a hostile fate Attempted to dethrone, not only me, But all Valhalla's gods? ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... 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 ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... came 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 him, too, farewell. Perchance he will find himself better placed in the Valhalla of his forefathers, surrounded by those stout old de la Molles whose memory he regarded with so much affection, than here in this thin-blooded Victorian era. For as has been said elsewhere the old Squire would undoubtedly have looked better in a chain shirt ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... be found in 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 ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... was braver when he sent an arrow through my arm than he is to-day," and untied the package. "It is not light, jarls. What!—by Thor and Odin, and all the gods of Valhalla! when did man ever ...
— The Iron Star - And what It saw on Its Journey through the Ages • John Preston True
... the mantling Channel's mist Dim your distant decks and spars, And your flag that victory kissed And Valhalla hung with stars— Crowd and watch our signal ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... 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 to stop them, but the Roman army was beaten and its camp taken. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... striking than the lonely eminence of a pitch in the hall of Madame Tussaud, and a name flaunting on her sandwich-board. Moreover than which, as grammarians say, SARK has evidently been misinformed. My sandwich-board man has heard nothing of reported addition to our Valhalla. Certainly his boards do not confirm ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... 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! phrase of "going ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster |
