If I am right, the story of Balder's tragic end formed, so
to say, the text of the sacred drama which was acted year by year as
a magical rite to cause the sun to shine, trees to grow, crops to
thrive, and to guard man and beast from the baleful arts of fairies
and trolls, of witches and warlocks. The tale belonged, in short, to
that class of nature myths which are meant to be supplemented by
ritual; here, as so often, myth stood to magic in the relation of
theory to practice.
But if the victims--the human Balders--who died by fire, whether in
spring or at midsummer, were put to death as living embodiments of
tree-spirits or deities of vegetation, it would seem that Balder
himself must have been a tree-spirit or deity of vegetation. It
becomes desirable, therefore, to determine, if we can, the
particular kind of tree or trees, of which a personal representative
was burned at the fire-festivals. For we may be quite sure that it
was not as a representative of vegetation in general that the victim
suffered death. The idea of vegetation in general is too abstract to
be primitive.
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