All our theories concerning him and his ways must
therefore fall far short of certainty; the utmost we can aspire to
in such matters is a reasonable degree of probability.
To conclude these enquiries we may say that if Balder was indeed, as
I have conjectured, a personification of a mistletoe-bearing oak,
his death by a blow of the mistletoe might on the new theory be
explained as a death by a stroke of lightning. So long as the
mistletoe, in which the flame of the lightning smouldered, was
suffered to remain among the boughs, so long no harm could befall
the good and kindly god of the oak, who kept his life stowed away
for safety between earth and heaven in the mysterious parasite; but
when once that seat of his life, or of his death, was torn from the
branch and hurled at the trunk, the tree fell--the god died--smitten
by a thunderbolt.
And what we have said of Balder in the oak forests of Scandinavia
may perhaps, with all due diffidence in a question so obscure and
uncertain, be applied to the priest of Diana, the King of the Wood,
at Aricia in the oak forests of Italy.
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