Thorwaldsen - Page 2

wintered his craft in one of the little bays of
Rhode Island, and spent the Winter at Mount Hope, where the marks of
his habitat endure even unto this day.

The statement to the effect that when the Indians saw the ships of
Columbus, they cried out, "Alas, we are discovered!" goes back to a
much earlier period, like many another of Mark Twain's gladsome
scintillations. So little did Thorfinne and his hardy comrades think
of crossing the Atlantic in search of adventure, that they used to
take their families along, as though it were a picnic. And so Fate
ordered that Gudrid, the good wife of Thorfinne, should give birth
to a son, there at Mount Hope, Rhode Island, in the year Ten Hundred
Seven. And they called the baby boy Snome. And to Snome, the
American, the pedigree of Thorwaldsen traces. In a lecture on the
Icelandic Sagas, I once heard William Morris say that all really
respectable Icelanders traced their genealogy to a king, and many of
them to a god. Thorwaldsen did both--first to Harold Hildestand,
King of Denmark, and then, with the help of several kind old
gran'mamas, to the god Thor. His love for mythology was an atavism.
In childhood the good old aunties used to tell him how the god Thor
once trod the earth and shattered the mountains with his hammer.
From Thor and the World his first ancestor was born, so the family
name was Thor-vald. The appendix "sen," or son, means that the man
was the son of Thor-vald; and in some way the name got ossified,
like the name Robinson, Parkinson, Peterson or Albertson, and then
it was Thorwaldsen.

Men who are strong in their own natures are very apt to smile at the
good folk who chase the genealogical aniseed trail--it is a harmless
diversion with no game at the end of the route. And on the other
hand, all men, like Thorwaldsen, who teach cosmic consciousness,
recognize their Divine Sonship. Such men feel that their footsteps
are mortised and tenoned in granite; and the Power that holds the
worlds in space and guides the wheeling planets, also prompts their
thoughts and directs their devious way. They know that they are a
necessary part of the Whole. Small men are provincial, mediocre men
are cosmopolitan, but the great souls are Universal.

Two islands, one city and the open sea claim the honor of being the
birthplace of Bertel Thorwaldsen. The date of his birth ranges,
according to the authorities, from Seventeen Hundred Seventy to
Seventeen Hundred Seventy-three--take your choice. His father was an
Icelander who had worked his passage down to Copenhagen and had
found his stint as a wood-carver in a shipyard where it was his duty
to carve out wonderful figureheads, after designs made by others.
Gottschalk Thorwaldsen