Perhaps we might give the Eddaic Twilight of the Gods a more human and
strictly European interpretation. May it not also foreshadow the great
Armageddon struggle which is evidently impending between the Teutonic
races in Western Europe, with their Protestantism, free speech,
individual liberty, right of private judgment, and scorn of all
thraldom, both material and mental, on the one side, and the dark
powers of absolutism, repression, and irresponsible authority in church
and state, on the other? How Russia, the type of brute-force, presses
with crushing weight on intellectual Germany! Soon she will absorb the
old kingdoms of Scandinavia,--to wit, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. On
the shores of Norway the ruler of the Sclavonic race will hang over
Scotland and England, like a bird of prey about to swoop upon his
victim. All despots and absolutists will array themselves under his
banner or be his auxiliaries. The old hierarchies will be banded with
him to crush out Protestantism, which is a plant of Teutonic growth.
Old Asia, with her rancor and despotic traditions, recognizes in the
Russian imperial rule a congenial rallying-point against the
progressive and hated Anglo-Saxonism and Protestantism of the West. A
decisive struggle is surely impending between freedom and absolutism,
between the bigoted adherents of the old faiths and the nations that
have cut loose from them. Perhaps this struggle may be prefigured in
the old Northern myth of the Twilight of the Gods.

All the old mythic cosmogonies are strangely suggestive and full of
mystic import,--that of Northern Odinism more than any other. In that
dim Niflheim, for instance, with its well-springs of the waters of the
upper world confusedly bubbling, and its metallic ore-veins, and dusk,
vaporous atmosphere, whence issued the old Nibelungen heroes of the
great Teutonic epos, there is much that is suggestive. May not one