the men whose blood still runs in our veins, whom doubtless we still
resemble in so many ways. Strange: they did believe that, while we
believe so differently. Let us look a little at this poor Norse creed, for
many reasons. We have tolerable means to do it; for there is another point
of interest in these Scandinavian mythologies: that they have been
preserved so well.

In that strange island Iceland,--burst up, the geologists say, by fire from
the bottom of the sea; a wild land of barrenness and lava; swallowed many
months of every year in black tempests, yet with a wild gleaming beauty in
summertime; towering up there, stern and grim, in the North Ocean with its
snow jokuls, roaring geysers, sulphur-pools and horrid volcanic chasms,
like the waste chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire;--where of all places
we least looked for Literature or written memorials, the record of these
things was written down. On the seabord of this wild land is a rim of
grassy country, where cattle can subsist, and men by means of them and of
what the sea yields; and it seems they were poetic men these, men who had
deep thoughts in them, and uttered musically their thoughts. Much would be
lost, had Iceland not been burst up from the sea, not been discovered by
the Northmen! The old Norse Poets were many of them natives of Iceland.

Saemund, one of the early Christian Priests there, who perhaps had a
lingering fondness for Paganism, collected certain of their old Pagan
songs, just about becoming obsolete then,--Poems or Chants of a mythic,
prophetic, mostly all of a religious character: that is what Norse critics
call the _Elder_ or Poetic _Edda_. _Edda_, a word of uncertain etymology,
is thought to signify _Ancestress_. Snorro Sturleson, an Iceland
gentleman, an extremely notable personage, educated by this Saemund's
grandson, took in hand next, near a century afterwards, to put together,
among several other books he wrote, a kind of Prose Synopsis of the whole