good Thought in all times. Not graceful lightness, half-sport, as in the
Greek Paganism; a certain homely truthfulness and rustic strength, a great
rude sincerity, discloses itself here. It is strange, after our beautiful
Apollo statues and clear smiling mythuses, to come down upon the Norse Gods
"brewing ale" to hold their feast with Aegir, the Sea-Jotun; sending out
Thor to get the caldron for them in the Jotun country; Thor, after many
adventures, clapping the Pot on his head, like a huge hat, and walking off
with it,--quite lost in it, the ears of the Pot reaching down to his heels!
A kind of vacant hugeness, large awkward gianthood, characterizes that
Norse system; enormous force, as yet altogether untutored, stalking
helpless with large uncertain strides. Consider only their primary mythus
of the Creation. The Gods, having got the Giant Ymer slain, a Giant made
by "warm wind," and much confused work, out of the conflict of Frost and
Fire,--determined on constructing a world with him. His blood made the
Sea; his flesh was the Land, the Rocks his bones; of his eyebrows they
formed Asgard their Gods'-dwelling; his skull was the great blue vault of
Immensity, and the brains of it became the Clouds. What a
Hyper-Brobdignagian business! Untamed Thought, great, giantlike,
enormous;--to be tamed in due time into the compact greatness, not
giantlike, but godlike and stronger than gianthood, of the Shakspeares, the
Goethes!--Spiritually as well as bodily these men are our progenitors.

I like, too, that representation they have of the tree Igdrasil. All Life
is figured by them as a Tree. Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of Existence, has its
roots deep down in the kingdoms of Hela or Death; its trunk reaches up
heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the whole Universe: it is the Tree of
Existence. At the foot of it, in the Death-kingdom, sit Three _Nornas_,
Fates,--the Past, Present, Future; watering its roots from the Sacred Well.
Its "boughs," with their buddings and disleafings?--events, things
suffered, things done, catastrophes,--stretch through all lands and times.