In the same direction have not we their descendants since carried it far?
May such valor last forever with us!

That the man Odin, speaking with a Hero's voice and heart, as with an
impressiveness out of Heaven, told his People the infinite importance of
Valor, how man thereby became a god; and that his People, feeling a
response to it in their own hearts, believed this message of his, and
thought it a message out of Heaven, and him a Divinity for telling it them:
this seems to me the primary seed-grain of the Norse Religion, from which
all manner of mythologies, symbolic practices, speculations, allegories,
songs and sagas would naturally grow. Grow,--how strangely! I called it a
small light shining and shaping in the huge vortex of Norse darkness. Yet
the darkness itself was _alive_; consider that. It was the eager
inarticulate uninstructed Mind of the whole Norse People, longing only to
become articulate, to go on articulating ever farther! The living doctrine
grows, grows;--like a Banyan-tree; the first _seed_ is the essential thing:
any branch strikes itself down into the earth, becomes a new root; and so,
in endless complexity, we have a whole wood, a whole jungle, one seed the
parent of it all. Was not the whole Norse Religion, accordingly, in some
sense, what we called "the enormous shadow of this man's likeness"?
Critics trace some affinity in some Norse mythuses, of the Creation and
such like, with those of the Hindoos. The Cow Adumbla, "licking the rime
from the rocks," has a kind of Hindoo look. A Hindoo Cow, transported into
frosty countries. Probably enough; indeed we may say undoubtedly, these
things will have a kindred with the remotest lands, with the earliest
times. Thought does not die, but only is changed. The first man that
began to think in this Planet of ours, he was the beginner of all. And
then the second man, and the third man;--nay, every true Thinker to this
hour is a kind of Odin, teaches men _his_ way of thought, spreads a shadow
of his own likeness over sections of the History of the World.