the ordering of seats in the hall; half the slain she chooses every
day, Odin has the other half," are an evident survival of a belief
that all the dead went to live with the Gods, Odin having the men,
and Freyja (or more probably Frigg) the women; the idea being here
confused with the later system, under which only those who fell in
battle were chosen by the Gods. Christian colouring appears in the
last lines of _Völuspa_ and in Snorri, where men are divided into the
"good and moral," who go after death to a hall of red gold, and the
"perjurers and murderers," who are sent to a hall of snakes.

For Ragnarök also a heathen origin is at least as probable as a
Christian one. I would suggest as a possibility that the expectation of
the Twilight of the Gods may have grown out of some ritual connected
with the eclipse, such as is frequent among heathen races. Such
ceremonies are a tacit acknowledgment of a doubt, and if they ever
existed among the Scandinavians, the possibility, ever present to
the savage mind, of a time when his efforts to help the light might
be fruitless, and the darkness prove the stronger, would be the germ
of his more civilised descendant's belief in Ragnarök.

By turning to the surviving poems of the Skalds, whose dates can be
approximately reckoned from the sagas, we can fix an inferior limit
for certain of the legends given above, placing them definitely in the
heathen time. Reference has already been made to the corroboration
of the Valhalla belief supplied by the elegies on Eirik Bloodaxe
and Hakon the Good. In the former (which is anonymous, but must have
been written soon after 950, since it was composed, on Eirik's death,
by his wife's orders), Odin commands the Einherjar and Valkyries to
prepare for the reception of the slain Eirik and his host, since no
one knows how soon the Gods will need to gather their forces together