Manchester,
July 1902.




The Edda: II. The Heroic Mythology of the North


Sigemund the Waelsing and Fitela, Aetla, Eormanric the Goth and Gifica
of Burgundy, Ongendtheow and Theodric, Heorrenda and the Heodenings,
and Weland the Smith: all these heroes of Germanic legend were known
to the writers of our earliest English literature. But in most cases
the only evidence of this knowledge is a word, a name, here and there,
with no hint of the story attached. For circumstances directed the
poetical gifts of the Saxons in England towards legends of the saints
and Biblical paraphrase, away from the native heroes of the race;
while later events completed the exclusion of Germanic legend from our
literature, by substituting French and Celtic romance. Nevertheless,
these few brief references in _Beowulf_ and in the small group of
heathen English relics give us the right to a peculiar interest in the
hero-poems of the Edda. In studying these heroic poems, therefore,
we are confronted by problems entirely different in character from
those which have to be considered in connexion with the mythical
texts. Those are in the main the product of one, the Northern,
branch of the Germanic race, as we have seen (No. 12 of this series),
and the chief question to be determined is whether they represent,
however altered in form, a mythology common to all the Germans, and
as such necessarily early; or whether they are in substance, as well