xxviii Valhalla.

Valhalla or Waihalla was the mythical Scandinavian Olympus, the
celestial locality where Odin and Edris dwelt with the happy dead who
had fallen in battle, and who had been conducted thither by the fair
Valkyries. Here they passed the days in fighting and hunting
alternately, being restored sound in body for the banquet each night,
where they drank mead from the skulls of the foes they had vanquished in
battle. Such was the heaven which commended itself to those fierce warriors.

xxix The parish priests were commonly called "Mass-Thanes"

xxx "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord.
He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and
whosoever liveth, and believeth in Me, shall never die."

It was not the usual English custom, in those days, to bury the dead in
coffins, still it was often done, in the case of the great, from the
earliest days of Christianity. For instance, a stone coffin, supposed to
contain the dust of the fierce Offa, who died A. D. 796, was dug up,
when more than a thousand years had passed away, in the year 1836, at
Hemel-Hempstead, with the name Offa rudely carved upon it. The earliest
mention of churchyards in English antiquities is in the canons called
the "Excerptions of Ecgbriht," A.D. 740, when Cuthbert was Archbishop of
Canterbury; and here the word "atria" is used, which may refer to the
outbuildings or porticoes of a church.


xxxi The Greater and Lesser Excommunications.