SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE (1628-1699).

From the above list it appears that the earliest mention in the English
language of Icelandic literature was Sir William Temple's. The two
essays noted above have many references to Northern customs and songs.
Macaulay's praise of Temple's style is well deserved, and the slighting
remarks about the matter do not apply to the passages in evidence here.
Temple's acknowledgments to Wormius indicate the source of his
information, and it is a commentary upon the exactness of the
antiquarian's knowledge that so many of the statements in Temple's
essays are perfectly good to-day. Of course the terms "Runic" and
"Gothic" were misused, but so were they a century later. Odin is "the
first and great hero of the western Scythians; he led a mighty swarm of
the Getes, under the name of Goths, from the Asiatic Scythia into the
farthest northwest parts of Europe; he seated and spread his kingdom
round the whole Baltic sea, and over all the islands in it, and extended
it westward to the ocean and southward to the Elve."[6] Temple places
Odin's expedition at two thousand years before his own time, but he gets
many other facts right. Take this summing up of the old Norse belief as
an example:

"An opinion was fixed and general among them, that death was but the
entrance into another life; that all men who lived lazy and inactive
lives, and died natural deaths, by sickness, or by age, went into vast
caves under ground, all dark and miry, full of noisom creatures, usual
in such places, and there forever grovelled in endless stench and
misery. On the contrary, all who gave themselves to warlike actions and
enterprises, to the conquests of their neighbors, and slaughters of
enemies, and died in battle, or of violent deaths upon bold adventures