not, as elsewhere, to pick up and piece together the wretched
fragments of a faith, the articles of which its own priests had
forgotten to commit to writing, and which those of another creed had
dashed to pieces and destroyed, wherever their zealous hands could
reach. In the two Eddas, therefore, in the early Sagas, in Saxo's
stilted Latin, which barely conceals the popular songs and legends
from which the historian drew his materials, we are enabled to form a
perfect conception of the creed of the heathen Norsemen. We are
enabled to trace, as has been traced by the same hand in another
place [_Oxford Essays for_ 1898: 'The Norsemen in Iceland'.],
the natural and rational development of that creed from a simple
worship of nature and her powers, first to monotheism, and then to a
polytheistic system. The tertiary system of Polytheism is the soil
out of which the mythology of the Eddas sprang, though through it
each of the older formations crops out in huge masses which admit of
no mistake as to its origin. In the Eddas the natural powers have
been partly subdued, partly thrust on one side, for a time, by Odin
and the Aesir, by the Great Father and his children, by One Supreme
and twelve subordinate gods, who rule for an appointed time, and over
whom hangs an impending fate, which imparts a charm of melancholy to
this creed, which has clung to the race who once believed in it long
after the creed itself has vanished before the light of Christianity.
According to this creed, the Aesir and Odin had their abode in
Asgard, a lofty hill in the centre of the habitable earth, in the
midst of Midgard, that _middle earth_ which we hear of in early
English poetry, the abode of gods and men. Round that earth, which
was fenced in against the attacks of ancient and inveterate foes by a
natural fortification of hills, flowed the great sea in a ring, and
beyond that sea was Utgard, the outlying world, the abode of Frost
Giants, and Monsters, those old-natural powers who had been