The Norseman's god was a god of battles, and victory his greatest
gift to men; but this was not the only aspect under which the Great
Father was revered. Not victory in the fight alone, but every other
good gift came down from him and the Aesir. Odin's supreme will was
that treasure-house of bounty towards which, in one shape or the
other, all mortal desires turned, and out of its abundance showers of
mercy and streams of divine favour constantly poured down to refresh
the weary race of men. All these blessings and mercies, nay, their
very source itself, the ancient language bound up in a single word,
which, however expressive it may still be, has lost much of the
fulness of its meaning in its descent to these later times. This word
was 'Wish', which originally meant the perfect ideal, the actual
fruition of all joy and desire, and not, as now, the empty longing
for the object of our desires. From this original abstract meaning,
it was but a step to pass to the concrete, to personify the idea, to
make it an immortal essence, an attribute of the divinity, another
name for the greatest of all Gods himself. And so we find a host of
passages in early writers, [_D. M._, p. 126 fol., where they are
cited at length.] in every one of which 'God' or 'Odin' might be
substituted for 'Wish' with perfect propriety. Here we read how 'The
Wish' has hands, feet, power, sight, toil, and art. How he works and
labours, shapes and masters, inclines his ear, thinks, swears,
curses, and rejoices, adopts children, and takes men into his house;
behaves, in short, as a being of boundless power and infinite free-
will. Still more, he rejoices in his own works as in a child, and
thus appears in a thoroughly patriarchal point of view, as the Lord
of creation, glorying in his handiwork, as the father of a family in
early times was glad at heart when he reckoned his children as arrows
in his quiver, and beheld his house full of a long line of retainers
and dependants. For this attribute of the Great Father, for Odin as