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Behind the green curtain of forests, deer, eland, and aurochs were bounding in herds, now and then showing their beautiful horns or their dark bushy brows at the opening of some clearing; goats wereclimbing about on the rocks and venturing close to the brink of precipices; birds were singing in the groves, now swinging playfully on the supple branches of willows, and now darting suddenly on swift wings through the air; fish were gliding silently under the surface of the waters, which reflected their silvery sheen or broke in soft ripples, while butterflies and insects were sporting and buzzing around beautiful flowers.
Odin smiled; the artist was pleased with his work.
But were animals, impelled by natural instincts only and exclusively occupied with the desire to satisfy their coarse wants, were such animals worthy to be the sole owners of such a charming abode?
It occurred to him to invent a being which, without participating in the divine essence, might still rise high above all other creatures. This time the divine artist wanted a spectator, to witness his work, to appreciate it intelligently, and afterwards to profit by it for some good purpose.
He was meditating on it during a walk on the sea-shore, when a piece of wood, a fragment of a huge branch of a tree which the wind had broken off, attracted his attention. It had evidently fallen into a river, which had carried it out into the high sea, and there it had been beaten and bruised byebb and tide. He drew this poor shapeless stick of wood towards him, split it in two and made out of it a man and a woman.
“Do you hear? Do you understand?” Asks the Edda, at this point.
Now, what is this intended to convey to us? That man, exposed to the caprices of the elements, is nothing but a poor plaything in the hands of Fate? Very well, let us admit this explanation. But can the sacred book of the Scandinavians really presume to teach us that the origin of mankind must be looked for in two sticks of wood? We cannot but think that that would be a sorry jest, alike unworthy of the general solemnity of the Edda and of the mysterious majesty of ancient cosmogonies.
Besides, we ought not to forget that all the Northern nations attributed a divine character to trees; if in Germany the oak was held sacred, the hyperboreans held the ash tree in great respect, and the question is only whether our first father was made of the wood of an ash tree, an oak, or a willow.
This leads us naturally to the consideration of the ashYgdrasiland its curious population of gods, birds, and quadrupeds.
The branches of this marvelous tree spread over the whole surface of the earth; its top supportedthe Walhalla and rose is to the uppermost heavens, while its roots penetrated to the very bottom of hell. Under its shadow dwell Odin and his Ases, when the government of the world requires his presence, or some important question has to be decided.
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Two swift winged ravens are incessantly flying to and fro in the Universe, to see what is going on; then they come and perch, one on his left and one on his right shoulder, and whisper into his ear the news of the day. A squirrel, as swift in its movements as the two ravens, is perpetually running up and down the tree. If you doubt my word, hear what the poet says:—
.... The fearful Odin Was seated beneath the ancient ash,The sacred tree whose immortal browRises and touches the vault of heaven.On the top an eagle with eager eyes,With piercing eyes, with ever open eyes,Takes in the whole Universe in a single glance.Odin receives his swift messages.Incessantly a tiny squirrelComes and goes; the god’s voice cheers it onward.All at once it dashes from the trunk to the topAnd in an instant it returns againFrom the top to the trunk. Odin, when it comes,Turns an attentive ear to the squirrel.....
But the poet does not tell the whole story.
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To act as a check upon the reports of the eagle, the ravens, and the squirrel, a vulture is perchingupon the loftiest top of the sacred tree, who looks over all the horizons of the earth and the universe, watching for the slightest stir and giving notice of any important event by his cries or the flapping of his wings.
Still other animals, however, inhabit the great ash tree Ygdrasil. Some of these play a sinister part in the great menagerie; they are hideous reptiles, half concealed in the slimy marshes into which one of the roots of the tree finds its way, and ever striving to pour their venom into the mire; beneath another root a dragon is crouching, who constantly gnaws at it, and four starving deer, rushing through its branches, forever devour its foliage.
“Do you hear? Do you understand?” asks the Edda once more.
For the present we do not presume to interpret these descriptions, and before we attempt to penetrate into these dark mysteries, we will mention the principal chiefs among the Ases.
The mystic marriage of Odin and Frigg resulted in the god Thor, who is held in equal veneration with his father. As his duty is to carry thunder and lightning, it is he who shakes the earth whenever he drives through the clouds in his car drawn by two goats and producing a noise represented by the words: “Pumerle pump! Ptimerle pump! Pliz! Pluz! Schmi! Schmur! Tarantara! Tarantara!”.This onomatopoetic translation of the flashing of lightning and the rolling of thunder, is not my own; it comes directly from Dr. Martin Luther, the great Reformer.
Thor is also engaged in pursuing and destroying the giants of the mountains, degenerate children of the giants of the frost, in size at least. At a later period we shall meet with giants of still smaller dimensions. Alas! that here below everything that is great and strong has a tendency to decrease steadily!
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For this war against the giants Odin has bestowed upon his son three precious objects, which in the inventory of the Ases appear under the name ofThor’s Three Jewels.The first is his weighty hammer.
Mjoïner(some people call it his club), which goes forth by itself to meet giants and crushes their heads. One of the commentators upon the Edda professes to see in the giants of the mountains nothing but the mountains themselves, and in the hammer Mjoïner, nothing but lightning, which generally strikes their summit. We must evidentlyput as little faith in commentators as in astronomers.
The second of Thor’s jewels was a pair of iron gloves. As soon as he puts them on, his spear no sooner reaches the point at which it is aimed, than it returns to his hand, precisely as the falcon comes back to the keeper’s gauntlet, after having destroyed its victim.
The third jewel of Thor is his war belt; when he puts it on, his strength is twice as great as before; in fact, he becomes irresistible and would overthrow the great Odin himself. But Odin has nothing to fear on his part, for in spite of his brutal and passionate temper, Thor is always an obedient and submissive son.
Asa-Thor, that is to say, the Lord Thor, was most highly respected among men as the redhaired master of thunder and lightning, and as the destroyer of giants; and he was also greatly feared as an active, blustering god, of a troublesome, turbulent temper and of somewhat eccentric manners.
Another weapon, at least as marvelous as Asa-Thor’s famous hammer, was the sword of the god Freyr. This sword was endowed with an intelligence very rarely to be met with among swords, and punctually obeyed the orders of its master. Even in his absence, it went promptly and faithfullyto carry out his orders, striking here and there at a given point, or making terrible havoc in the midst of a battle, without a hand at the hilt to direct its mortal blows.
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The good Freyr, as pacific a god as ever lived, was quite indifferent to battles and fights; hence he gave his orders quietly to his faithful sword, while he remained comfortably seated at Odin’s table, enjoying his strong beer and the rarest wines.
I cannot help wishing that they might have known the art of manufacturing guns after this system, at the time when I was a lieutenant in the Belleville National Guard. It would have been so pleasant to see a rifle move gravely to and fro, quite alone, in front of the City Hall and the Guard House; or to meet a patrol of fourguns, accompanied by a corporal, but a flesh and blood corporal to cry out: Who is there?
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In the meantime the happy owners of these improved weapons might have been sitting, not at Odin’s table, but at the nearest coffee house or restaurant,drinking beer or wine just like the Scandinavian gods.
Unfortunately our manufacturers of arms have not yet reached that degree of skill, which our forefathers seem to have possessed, and thus I have never yet been able to enjoy such a sight.
The happy owner of this magic weapon, Freyr, presided over the general administration of the clouds; it was he who made fine weather or rain, a very troublesome office, which must have exposed him to countless petitions and most contradictory prayers.
His sister Freya, afterwards called Frigg, was Odin’s wife and the most honored goddess on earth as well as in heaven. She inspired and protected lovers, and very different from her sister in Greece, this Northern Venus enjoyed an unsullied reputation.
They say that once, when her husband had gone away on a long journey, she was so deeply grieved at his absence, that her tears ran day and night incessantly; these tears, however, differed from those of mortal beings; “they were all drops of gold which fell into her bosom,”—and hence the Northern people call the precious metal to this dayFreyas tears.
One only among all the dwellers in Walhalla had been able to give her some comfort by singinghis sweetest songs; this was the god Bragi, the god of poetry and beautiful words.
A tradition which deserves to be mentioned here, accounts for the manner in which he obtained this precious gift of eloquence and the art of poetry.
In the early days of the world, when the creating god had concentrated, so to say, all the active powers of humanity in a few individuals, and when a long life permitted these favored beings to carry on their studies till they reached a happy end, there lived on earth a wise man who possessed an art unknown, not among men only, but among the gods themselves. This was the art of perpetuating thoughts by word-painting, of reproducing them in outward forms, not to the eye by colors, but to the ear by sounds. This sage was called Kvasir. He had invented theRunes, the art of poetry, and the no less precious art of reproducing words and fixing them in writing. He cut his runes on beech tablets; if he had gone a step farther, he would have invented printing long before Guttenberg.
Kvasir was then the sole owner of the art of Poetry.
Two wicked dwarfs prowling about in search of treasures, took it into their heads, that the treasure of Poetry was better than any other, and forthwith determined to obtain possession of it. They killed Kvasir, into whose dwelling they had crept bystealth, and as they were masters in magic, like all the dwarfs of those days, they carefully collected his blood, and mixing it, in different proportions, with honey, put it into three vessels, which they closed hermetically. These three vessels contained respectively Logic, Eloquence, and Poetry. To keep them safe till the day on which they should be used, they buried them in the depths of a cave which was inaccessible to men and unknown to the gods themselves. But one of those travelling agents, who under the form of ravens, were continually wandering over the world in Odin’s employ, had been a silent witness of the transactions, the murder, the mixing, and the hiding of the three vessels. He returned instantly to the ash Ygdrasil and reported it all to his master. The god gave his orders, which the squirrel, no doubt, at once carried to the eagle, and the latter, who was continually on the watch on the top of the sacred tree, left his post for a few moments in charge of the vulture, and flew with rapid wings to the cave, from whence he returned laden with the three precious vessels. It is to be supposed that he carried one in his beak, and the two others, one in each of his claws.
He placed the mysterious vessels at Odin’s feet and at once returned to relieve the vulture and to resume his watch.
Odin opened first the vessel which containedPoetry and tasted the contents. From that moment he never spoke otherwise than in verse. He also tasted Logic, and henceforth he spoke and reasoned with such extreme accuracy, that he found no one to agree with him any longer; he tasted Eloquence, and as soon as he opened his lips, he might have been mistaken for one of our own most eminent lawyers. Gold chains seemed to come out from his lips, as was the case with Ogmius, with which he bound the ears and hearts of all his hearers.
Whilst he was thus enjoying himself, Bragi his son, and Saga his daughter, who were sitting by him, felt their mouths water and looked imploringly at him.
Setting aside the terror with which the Druids have surrounded Odin, he seems to have been occasionally good-natured, and certainly always acted like a kind father. He offered the vessel with Poetry first to Saga, courteously giving her the preference on account of her sex. She barely touched it with her lips. When Bragi’s turn came, he eagerly swallowed as much as he could, and without taking time to gather breath, he began a grand triumphal chant in honor of the feasts, the loves, the wars, and the greatness of the gods, the stars of the firmament, paradise, hell, and the ash Ygdrasil.
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In well chosen cadences he imitated the clanking of cups, the cooing of doves and of lovers, the tumult of battles, the harmonies of the celestial spheres, and all this with such energy, such fire and such grace by turns, that Odin was enchanted, and having become a master himself about five minutes ago, on the spot changed his name of the Long-bearded God, which he had borne so far, to that of the God of Poetry. Moreover, he entrusted to his keeping the threefold treasure which had been taken from Kvasir’s murderers.
This was that god Bragi who alone succeeded in comforting the beautiful and inconsolable Freya in her great grief.
Through him the Druids were instructed in the art of verse; to him is due that terrible Scandinavian poetry, which contains, according to Ozanam, quite as much blood as honey.
As to Saga, she became the goddess of Tradition. “The heart of history is in tradition,” says a master, a sage, and a poet.
Good goddess Saga, your lips, I know, never touched the vessel containing Eloquence, nor that which held Logic, far from it! And still I count upon you to support me in carrying out my work, which I have perhaps imprudently begun; for I begin to be overwhelmed with materials, the subject is a very grave one, and, in spite of the good advice of my learned doctor and the assistance of my two charming lady-companions, time and strength threaten not to suffice. Therefore I beseech you as well as my readers, to grant me a short repose, before I proceed any farther on my journey through Odin’s fantastic world.
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ShortBiographies.—A Clairvoyant among the Gods.—A Bright God.—Tyr and the Wolf Fenris.—The Hospital at the Walhalla.—Why was Odin one-eyed?—The Three Norns.—Mimer the Sage.—A Goddess the Mother of Four Oxen.—The Love Affairs of Heimdall, the God with the Golden Teeth.
We have no intention of giving here a complete list of the numerous deities of the North. We will only mention Hermode, Odin’s messenger and man of business; Forseti, the peacemaker; Widar, the god of silence, a dumb person who only walks on air, as if he were afraid to hear the noise of his own footsteps; Vali, the skilfull archer; Uller, the excellent skater, who taught the giant Tialff his art, in spite of what the poet Klopstock says to the contrary; Hoder, a mysterious deity, whose name must never be uttered by any one in heaven or on earth. Why not? Odin alone knows the reason.
Let us also mention Heimdall, with the golden teeth. A son of Odin, he had nine mothers—eight more than had ever been known before him. He is the guardian of Walhalla, and his duty is to watch lest the giants should one fine day attempt to storm the heavenly abode by means of the Bifrost bridge, that is, the rainbow. But the gods can sleep in peace; neither the eagle nor the ravens on the ash Ygdrasil can surpass Heimdall in vigilance. The senses of sight and hearing are in him developed to a perfectly marvelous degree; he can hear the grass grow in the meadows and the wool grow on the back of the sheep. From one end of the world he sees a fly pass through the air at the other end, and, more than that, he sees distinctly the different joints in its feet and the black or brown spots with which its wings aredotted. In the midst of the darkest night and at the bottom of the sea where it is deepest, he sees an atom moving and watches the marriage of monads. There is nothing in the whole universe hid from him.
But why should this god Heimdall have golden teeth, after a fashion of some of the natives of Sunda? Odin alone knows the reason.
Among all these gods Balder is the most richly endowed, the best, the handsomest and the most virtuous—Balder, the Bright God, by eminence. Although the son of Odin and Frigg, he might be taken for a son of Freya, on account of his strong resemblance to Love itself, not to the turbulent, passionate, and capricious Love of the Greeks, but to Love in the widest and noblest sense of the word,—Love, in fine, in its Christian meaning. Balder represents that universal goodness, loyalty, affection, and harmony, which binds all beings to each other; Bragi, the poet is his brother; Forseti, the peacemaker, is his son. But we shall but too soon have to return to him on a most melancholy occasion.
In spite of our desire to close this already too numerous list, we cannot well pass over in silence that poor Tyr, the very type of intrepidity and loyalty, who fell a victim to his own prowess and to his imprudent confidence in the other gods.The latter, having one day met the wolf Fenris, invited him to enjoy a good meal with them. The wolf, always voraciously hungry, listened to the proposal. Then the Ases, pretending to fear that he might play them an ugly trick on the way home, insisted upon leading him by a chain around his neck, pledging their word as gods, however, that they would set him free upon going to table.
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Fenris, suspicious as all wolves, in fact, as all wicked creatures are, consented to be bound, but made it a condition that as a proof of the good faith of the Ases, one of them should put his hand into his mouth. Tyr agreed to do so without hesitation, not expecting that personages of such lofty position could possibly be faithless. The gods,however, did behave faithlessly and kept Fenris a prisoner, whereupon the wolf claimed the fulfillment of the pledge, and when Tyr put his hand into his mouth, coolly bit it off up to the wrist. Hence that particular joint has ever since been calledthe wolf’s joint, in memory of this inartistic amputation.
Thus the gods had a one-handed brother among them, after having long been presided over by a one-eyed god. But Tyr and Odin were by no means the only gods who labored under such an infirmity. Heimdall with the golden teeth must evidently have had a set of false teeth; Widar, the god of silence, was dumb, and Hoder, that mysterious being whose name must not be pronounced by any one, was blind. There was also a certain god, called Herblinde, who was not only blind but—actually dead! We poor mortals generally imagine that death includes blindness as a matter of course, but it was not so, apparently, among these mystic personages. Herblinde, for instance, was quite blind, although he was quite dead also, and yet he attended the meetings of the gods and even had a vote in their counsels. Do you understand that? I do not, I am sure.
And this grand council, this hospital of the Walhalla, which counted among its members a onehanded and a dumb god, a toothless and two blindgods, was, as I said, presided over by one-eyed Odin! This fact recalls forcibly the old proverb: Among the blind the one-eyed is king.
But why had Odin but one eye?
Fortunately I am able, for once, to give an answer to this question.
Astronomers have naturally found a reply to this Why? in their imperturbable system of sidereal interpretations. Odin was the sun-god; the sun was the eye of Nature, Nature had but one eye—consequently Odin was bound to be born one-eyed!.... Now you see why your daughter is deaf-mute.
The Edda, however, gives a different account of the matter, and I feel bound to adopt this explanation, as it is founded upon a knowledge of the most secret mysteries.
Odin had two eyes when he was born, and the sun was nothing more than his travelling companion, when he came from the far East, to revive and warm the earth which had so long been in the hands of’ the giants of the frost.
Several centuries after he had created man, he was one day walking up and down in the lower parts of his great ash tree Ygdrasil, and thinking of the greatly increased responsibility which rested upon him since he had added the government of the earth to that of heaven, and since the earthhad begun to be peopled with a multitude of races. He was asking himself whether the knowledge of all things had been revealed to him fully enough to enable him satisfactorily to fill, his two great offices. He had quaffed ample draughts by turns from the three vessels of Kvasir, but Eloquence, Poetry, and even Logic do not supply Wisdom.
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As he passed by a large tank fed by a purling brook, he saw three beautiful swans swimming merrily about in it, who after having examined him with half thoughtful, half mocking attention, twisted their long flexible necks in strange contortions and then seemed to converse with each other by significative glances.
He spoke to them and asked them if they possessed the secret of Wisdom.
The swans suddenly plunged beneath the surface,and in their place there appeared three beautiful women, representing three different stages of life.
They were the Norns.
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The first, called Urda, knew the Past; the second, called Verandi, saw the Present unfold itself before her eyes, hour by hour and minute by minute, and when to-day had become yesterday, her older sister gathered up the departed day and entered it on her record. Finally Skulda, the third, the Norn of the Future, enjoyed the privilege of beholding with her far-seeing eyes the germs of all future events and of being able to foretell with unerring accuracy the date and the consequences of their occurrence.
Let us pause here a moment to notice a remark communicated to me by the amiable and learnedDr. Rosalh, which may not be without interest to some of my readers.
It will be remembered that the Romans had at first pretended to recognize in these three Norns their own three Fates, probably because they were three and because they were women; at least I can see no other reason. Urda, Verandi, and Skulda were as beautiful and as graceful as the three Parcæ—Alecto, Lachesis, and Atropos—were ugly. Besides, their duties were entirely different. The Norns knew the fate of men, but they were utterly unable to lengthen human life. Such at least is the opinion of the great Holinshed in his Chronicles. Warburton sees in them nothing more than Valkyrias, but, what is far more astonishing, Shakespeare chose these three beautiful prophetic virgins, to furnish the three hideous, unclean, and toothless witches, the weird sisters, who called out to Macbeth, “All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!”
Shakespeare had evidently taken the curse denounced by the Church against the ancient deities in its literal meaning.
Odin had a better opinion of the three sisters; he conversed for some time with them, and afterwards came frequently back to visit them. It was thus and by their aid that he gained experience.
But even Experience, added to the precious giftsof Eloquence, Poetry, and Logic, is not able to supply Wisdom.
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He took counsel with the Norns, and in his anxiety to possess this most precious of all gifts, he expressed his willingness to exchange for it, if needs be, his treasures of poetry and of eloquence, his magic armor which made him safe against all danger, his horse Sleipner, which had eight legs and crossed the air with the rapidity of lightning, his eagle and his vulture, his squirrel and his tworavens. Then he went to Mimer, the wisest man in existence, the successor of old Kvasir, and attended his lectures like the most humble and zealous of students. When he had mastered the subject, and felt that he had acquired Wisdom at last, he paid the philosopher liberally by giving him one of his own eyes, in order thus to show him the high value he set upon the service which had been rendered to him by Mimer.
This was the reason why Odin was one-eyed. The truth is far too honorable to the god to be hid under idle astronomical pretexts.
Now, what use did he make of his wisdom?
He began by regulating the government of heaven. The Ases had until now lived very much as they chose; he now gave to each of them a duty to perform: to Niord the management of rivers and of fishing; to Egir, the seas and navigation; and so to others, requiring regularity and accuracy of all, but sternly prohibiting the display of extreme zeal, just as Talleyrand used to do with his diplomatic apprentices.
Then he turned to the earth.
Here men had multiplied incessantly, and with their numbers their wants had increased, and alas! with these, their vices also! In order to satisfy the wants and to repress the vices, they had established among them that great, primitive law whichconstitutes the whole code of laws among barbarians—the right of the stronger.
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The most fertile pastures, the rocks and grottoes best fitted for dwellings and safe retreats, the forests that were richest in game and the springs that were most frequented by the flocks, all were taken by force and possession maintained by the strength of the sword.
Wise Odin felt that violence gave no right and that theft could not give a title to possession. Hedetermined to establish the right of property, and to give it, for greater efficiency, a religious character which would make it sacred in the eyes of nations.
One of his daughters, Gefione, was sent by him to one of the most powerful chiefs of Scandinavia. She presented herself before his tent, with presents in her hands. In return she asked only for a span of land. The chief gave her a vast but uncultivated territory.
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Next she went, with secret purposes in her mind and always inspired by Odin, to a distant country, into the mountains, where giants dwelt. Here she married one of these giants, the most powerful of them all, to whom she bore four sons. The strong are apt to be gentle. Gefione took her four sons, changed them into oxen, and by words of gentle persuasion induced her husband to harness them himself to a plough. A river marked the boundary of the field, on the other side stood an altar. Thus was the first piece of property inaugurated,by purchase, by labor, and under the protection of the gods. The first owner, the gigantic husband, represented Force submitting to Right, and the four oxen represented the hard-working family, improving the soil and enriching it with the sweat of their brow.
Soon people began to imitate Gefione’s example, and in all directions land was measured and laid out; stones were put up to mark the boundary lines of each legal possession, and these stones were held sacred.
In order to encourage men in these efforts, the Ases made it a point every morning to show their bright, shining heads above the horizon and thus to cheer them by their presence and the interest they took in their labors.
The god Thor even came once to pay a visit to his sister Gefione, and then cast a few flashes of lightning upon each one of the newly acquired pieces of land, to render them sacred. Hence the old, deeply rooted notion that lightning hallows all it touches. Afterwards, and as late as the fifteenth century, it was deemed sufficient at Bonn, at Cologne, and at Mayence, to cast Thor’s hammer upon the piece of land that had become a fief, in order to establish an absolute right of proprietorship.
But the right of property alone did not suffice to render human society stable and flourishing,—the nations of the earth longed for a hierarchy of rank and race; at least the divine pupil of the wise Mimer decided it should be so. The means he employed to found such a hierarchy and the system itself appear curious and odd enough to us, who are no gods, but, unsuitable as they look now, they were successful at the time.
By his order Heimdall, the god with the false teeth, abandoned his post as guardian of the Wal-halla for nine days, and after a long journey across the country, knocked at the door of a wretched tumbledown hut, where theGreat-grandmotherlived. Here he remained three days and three nights.
The Great-grandmother brought a male child into the world, black-skinned, broad-shouldered, with hard horny hands, and powerful arms. They called itThrall, the serf.
Thrall’s natural inclination led him to prefer the hard work in mines and in the wilderness; he was fond of the society of domestic animals and even slept with them in their stables. His sons became cattle-raisers, miners, or charcoal-burners.
Heimdall had continued his journey. He next stopped at theGrandmother’shouse, a small, simple cottage, but lacking in nothing that was useful.
Here he remained three days and three nights.
The Grandmother gave birth to a son, who was calledKarl, the free man.Karl was fond of driving oxen under the yoke, of working in wood and in iron, of building boats and houses, and of trading. From him are descended our workmen and artisans, our merchants and builders.
Turning his face towards the south, Heimdall next went to a beautiful mansion, surrounded by magnificent gardens and reflected in the blue waters of a large lake. As the god had only to show his golden teeth in order to be welcomed by every woman he saw, the mistress of this mansion, theMother, also received him with great delight and tried to do him honor. Dressed in her most costly robes she put an embroidered cloth upon a table of polished wood and offered him in silver dishes all the varieties of fish and game, in which the lake and the park near the house abounded. The Mother did everything to keep the god as long as possible at her house, but, as at the Grandmother’s and at the Great-grandmother’s, so he remained here only three days and three nights.
A son appeared to console the Mother for the departure of her illustrious guest; this child had at its birth already rosy cheeks, long hair, and a haughty look. When he was still a child, he was fond of brandishing his spear and of bending his bow; at fifteen he swam across the blue waters of the lake, or plunged on an unbroken horse intothe depths of the forest, riding as fast as the wind. They called him Jarl, the noble.
Some years later Heimdall paid another visit to this country; delighted with the prowess of Jarl, he acknowledged him as his son and taught him the language of birds, which the gods alone understand and fluently speak. He taught him also the science of Runes, of runes of victory which are engraven on the blades of swords; runes of love to be traced upon drinking horns or the thumbnail; runes of the sea, with which the prow and the rudder of ships are decorated—in all cases precautionary measures by which alone ill fortune can be kept at bay.
Besides these gifts of knowledge, he bestowed upon him an inalienable, hereditary domain. This was the first entailed estate ever known in Europe.
Jarl, says the Edda, was a man ofeight-horse power. Could we express it better in the noble railway Anglo-Saxon of our day, or does our modern English really go back to the old Scandinavian, as this coincidence would seem to prove?
Jarl’s descendants are the great chieftains, the barons, princes, kings, and Druids, who have all inherited great power from their divine ancestor with the golden teeth. They alone are his legitimate and acknowledged children; the descendants of the grandmother and great-grandmother are illegitimate.Still, whether acknowledged by the law or not, they all form a close chain, a single family, they all spring from the same god! Thus the humblest among them saw his rights secured for the future.
I must confess that, the more carefully I examine these barbarians, whether they were gods or men, the more I am surprised to discover beneath the outward cloak of their fables so many correct ideas of order and of justice. These fables had, of course, their day and then passed away. Up to the present time, it is true, there is not much of the day gone; perhaps also Odin may be blamed for having invented, before the world was a few hundred years old, both the Middle Ages and the Feudal System. But it would be wrong to blame him, for it must be acknowledged, that in spite of the violence of their manners and the bloody nature of their worship, a certain civilization had at last appeared among the Scandinavians. It may be called brutal, I grant; it may be called aggressive even, but it was after all an improvement, and it has held its own in the North, under snow and ice, like the vigorous plants of our Alps. How comes it that the Germans and the Franks, more favored by climate and by contact with highly civilized nations, remained so long inferior to the Scandinavians in this respect? Perhaps they were more liable to be invaded than the Sons of the North; the Scandinavians invaded the continentin all directions, but no one ever dreamt of invading their country.
After having thus established the right of property and a certain social hierarchy, Odin had next instituted marriage with the symbolic ring, and finally courts of justice.
But, since he had given to man an immortal soul, and since he held out to him reward or punishment in another world according to his deserts, Odin had been compelled to establish the first high tribunals in that other world.