Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/132

126 the other Eddic Lays, that it is isolated in character and tone. It is a work neither of daylight nor dark, in fact, a creation of the passing twilight. But to my mind there is a power, a simplicity, a spontaneity in it that absolutely forbids one to look upon it as the learned product of a reconstructive book-worm of the 12th century in Iceland.

The wide reading and ingenuity of Bugge and the discoveries of Bang have led incautious followers into doubtful tracks. Mediæval Christianity in Teutonic lands is to a great extent Teutonic heathendom with a thin varnish of Christian ideas, but it is not true that Teutonic heathendom is permeated by Latino-Greek or Judæo-Christian thought. The fantastic theories of mediæval book-writers such as Jordanes Dudo, the Editor of what is called the Prose Edda, were not persons who represented the general ideas and feelings of their time, but learned speculators who had no more influence on the thought of the mass of their fellow-creatures than the Bishop of Oxford’s researches into the British Constitution have on the ordinary member of a Liberal Three Hundred or a Primrose League Habitation. The good old mythology and ritual went on as old wives’ fables and charms many a century after, and survive in the fairy-tales and superstitious observances of to-day.