Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 17, 1906.djvu/425

 Ctistom and Belief in Icelandic Sagas. 409

the general rites in the two cases seem to preserve the different characters of the two divinities. Odin, a heaven- god, is burnt on the pile ; Frey, apparently a god of arms and agriculture, is buried in a mound, into which money is put through three holes, and " peace and good seasons continued." This is rather to be regarded as a proof of the strength of hero-worship in the North, and of the belief in the old gods after the establishment of Christianity, than as evidence of the deification of a hero ; it is not that the hero becomes a god, but that the god is confused with the hero. Dr. Warde Fowler notices the same tendency in Roman religion towards the end of the Republic, when Saturnus and Faunus figure as early kings of Latium. Mr. Chadwick seems to take the opposite view ; several Continental scholars, relying largely on Saxo, conclude that Balder is a deified hero. Yet I do not know that any one has seriously adopted the same view of Odin, who is also a hero in Ynglinga and in Saxo. There is no indication that Frey and Odin were ever regarded as ancestor-kings in heathen times ; and their being so regarded in sources composed in Christian times is rather due to an unwillingness to give up the old gods altogether. On the other hand, a place is found in Valhalla for both the heroes and the vague female spirit-deities of the under- world, who seem to be combined with the Asgard hierarchy as the Einherjar and the Valkyries. The Einherjar, slain warriors who make up Odin's host, include dead heroes like Hakon the Good, Gunnar of HliiSarendi, Vestein Vesteinsson. The Valkyries, like the harpies, are wind or storm ghosts, who carry off men by a violent death ; legend, by making them the attendants of Odin, the Wild Huntsman, marks their connexion with the storm-winds. I cannot accept Mr. Chadwick's suggestion that they originated as sacrificial priestesses, an idea which could hardly arise except in a sophisticated and literary fancy. In the case of the Norns, the Norse Fates, we have a