Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/84

74 tions" for  ("courses" of the stars), "solutions" for  ("appeasings" of divine wrath). P. 138, "chiefly," is rendered by the portentous word "precedaneously." Sheer blunders are "appear to be bound" for  ("make their appearance bound"), and on p. 143, where he says the Pythia becomes sacred to the god, where Iamblichus speaks of the "sacred chair." I have noted others.

All the same, I think the book useful for those who are not at home in Greek; most of what we want can be got from the translation. But I recommend in preference Parthey's Latin translation, given in his edition of the Greek text, with full index of Greek words (Berlin, 1857).

reprint of a paper lately read before the Cambridge Philological Society is evidence how little we really know as yet concerning the beliefs of the Scandinavian peoples. The learned author seeks to show that the statement, hitherto universally accepted, that Odin was hanged upon the world-ash Yggdrasill is based upon a late misunderstanding; that the name Yggdrasill was never applied to the great world-ash, except by confusion; that the myth of the conception and birth of Odin's famous steed, Sleipnir, hitherto usually reckoned of late origin, was really an early one; and that Sleipnir himself was a nature-myth of the wind. The problem is one beset with many difficulties, the chief of them arising from the fact that none of the Icelandic poems and no part of the mythology was recorded in writing until long after Christianity had become the religion of the North. Hence arose the double possibility of the impregnation of the heathen myths by Christianity, and their misunderstanding by the scribes who recorded them.

To examine Mr. Magnússon's revolutionary theories would need a paper at least as long as he has himself written; and our observations will be confined here to a single point. The story of the hanging of Odin is, as he says, monstrous and repulsive enough to make us pause before accepting it. But on the one hand