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 perhaps the most striking thought in these lines. Like the future blessedness of the Egyptian, Lodbrok's paradise is merely the best of his earthly good things, which in the cold regions of the North are scant and coarse enough. But though there is no thought of future life as a moral sanction, though personality has not yet passed beyond a sense of animal pains and pleasures, Lodbrok's song sets the person of the chief in the front and thrusts the kinsmen well into the background; and we could readily imagine the Heroes' Hall developed into the privileged paradise of the chiefs, while the body of the kinsmen, like the common herd in Mexico, remained in some dreary realm of Mictlan. Whether it was that clanship lost much of its communal spirit during the expeditions of the sea-robbers, devotion to the chief taking theplace of kinship ties, or that Northern conditions of soil and climate never permitted the same closeness of clan co-operation and sentiments as the sunny lands of the South, Lodbrok's song is pitched in a more personal key than most early Arab poems. Ideas of fate and revenge, common enough in Arab poetry, are thus personalised. Moreover, in the Arab death-song the idea of future