Page:Norse mythology or, the religion of our forefathers, containing all the myths of the Eddas, systematized and interpreted with an introduction, vocabulary and index.djvu/126

 Tefldu í túni, Teitir váru; Var þeim vettugis Vant ór gulli.

Free version in English:

With golden tablets in the garden Glad they played, Nor was there to the valiant gods Want of gold.

The rhyme-letters here are those in italics.

The poems of the Elder Edda are in no special connection one with the other, and they may be divided into three classes: purely mythological, mythological-didactic, and mythological-historical poems.

The Elder Edda presents the Norse cosmogony, the doctrines of the Odinic mythology, and the lives and doings of the gods. It contains also a cycle of poems on the demi-gods and mythic heroes and heroines of the same period. It gives us as complete a view of the mythological world of the North as Homer and Hesiod do of that of Greece. But (to use in part the language of the Howitts) it presents this to us not as Homer does, worked up into one great poem, but as the rhapsodists of Greece presented to Homer's hands the materials for that great poem in the various hymns and ballads of the fall of Troy, which they sung all over Greece. No Homer ever arose in Norseland to mould all these sublime lyrics of the Elder Edda into one lordly epic. The story of Siegfried and Brynhild, which occupies the latter portion of the Elder Edda, was, in later times in Germany moulded into the great and beautiful Niebelungen-Lied; although it was much altered by the German poet or