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/48



too, in good part, is Danish, Norse,—or rather, at the bottom, Danish and Norse and Saxon have no distinction except a superficial one—as of Heathen and Christian, or the like. But all over our island we are mingled largely with Danes proper—from the incessant invasions there were; and this, of course, in a greater proportion along the east coast; and greatest of all, as I find, in the north country. From the Humber upward, all over Scotland, the speech of the common people is still in singular degree Icelandic; its Germanism has still a peculiar Norse tinge. They, too, are Normans, Northmen—if that be any great beauty!
 * men had believed in the god Ægir. Indeed, our English blood,

Of the chief god, Odin, we shall speak by-and-by. Mark, at present, so much: what the essence of Scandinavian, and, indeed, of all paganism, is: a recognition of the forces of nature as godlike, stupendous, personal agencies—as gods and demons. Not inconceivable to us. It is the infant thought of man opening itself with awe and wonder on this ever stupendous universe. It is strange, after our beautiful Apollo statues and clear smiling mythuses, to come down upon the Norse gods brewing ale to hold their feast with Aegir, the Sea-Jötun; sending out Thor to get the caldron for them in the Jötun country; Thor, after many adventures, clapping the pot on his head, like a huge hat, and walking off with it—quite lost in it, the ear of the pot reaching down to his heels! A kind of vacant hugeness, large, awkward gianthood, characterizes that Norse system; enormous force, as yet altogether untutored, stalking helpless, with large, uncertain strides. Consider only their primary mythus of the Creation. The gods having got the giant Ymer slain—a giant made by warm winds and much confused work out of the conflict of Frost and Fire—determined on constructing a world with him. His blood made the sea; his flesh was the Land; the Rocks, his bones; of his eyebrows they formed Asgard, their gods' dwelling; his skull was the great blue vault of Immensity, and the brains of it became the Clouds. What a Hyper-Brobdignagian business! Untamed thought; great, giantlike, enormous; to be tamed, in due time, into the compact greatness, not giantlike, but godlike, and stronger than gianthood of the Shakespeares, the Goethes! Spiritually, as well as bodily, these men are our progenitors.