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/94

 evil, virtue and vice, right and wrong. As Rudolf Keyser beautifully expresses himself:

The gods are the ordaining powers of nature clothed in personality. They direct the world, which they created; but beside them stand the mighty goddesses of fate and time, the great norns, who sustain the world-structure, the all-embraceing tree of the world (Ygdrasil). The life of the world is a struggle between the good and light gods on the one side, and the offspring of chaotic matter, the giants, nature's disturbing forces, on the other. This struggle extends also into man's being: the spirit proceeds from the gods, the body belongs to the world of the giants; they struggle with each other for the supremacy. If the spirit conquers by virtue and bravery, man goes to heaven after death, to fight in concert with the gods against the evil powers; but if the body conquers and links the spirit to itself by weakness and low desires, then man sinks after death to the world of the giants in the lower regions, and joins himself with the evil powers in the warfare against the gods.

Nature is the mother at whose breast we all are nourished. In ancient times she was the object of childlike contemplation, nay, adoration. Nature and men were in close communion with each other, much closer than we are now. They had a more delicate perception of, and more sympathy for, suffering nature; and it were well if some of the purity of this thought could be breathed down to us, their prosaic descendants, who have abandoned the offerings to give place to avarice (die Habsucht nahm zu, als die Opfer aufhörten.—Grimm).

It was a beautiful custom, which is still preserved in some parts of Norway, to fasten a bundle of grain to a long pole, which on Christmas eve was erected somewhere in the yard, or on the top of the house or barn, for the wild birds to feed upon early on Christmas-day morning,—(our heathen ancestors also had the Christmas or Yule-tide festival). In our degenerate