Page:Popular tales from the Norse (1912).djvu/87

 Rh another Norse tale? How is it that we find a Mongolian tale, which came confessedly from India, made up of two of our Norse Tales, "Rich Peter the Pedlar," and "The Giant that had no heart in his body"? How should all these things be, and how could they possibly be, except on that theory which day by day becomes more and more a matter of fact: this, that the whole human race sprung' from one stock, planted in the East, which has stretched out its boughs and branches, laden with the fruit of language, and bright with the bloom of song and story, by successive offshoots to the utmost parts of the earth.

NORSE MYTHOLOGY.

And now, in the second place, for that particular branch of the Aryan race, in which this peculiar development of the common tradition has arisen, which we are to consider as "Norse Popular Tales."

Whatever disputes may have existed as to the mythology of other branches of the Teutonic subdivision of the Aryan race—whatever discussions may have arisen as to the position of this or that divinity among the Franks, the Anglo-Saxons, or the Goths—about the Norsemen there can be no dispute or doubt. From a variety of circumstances, but two before all the rest—the one their settlement in Iceland, which preserved their language and its literary treasures incorrupt; the other their late conversion