Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/106

 over the north of Europe, by lighting fires on the hills, and other festivities. It is but within these fifty years that trolls or sea-trows, and finmen and dwarfs, disappeared in the northern parts of Scotland. Mara (the nightmare) still rides the modern Saxon in his sleep, and under the same name nearly as she did the Yngling king Vanland; and the evil one in the Odin mythology, Nokke, keeps his ground, in the speech and invocations of our common people, as Old Nick, in spite of the Society for the Diffusion of Christian Knowledge. It is curious to observe how much more enduring ideas are than things—the intellectual than the material objects that mark the existence of the human species. Stone-work, and gold, and statues, and all material remains of this once general religion of the North, have disappeared from the face of the earth; yet words and ideas belonging to it remain.

It is remarkable that in the religion of Odin, as in that of Mahomet, women appear to have had no part in the future life. We find no allusion to any Valhalla for the female virtues. The Paradise of Mahomet and the Valhalla of Odin are the same; only the one offers sensual and the other warlike enjoyments to the happy. They both exclude females. This is not the only coincidence. Odin appears to have stood in the same relation to Thor in Odinism that Mahomet stands in to the Supreme Being in Mahometanism. The family of Mahomet, its semi-sacred character, and its rights, as successors to the prophet, to the throne and supremacy of temporal power over Mahometans, and with equal rights of succession in equal degrees of affinity to this sacred source, is in fact the Yngling dynasty of Odinism. If Mahomet had existed 400 years earlier, he would have been in modern history one of the Odins, perhaps the Odin, and the person or persons we call Odin would have merged in him. The coincidence between Odinism and Mahometanism