Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 3.djvu/386

 374 CHRONICLE OF THE NOTES. The apostolic succession also, if it may be so termed, from the twelve original godars the companions of Odin, or a qualification derived from them, appears to have been consi- dered, just as a true apostolic succession is considered in Eng- land at the present day, necessary for holding the office of godar. These are coincidences with the Cln'istian church which can scarcely be accidental. The use of the sign of the cross also as a religious symbol appears to have prevailed in Odinism in the earliest times, and must have been borrowed from Christianity. Antiquaries call it the sign of Thor's hammer, not of the cross ; but the use of any sign as a reli- gious symbol by which people of the same faith might recog- nise each other, although necessary in the persecutions of the early CMstians, could only arise from imitation among the the followers of Odin-worship, and especially of the same sign. It would naturally be adopted, however, from a superstitious belief that there was some virtue in the si2;n itself. The use of water also in giving a name — and in the earliest historical period we find that Harald Haarfager, with whom history commences in Norway, had water poured over him and a name given him in infancy — is a rite evidently borrowed from Christianity. It has no meaning in Odinism. It is a remark- able circumstance in the mythology of the Odin religion, that there was no god particularly connected with water, or the sea, or the winds ; and the circumstance is a very strong proof that the Odin religion was not indigenous in Scandinavia, in which the people in all ages must necessarily have been sea- faring, and dependent on the elements, and that this religion had its origin, as the tradition states it, in the inland parts of Asia, where sea and wind, and the interests connected with these elements, were unknown or unimportant. The use of water at the ceremony of giving a name, without any sacra- mental meaning or symbolical reference to their own mytho- logy, seems to prove a mere imitation of the Christian cere- monial by a later religion. It is, indeed, possible that all the passages in which baptism by water are mentioned may have been interpolated by the scalds or saga-men, in compliment to the kings descended from those pagans, and to please their family pride with the idea that their remote pagan ancestors had not died unbaptized, and consequently out of the pale of Christian salvation, according to the ideas of those times, in