and poetry; grand in their groupings, wonderful in their masses, but not to be seen through. It is like looking at the Spectre of the Brocken-what you see is yourself, yet not yourself. These figures are our ancestors, and the traditional creations of the minds and fancies of our ancestors; but we cannot measure, we cannot touch them. Men like ourselves were living there, in the Scandinavian Peninsula, countless ages ago-worshipping, fighting, hunting, fishing; leading a sort of amphibious life on the wild coasts of Norway and among the islands of Denmark; working (according to their skill) the mines of Sweden; a brave, rude, alternately fierce and jolly, race of men; and they produced us. This much is certain, and we can form a tolerably vivid notion of their existence at the period when our story begins. But the very early heroic history—the emigration of a hero or sacred race from Asia, and its settlement amidst the rocks and pines of the North— all that is a literary cloud-land; and the antiquaries fight amongst each other as to what the cloud is like.* They are not agreed; and much else as they can teach us-for what do we not owe to the great antiquaries of the last three centuries in Europe ?—they cannot teach us this. That our ancestors believed in a noble old system of gods and goddesses; in Odin and his wife,

* See, for instance, Blackwell on Finn Magnusen, in his edition of Mallet's "Northern Antiquities."

Frigga; in beautiful Balder, and in fair Freya; in the rough Thor, with his hammer; in Frost-giants and all manner of sprites, serious and playful, is indubitable; and the details even of their creed are intelligible. But how it all originated, and whence and how it grew, is beyond human ken. Follow up the longest Norse pedigree (that of Gournay is one of them),-its steps, like those of the ladder of Jacob, are lost in the ascent. Trace the oldest Norse songs-their notes, like those of a skylark, rise far away out of hearing in the heaven of the past. So we shall confine ourselves on this occasion to what is known and certain-the best plan, perhaps, towards helping the reader to feel the reality of that ancient life to which possibly he owes his own-to which, certainly, he owes that of many of his countrymen, and much in his country's institutions and character.

It is known, then, that the Norsemen-by whatever name we call them-were "very early" settled in the North. Amber from their coasts was used in Europe before Homer; and some mention is made of them by a traveller who travelled in the days of Aristotle.* It seems certain that they were the " Suiones" of the great treatise of Tacitus on the Germans,† where men

* Prichard's "Researches into the Physical History of Mankind." (3rd edit. 3, 383-4.)

Tac. Germ. c. 44.

tion is made of their fleets and their kingly governments. That they were wild and warlike, fond of hunting and fishing, and worshippers of Hertha-mother-Earth-is pretty well all that the classic writers tell us of people whom they looked on as barbarians, and whose wonder at the Roman love of amber inspired the historian first mentioned with one of his usual philosophical epigrams.* What more can be learned about them, we learn from their own Eddas and Sagas, which were digested into literature in Iceland, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; thus keeping alive the memory of that original Heathenism and Paganism which they were the last of the great nations to relinquish.†

*

The positions of races and their traditions explain each other: we shall look at them, in this case, together.

The Scandinavian Peninsula is a vast table of mountain land, too high for general cultivation, or for the pasturing in the same places of very large herds. Towards the sea, on the coast of Norway, great lofty ridges of rocks run out-some bare, some covered with pines. In the fiords so formed the sea flows in for immense distances, filling the valleys and glens with lakes of deep blue, on which are often Wheaton's "History of the Northmen

*Tac. Germ. c. 45.

(1831), p. 5.

+ The world owes much to Mr. Laing for translating the "Heims, kringla," and for the vigorous dissertation prefixed to it.

beautiful islands crowned with trees.*

Wild scenery

a climate severe but bracing-abundant facilities for the chase-and, above all, the sea-an almost omnipresent sea, seeming to follow up the Norseman (in these fiords) to the very heart of the hills: such conditions explain something in the religion, and much in the character and institutions, of the people. If there be marks of the East, there are also marks of the North still more recognisable in their mythology. Whence came those Frost-giants?—those rude wild visions of a Valhalla, where fighting was the order of the day, and drinking of the night—where there was a wild boar or sanglier that could never be eaten, and a goat inexhaustible in her supply of mead? It is the Mahometanism of a Northern people, and of a braver and hardier people, who did not want to drink out of cups of crystal, but were content with their good old cups of deer's horn.‡ A man of genius, of our own time (whose genius is especially Northern in its character), has cast a glance of noble and kindly insight into this ancient form of Paganism.§ He seizes as its essence the consecration of valour. He respects its "rude sincerity" as superior to the "old

*

66

Laing's 'Heimskringla;" Metcalfe's Norway;" Forester's "Norway.'

† Mallet's "Northern Antiquities." Ed. Blackwell.

Laing's "Heimskringla," p. 128.

§ Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship." (Lecture First.)

Grecian grace;"* and especially sympathises with a certain homely humour which runs through it all, and which in one form or another has always characterised the peoples by whom the faith was once held. They figured to themselves the Universe under the beautiful image of the great Ash Yggdrasill, of which the roots penetrate to the centre of the world, and the branches spread over heaven;-a sacred tree, for ever watered by the Virgin Nornas or Fates, and affording a place of meeting to the Esir-the gods of their worship. It is not necessary here to detail the whole system : our business is only to catch its spirit and character. Such conceptions as this-and of the rise of the world from chaos, and its termination by fire from the funeral pile of Balder, the son of Odin,—are the conceptions of an earnest, a tender, and a gifted race. They were inspired by the natural instinct of wonder and worship, and embodied it in mystic and musical song. And everything in their society was connected with their religion. The kings derived their lineage from Odin and Thor; their chiefs were pontiff chiefs +-a sacred aristocracy, like the old Roman. patricians. Death in battle was noble, for the gods honoured it; and hospitality and such virtues inviolable, because the gods

*Carlyle's "Hero and Hero Worship," p. 49.

+ Godar or Hof-godar, such as led the colonists to Iceland. Wheaton's "Northmen," p. 36.