NORSE MYTHOLOGY.

(A lecture delivered at St. Mary's Hall, February 28th, 1896.)

MY DEAR YOUNG LADIES:-To-night it is my privilege to speak to you upon a subject to which there is, or at any rate was until very lately, comparatively little attention given in the scheme of scholastic education. You are taught the mythologies of Greece and Rome, if for no other reason, because it is necessary that you should know something about them in order to appreciate and, indeed, to understand at all, parts of your Virgil and your Horace, and because of the frequent allusion to gods and goddesses of Olympus and the deeds of the heroes to be found in the best English writers. But there is a mythology nearer to us, whose gods have claimed as their own four days out of the seven of the week, which is far more in harmony with the natural religious bent of our minds, and which should be far more interesting to us, about which little instruction is generally given. I mean the mythology of the Norsemen, to which we shall devote our attention for a short time.

We Americans are, and sometimes boast ourselves to be, a composite race-"the heir of all the ages" in a sense broader than that in which Tennyson employed those words. We find flowing in our national veins the bloods of all the western races. As we cast our eyes over our broad land we are made conscious of the fact, from what we see as well as by the records of history, that to no one nation, no one race, is it solely indebted for its settlement and population. We find that the French, the English, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Germans, the Swedes have all contributed to the making of this country. The Teutonic, Celtic and Latin races have all entered into the composition of the American. The Latin and Celtic

infusion have rendered him more mercurial than the Englishman, while the Teutonic base of his character has preserved to him a seriousness and steadiness which we are in the habit, at least, of considering as foreign to the French.

You will observe that I speak of the Teutonic base of the American character. This is advisedly done. In every composite race there must be some dominant component race; you cannot mix races in exactly equal proportions as you can chemical substances-the character of some one race, or even of some one nation, will be dominant in the new race; the character much modified, no doubt, by its intermixture with those of the other component nations, but still standing out clearly and distinctly as of and belonging to the original nation. An example of this is to be found in what is perhaps the best defined instance of the creation of a new people by the fusion of two others, the making of the English nation by the fusion of the Norman-French and the Saxon, after the conquest. That a new people very different from either had been formed was unquestionable, but it was equally unquestionable that the Saxon was the dominant characteristic of the new people. So, as we take the American people and resolve it into its component parts and resolve those parts into their elements, we find that the race which has dominated the English, and through it the American, character is the Anglo-Saxon. Everything, therefore, about the Anglo-Saxons becomes interesting to us. We regard them as our first ancestors, and everything which shows their character, their development, or throws any light upon what they were, possesses for us an attraction such as is possessed by information about no other people; and as we wish to know all that we can about any ancestor of distinction, not only his deeds, but his surroundings, his dress, his habits, his appearance, so we desire to know all that can be learned about the Anglo-Saxons, not only their deeds,

but their surroundings, their habits, their manner of life. All these things have a charm for us.

Who then were these Anglo-Saxons? A race of men. who lived in the North of Europe; a wild, free, perhaps savage, but sincere race. Reared amidst marshes and in an inhospitable climate, nature presented herself to them in her sterner aspect, and their disposition soon partook of the character of the surrounding scenes and was rugged and earnest. These Saxons were warlike, they welcomed war, they rejoiced in it. It was not to them, as it is to us, a dreaded but sometimes necessary evil, the last resort to maintain national honor or national right; nought was pleasanter to them than its alarums. War for war's sake was good; nay, so great a virtue was warlike prowess accounted, and so detestable was its absence, that the man who died a natural death upon his bed was accounted base and utterly ignoble, and was denied entrance to the Scandinavian heaven, which was meant only for the brave. The Saxon love of war was not confined to the land, as for so long time was the Roman valor. The Romans, whose legions were the best soldiers of antiquity, were for a long time afraid to fight at sea,—and why? Not on account of fear of their enemies, for the Roman soldiers were strangers to fear and their fidelity to duty under all circumstances and all hazards is well known, but because of the superstition that prevailed, according to which those who were drowned at sea, and whose bodies were lost, could never obtain admission to the Elysian fields, but must go wandering about, miserable outcasts, to all eternity, hopeless and wretched;—and was not this a prospect sufficient to cause the boldest to tremble, the most gallant to become a coward? And it was a long time before the Roman mind was disabused of this superstition, and the Consul Duillius was enabled to show to the Carthaginians that Rome could conquer on sea as well as on land.

The Saxons were held back by no such superstition. The only death terrible to them on account of its future consequences was the straw death-the natural deathand to escape it many an old warrior, feeling his end draw nigh, called upon his son to slay him, and so the Saxons ranged the seas in their barks and, under the name of the Vikings, became the terror of all the neighboring nations. Their ships were called Dragons, from the figure they bore at the prow as an appropriate symbol of the vessel's character.

These men were so warlike, fighting was so dear to them, that their very sports were of that description. They delighted in the chase, and, spear in hand, pursued the wild beasts with the same fierce, unrelenting fury, which in time of war, or of predatory excursion, had for its object men. Otherwise, these Saxons were simple in their habits, tastes and fare. They did not care for gaudy or magnificent clothing, or for delicate viands. They loved, it is true, good cheer, but it was good cheer of a hearty sort. The more wealthy Romans, in the decadence of the Empire, we known indulged in most outlandish dishes to excite and gratify a pampered and perhaps enervated palate, peacock's brains and tongues, for example; but one can well imagine what would have been the disgust of a Saxon monarch had peacock's brains and tongues been placed on the board before him. No, he wanted boar's flesh, and as for Falernian wine in elegant goblets-away with such stuff! Give him mead in a hollow horn. So these Saxons were rude, uncouth, rugged, brave and simple minded men, and their religion, as might be expected, partook of the same qualities. As might be expected, I say, for what is religion (natural religion I mean, the religion which man left to himself and to his own reasonings forms, and not revealed religion) but the embodiment of the workings of nature upon the mind of man and the

reaction of the mind of man upon nature? A man with no religious instruction, without the light of revelation, finds himself in the midst of the created world; he sees the fair prospect around him; hears the music of the birds; feels the cooling influence of the breeze; beholds the sun rise in his splendor, bringing warmth and light into the world; and, again, beholds the heavens, darkened with clouds, vomiting forth fire and terrifying with the loud resounding long rolling thunder, or, again, the azure of the sky changed into a deeper hue and spangled all over with the twinkling stars, while the queen of night, ever changing, seems to rule the wide expanse. He sees also the seasons change, the temperature change, the face of the earth change, and the man must think, and his first thought is, "I did not cause all this. I cannot control this. Nay, the changes often take place when I am least desirous that they shall, and, frequently, when I long for change, it is delayed. There is a power without me greater than I am!" And so comes the idea of a god; but what is the god? If the man be timorous, a coward, he makes his god one of the terrifying manifestations of nature, the thunder for instance, and trembles before it and implores its mercy; or if he be the reverse, one of nature's kindlier manifestations, say the sun, and pray for its blessings; or if, as is more likely, the man. be neither wholly brave nor wholly coward, he may make gods of manifestations of both classes, and so keep on until he has a separate god for everything, with, perhaps, one, superior to all, as an overruling power; and so did many nations of antiquity. Some even carried this idea. so far into practical development that every tree of the wood, every wave of the sea had its own particular indwelling deity. From the worship of the power to the worship of the personification of the power is but a short step, and from that to the utter forgetfulness of the god's origin a shorter one, and this step taken it becomes