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Yggdrasil is a tree worthy of the gods; it is a world-tree; its roots extend to all the worlds; its branches spread even over heaven. Under it is the fountain Mimir, spring of wisdom, from which Odin drinks daily. Near it is the dwelling of the Norns, fates or weird sisters, who establish laws and uphold them by their judgments, and allot to every man his span of life.
This much I had learned from my coachman. But I kept a steady silence, and sat as serious as Odin when he visited the Vala, until the address ceased. Then I said in Rommany "Mother, you don't know me. I did not come here to listen to fortune- telling." To which came the prompt reply, "I don't know what the gentleman is saying." I answered always in Rommany. "You know well enough what I am saying.
"I know I was hanged upon a tree shaken by the winds for nine long nights. I was transfixed by a spear; I was moved to Odin, myself to myself." And so on. The instances are endless. "I am the oblation," says the Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, "I am the sacrifice, I the ancestral offering."
"But it is said," added Siegfried, "that in the last twilight the Fenris-wolf will break his chain, and that he will swallow the sun, and slay the great Odin himself, and that none can subdue him save Vidar the Silent." It was thus that the heroes conversed with each other as they rode through the silent ways of the wood.
For at bottom the Great Man, as he comes from the hand of Nature, is ever the same kind of thing: Odin, Luther, Johnson, Burns; I hope to make it appear that these are all originally of one stuff; that only by the world's reception of them, and the shapes they assume, are they so immeasurably diverse.
Even still in that age, when the Teuton had yet in his veins the blood of Odin, the demi-god, even still one man could delay the might of numbers.
Jack Odin twisted the controls to take a look at what was happening back there in the cloud. Just as he got it in view, the moiling space out there coalesced into one smoldering ember. Crushed by the awful weight, that single giant of flame suddenly burst into a thousand pieces. Comets streaked away. Dripping suns streamed across the mad sky.
Thus it is well seen that Sigi has slain the thrall and murdered him; so he is given forth to be a wolf in holy places, and may no more abide in the land with his father; therewith Odin bare him fellowship from the land, so long a way, that right long it was, and made no stay till he brought him to certain war-ships.
"That mistletoe is too young to promise, and too weak to do any harm," said Frigga; and she passed it by. All the gods rejoiced with her when she told of her success; even Odin partially shook off his fears, as he told the younger gods and the heroes who dwelt with him in his palace to go and seek enjoyment after their period of gloom.
But in their exodus, whencesoever they started, what all alike sought was liberty; which, for them, meant the right to do exactly as they pleased to others, and freedom from paying "scat" or dues to a superior lord. When the Vikings came, they came as worshippers of Thor and Odin and the old Teutonic gods. To them the Christianity of the Pict was "a weak effeminate creed."
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