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Cox's "Mythology of the Aryan Nations," and "Tales of Ancient Greece," the reader will find the entire contents of the Iliad and Odyssey thus minutely illustrated by comparison with the Veda, the Edda, and the Lay of the Nibelungs. Ancient as the Homeric poems undoubtedly are, they are modern in comparison with the tale of Achilleus and Helena, as here unfolded.
As this survey of the literature of France was also intended to guide me with regard to the Danish, I groped my way forward in the following manner: I. Romanticism. Grundtvig's Scenes from the Lives of the Warriors of the North likewise owes all its value to the Edda and the Sagas. Oehlenschlaeger's Aladdin is the Northern pendant to Hugo's Les Orientales.
Thor embodied more Teutonic attributes than Odin. The feats which Thor performed in that strange city of Utgard, as they are related in the old "Prose Edda," were prophetic of the future achievements of the race, of which he was a chief god. Thor once went on a journey to Jötunheim, or Giant-land, a primitive outlying country, full of the enemies of the Asgard dynasty, or cosmical deities.
Thus we have oska-steinn, wishing-stone, i.e. a stone which plays the part of a divining rod, and reveals secrets and hidden treasure; oska-byrr, a fair wind, a wind as fair as man's heart could wish it; osk-barn and oska-barn, a child after one's own heart, an adopted child, as when the younger Edda tells us that all those who die in battle are Odin's choice- bairns, his adopted children, those on whom he has set his heart, an expression which, in their turn, was taken by the Icelandic Christian writers to express the relation existing between God and the baptized; and, though last, not least, oska-maer, wish- maidens, another name for the Valkyries Odin's corse-choosers who picked out the dead for him on the field of battle, and waited on the heroes in Valhalla.
We have here within a few lines, accordingly, the elm as the parent of mankind, and wolves as the beasts of transport for the supreme deity, both in the Indian legend and in the Edda. As Glooskap is directly declared in one tradition to keep by him as an attendant a being who is the course of the sun and of the seasons, it may be assumed that the black and white wolf represent day and night.
For Edda, however, she had as warm an affection as it was in her nature to feel for anybody so totally different as her sister and she were to each other. She could scarcely help despising Edda for her gentleness and her kind and affectionate disposition, as well as for the implicit obedience she yielded to their father's often imperious commands.
What history it had, how it changed from shape to shape, by one thinker's contribution after another, till it got to the full final shape we see it under in the Edda, no man will now ever know: its Councils of Trebizond, Councils of Trent, Athanasiuses, Dantes, Luthers, are sunk without echo in the dark night! Only that it had such a history we can all know.
Her name had lately become known for the havoc she had committed among the British merchantmen, many of which had been carried off, but what had afterwards become of them it had not been hitherto ascertained. It was a great relief to Edda to receive a visit from Captain Winslow.
Ages rolled away; the religion of Odin had perished from the mainland, and the very hymns and poems in which its doctrines were recorded had perished with it, when, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Rhythmical Edda of Samund was discovered, followed by the Prose Edda of Snorre Sturleson.
These mythological records are contained in two collections called the Eddas, of which the oldest is in poetry and dates back to the year 1056, the more modern or prose Edda being of the date of 1640. According to the Eddas there was once no heaven above nor earth beneath, but only a bottomless deep, and a world of mist in which flowed a fountain.
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