United States or Greece ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Saxo Grammaticus, a very curious Northman of that same century, is still more unhesitating; scruples not to find out a historical fact in every individual mythus, and writes it down as a terrestrial event in Denmark or elsewhere. Torfaeus, learned and cautious, some centuries later, assigns by calculation a date for it: Odin, he says, came into Europe about the Year 70 before Christ.
Hesiod's heaven is what he calls the islands of the blessed, in the midst of the ocean, three times a year blooming with most exquisite flowers, and the air is tinted with purple, while games and music and horse-races occupy the time. The Scandinavian's heaven was the hall of Walhalla, where the god Odin gave unending wine-suppers to earthly heroes and heroines.
Of that equestrian caste the symbol was the horse. The favourite, and therefore the chosen sacrifice of Odin, their ancestor and God, the horse's flesh was eaten at the sacrificial meal; the horse's head, hung on the ash in Odin's wood, gave forth oracular responses.
Valhalla or Waihalla was the mythical Scandinavian Olympus, the celestial locality where Odin and Edris dwelt with the happy dead who had fallen in battle, and who had been conducted thither by the fair Valkyries.
"About as easy as German?" was my insidious remark. My uncle shrugged his shoulders. "The letters at all events," I said, "are rather difficult of comprehension." "It is a Runic manuscript, the language of the original population of Iceland, invented by Odin himself," cried my uncle, angry at my ignorance.
Gray-haired Bellin's fat face wore a broad smile, and the trusty old soul shed tears as he patted me paternally on the back and expressed his satisfaction; his wife, of course, wept most violently; even Odin was more demonstrative than usual, and his paw on my coat-collar proved incontestably that it was muddy weather.
Then he cut up the flesh into strips of meat. He lighted a fire and put the meat on spits to roast. While the meat was being cooked, Odin, the Father of the Gods, a little way off, sat thinking on the things he had seen in the world of men. Loki made himself busy putting more and more logs on the fire.
Look at Christ upon his Cross; the sight which melted the hearts of our fierce forefathers, and turned them from the worship of Thor and Odin to the worship of 'The white Christ; and from the hope of a Valhalla of brute prowess, to the hope of a heaven of righteousness and love.
No church, no official religion, no cleric or synod of ministers appears to have raised a hand to inaugurate the emancipation of the Western world from its degrading belief in a "God of Hosts". It is only now, during the last thirty or forty years, that stragglers here and there are coming into camp and making their submission to the "sovereignty of ethics," the supremacy of the moral law, which dooms to eternal death divinities such as Odin, Jahveh and Zeus.
Thither also repair the wolf Fenris, the Midgard serpent, Loki with all the followers of Hela, and the Frost giants. Heimdall now stands up and sounds the Giallar horn to assemble the gods and heroes for the contest. The gods advance, led on by Odin, who engages the wolf Fenris, but falls a victim to the monster, who is, however, slain by Vidar, Odin's son.
Word Of The Day