viii for a short retrospect will suffice to shew, that the religion of Odin must have exercised a great and lasting influence on the character and institutions of the inhabitants of Great Britain. The Jutes, Anglians and Saxons, who in the course of the fifth and sixth centuries, effected the conquest of the greatest part of this island, were worshippers, and their principal leaders reputed descendants of Odin. In process of time these heathen invaders were converted to Christianity, but the old worship died away by degrees and slowly, and not without leaving permanent traces on the manners and habits of their descendants. England had scarcely begun, under Egbert, to recover from the troubles of the Heptarchy, when her Christian inhabitants were once more engaged in a struggle for existence with their kinsmen, followers of Odin, and were compelled, despite the genius and courage of Alfred, to divide the land with them, and that for no brief period of

ix time. It is well known that this great king, notwithstanding his signal and repeated victories, deemed it politic to compound with the vanquished Danes, by leaving them in possession of the kingdom of East Anglia, of the whole of England, North of the Humber, and of the best part of Mercia, including the five cities of Derby, Leicester, Stamford, Lincoln, and Nottingham. These Danes or Northmen were fierce idolaters, and the ruthless destruction with which they visited whatever came within their power connected with the Christian worship, affords too good evidence of their zeal for Odin and for Thor. No king, before the Conquest, ever possessed more substantial power in England than Knudt or Canute the Dane. He, as his father Sweyn before him, was a Christian, his grandfather, Harald, of the blue tooth, a sanguinary tyrant, having found it convenient to embrace Christianity. It was through the exertions of Canute, indeed, that the Christian faith was first firmly established in Denmark. But, although hostile to the ancient superstitions of his countrymen, Canute was essentially a Dane, and during his vigorous reign of twenty-eight years, contributed not a

x little to implant amongst the higher classes in this country the manners and the feelings of the Northmen. The sway of the Danish kings in England ended in 1041. Twenty-five years later a new tide of Northern institutions and habits was poured in upon England, from a different quarter, it is true, and somewhat modified, but of the same character and from the same original source as those which preceded. Quaintly but truly saith old Robert of Glo’ster, “Of Normans beth these high men that beth in this land, And the low men of Saxons.”                                    Robert of Glo’ster’s Chronicle. and both nations were, for centuries, the worshippers of Odin. It would not be difficult to shew, although this is no place for the enquiry, that most of the still existing peculiarities in the institutions and manners of the nations of Gothic descent, which distinguish them from the Greeks and Romans in what may be assumed as a parallel state of civilization, can be traced directly to the influence of the religion of Odin. The trial by twelve, the deference paid to the female sex, and the point of honour maintained by the

xi practice of duel, are prominent instances in support of this assertion. It is the object of the present work to give a plain account of the ideas entertained by the inhabitants of North-Western Europe, during a period of long duration, respecting the nature and power of the various deities and good and evil spirits, in whose existence they believed, as preserved in the Eddas, and explained and elucidated by the writers alluded to above. Its form was suggested by a similar work, “Die Nordiske Mythologie,” published in Germany in 1827, by E. L. Heiberg, whose example has been followed, more especially in the insertion, by way of illustration of frequent free translations from Oehlenschläger’s poem, “The Gods of the North.” The introductory chapter and the supplementary essay in the appendix, the materials of which are drawn chiefly from the works of Professors Finn Magnussen and P. E. Müller, of Copenhagen, were intended to shew generally the state of society which prevailed in the three Scandinavian kingdoms contemporaneously with the religion of Odin. The first chapter contains a general view of the whole system of the Scandinavian Mythology, which,

xii although essential to a clear understanding of the subject, is necessarily of a more abstract character than the ensuing chapters. These consist of a circumstantial description of the various deities of the Eddas, of their attributes and attendants, of the power which they were believed to exercise over man and the elements, and of the most characteristic adventures in which they are supposed to have been engaged. Much of the matter contained in these chapters may be found in Bishop Percy’s translation of Mallet’s Northern Antiquities, but since that work was written, the publication of numerous well authenticated Sagas, and the works of Suhm, Magnussen, Müller, &c. have given a new interest and importance to the subject, have brought to light many new facts, and have sufficiently confuted the arguments advanced by Huet, Ritson und others against the authenticity of the Eddas. The unfavourable account of the religion of Odin contained in a work of such authority as “The Book of the Church,” might suffice alone to justify this publication; the more so as the distinguished writer alluded to has elsewhere so well borne witness to the lofty poetry of Scandinavian fiction:

xiii “Through wildest scenes of strange sublimity. Building the Runic rhyme, my fancy roves; Niffl-hil’s nine worlds, and Surtur’s fiery reign, And where, upon creation’s utmost verge The weary dwarfs who bear the weight of Heaven Wait the long winter which no sun may cheer, And the last sound which from Heimdallur’s trump Shall echo through all worlds, and sound the knell Of Earth and Heaven.”                                                             Southey It has been the aim of the author of the present work to bring within a small compass information spread throughout many a costly volume, and shut up in languages not much studied in England. It can boast no merit of originality, consisting chiefly of extracts from the works of others, loosely put together, and not always with due acknowledgments; an omission arising from no desire to appropriate their labours, but from the fact that many of those extracts, having been originally made without any view to publication, were not noted with sufficient exactness, nor after a lapse of some years when the original works could no longer be referred to, always distinguishable from the author’s own conclusions. It is intended chiefly for such as desire, without much research, to obtain some definite ideas of the wild and war-like

xiv religion of their ancestors, which, teaching that death in battle or by violence was the only road to their Paradise, Valhalla, rendered them for centuries the scourge of Europe, and by the martial habits which it engendered, enabled them to gain and to keep possession of the fairest portions of Ireland, England, Italy, and France.