CHAPTER XV
THE TEUTONS
The Aryans in Europe.—There is more than one European people which before it was touched by Roman civilisation had remained for an indefinite period—a period to be measured probably rather by millenniums than by centuries—in the state of society described in last chapter (see above, sqq.) as occurring when the Aryans dwelt among those whom they had conquered. In various lands alike we meet with the combination of the patriarchal household with the village, the combination of agricultural with pastoral life, to which the Aryans early settled down among non-Aryan populations. This type of society, which is the basis of feudalism, is recognised alike in India and in Germany. It stretches far back into the past, and may even be recognised in some quarters at the present day.
As with civilisation so with religion. The early faith of the Slavs, the Celts, and the Teutons is now generally regarded as best representing that of the Aryans. It was a religion in which rite and belief were indefinite and variable compared with those of the later Aryan faiths of India and of Southern Europe, there being neither a regular priesthood nor the use of writing to impart fixity to religious forms. The river, the fountain, and the aged oak, each had its legend and its observance of unknown antiquity. The pre-Aryan and the Aryan elements of religion acted and reacted on each other, the Aryan, no doubt, being the element of progress, but blending with the other in indistinguishable mixture. The spirits of ancestors lived in the belief and the practice of posterity; a thousand unseen agents in the sky, and in the earth, and under the earth were believed in and treated according to tradition, fed or flouted, bribed or exorcised, as occasion suggested. New gods appeared, or old ones were combined into new, or a god migrated from one province to another. Here also myths and rituals were formed by various processes. But a more constant growth of belief took place in connection with some gods as larger social organisms came into existence, village communities combining into tribes, tribes into nations. The great gods of heaven, whatever the history of their early growth, proved specially fitted to unite together clans and peoples. These beings received different names in different countries. Their early history, no doubt, was not the same in all, yet in each mythology there were figures and stories which occurred also in others, whether in consequence of parallel growth out of similar circumstances in each land, or from a process of borrowing at a later time, or from both, we need not try to decide.
We give a short account of the religion of the Germans. That of the Celts, which may be studied in the Hibbert Lectures of Professor Rhys,1 or that of the Slavs (of which there is an excellent short summary by Mr. W. R. Morfill in Religious Systems of the World), would have equally well served the purpose of exhibiting an Aryan religion at a low stage of development, and held by a people not thoroughly compacted into a nation. The religion of the Teutons has the advantage for our study over these others, that it remained longer unsuppressed by Christianity, and in its Scandinavian branch put forth a vigorous original growth in comparatively recent times. The latest paganism which flourished in Europe, it is also the religion of our ancestors, on which the Christianity of the Northern lands was grafted, and many a survival of which may still be recognised in our own land. It therefore possesses for us even in itself considerable interest.
1 Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by Celtic Heathendom, 1886.
Of the ancient Germans, of the dwellers in the basins of the Rhine and the Danube, we have accounts by Cæsar and by Tacitus.2 After this there is a dearth of information; the Christian missionaries to the Germans thought it their duty to cover the former beliefs and rites of their converts in oblivion, and abstained from giving information about them. What we know is drawn from Church writers. The Eddas belong to a much more developed stage of Teutonic life; they tell their own tale, which will be noticed in its turn.
2 Cæsar, B. Gall. vi. 21. Tacitus, Germania.
The early Germans dwelt in scattered settlements surrounded by the great forests and marshes which then covered Central Europe. Every one has read the description of the brave and warlike people of whom the Romans justly stood so much in awe, and knows about their fierce blue eyes and their fair hair, their tall stature, their battle-cries and charges, their hardy habits and strict morals. As the Roman writers describe them, they are by no means savages. They do not live in towns, but migrate from one spot to another, the community cultivating the land it takes possession of, on a system of common ownership with rotation of occupants. The women did the hard work, Tacitus says; the men spent their time in the chase and in fighting. They had an organisation beyond that of the village, being arranged in what we may call hundreds and shires, each district having to furnish so many men for war, electing its own heads and holding meetings for various purposes. Amidst these local and tribal divisions they did not forget that they were a nation different from other nations, and invasion found them a united people. The religious expression of this is to be found in the legend which represents the three great divisions of the nation as descended alike from the god Mannus, son of the earth-born Tuisco; hymns were sung to the latter as the father of the German race. It was by hymns that this people remembered things which were important.
The Early German Gods.—There is a national god, then; and other gods of whom Tacitus tells us are national too, not local or tribal. The tribes to the south of the Baltic worship Herthus, which, Tacitus says, is their name for Terra Mater, Mother Earth. The other gods he mentions are called by Roman names. They worship Mercury, he says, as their principal god; on certain days they worship him with human sacrifices. They also worship Mars and Hercules with animal victims; and a particular tribe, the Suevi, worship Isis. Cæsar says the Germans worship the sun, and Vulcan, and the moon. Tacitus mentions other German gods; the two statements are both true. Tacitus gives the German gods Roman names according to a common practice of antiquity, which has been the source of much confusion; we shall see afterwards how the Romans identified the gods of Greece also with those of Rome.
The equation which Tacitus gives of the German gods with Latin ones is still in daily use in the names of the days of the week. The Romans applied the names of the planets, which were the names of their own gods, to the days of the week as early as the first Christian century; and in Germany the days were called after the German gods supposed to answer to the Roman gods in question. Half Europe to this day calls the days of the week after the Roman, and the other half after the German gods. We give the Latin names with the modern French and over against them the English, in which the names of the German gods appear more clearly than in modern German:—
Dies Solis, the Sun's day=Sunday. (The French Dimanche is from Dominicus, the Lord's Day.)
Dies Lunæ (Lundi)=Monday or Moon's day.
Dies Martis (Mardi)=Tuesday, the day of Tiw or Ziu.
Dies Mercurii (Mercredi)=Wednesday, the day of Wodan.
Dies Jovis (Jeudi)=Thursday, the day of Thor. In German this is Donnerstag, the day of Donar=Thor.
Dies Veneris (Vendredi)=Friday, the day of Freya.
Dies Saturni retains the Latin god's name in our Saturday. (The French Samedi is derived from Sabbath.)
These Teutonic names for the days of the week are common to all the branches of Teutonic speech, and must have a high antiquity. They tell us what gods the Germans had in early times, and to what Roman gods these were believed to correspond; but it would be a vain endeavour to attempt to deduce from this, or indeed from any early information we possess on the subject, the origin and nature of these gods. From Grimm's laborious study of the question (German Mythology, vol. i.) we gather that it is a matter mainly of speculation what it was in Wodan that led the Romans to identify him with their Mercury. Thor, who is identified with Jupiter, was probably a sky-god, while Tiw or Ziu (whom etymology identifies with Zeus, not Mars) was a god of war, and Freya, like Venus, had to do with female beauty. We come to know more of these gods when we find them in the Eddas, but it is scarcely legitimate to fill in the South German gods of the first century from the North German gods of the same names of the eleventh or twelfth. We reserve, therefore, our description of the German gods till we come to the Northern mythology.
The Roman writers do not furnish any accurate idea of the working religion of the Germans of their day. Cæsar says they were not so much under the guidance of priests as the Gauls were, and that they were not greatly addicted to sacrifice; neither statement can be received without scrutiny. Tacitus idealises the untutored savage as Rousseau does, in order to rebuke the vices of a luxurious civilisation; but his statements of actual facts may be trusted. Knowledge recently acquired of early forest-cults disposes us to trust him when he speaks, as he does more than once, of the peculiar sacredness the Germans attached to woods and groves. He is idealising when he says, "They did not confine their gods in walls nor represent them under the likeness of men, being led thereto by considering the greatness of the heavenly beings." A few centuries later at least we find Christian bishops busy destroying temples of German heathenism and burning images found in them. Undoubtedly, however, the great sanctuary of a district was frequently, as he represents, in the recesses of a wood. Under a mighty tree a tribe would hold its meetings and sit in judgment and in council; and there were sacred groves in which no human foot might stray, where the god was supposed to dwell, where great sacrifices both of animal and of human victims took place, where the boughs were hung with the bones of former sacrifices which in war were carried forth at the head of the tribe as its sacred standards. This was done by the priests, who accompanied the host to battle, and were charged at such a time with the infliction of all necessary punishments, since they represented the god who was supposed to be personally present as commander. The priests had to work the auguries when consulted on matters of state; on private matters the paterfamilias might do this himself. The priests also had charge of the sacred white horses, by whose neighing the will of the deity became known. Several women are also mentioned as having enjoyed the reputation of sacred personages; and "even in their wives they considered that there was a certain holiness and inspiration."
To judge from Tacitus and from other writers of the first Christian centuries, there was little system in the religion of Germany in those days; the gods were not organised in a divine family, the priests were not a caste like the Druids of France and Britain, and religious practice was loose and variable. It must also be remembered that what foreign writers reported on the subject was connected rather with national and official cults than with popular local observances. Of the latter there was an abundant growth; a distinguished foreign writer might not know about it, but the evidence of it survives in various forms which are only now being seriously studied. To know the practical religion of early Germany we have to consult the village festival and legend (as has been done by Mannhardt in his Wald- und Feld-kulte and Mr. Frazer in The Golden Bough, and many a student of folklore), which, though now apparently meaningless, were once the serious religious observance and doctrine of the peasantry. The peasant carried his wishes and prayers to the familiar wishing-well, and presented offerings to the spirit of the well by throwing them into the water or hanging them on the surrounding trees. The fairy rather than far-off Wodan was looked to for good fortune; the rite of the fabulous village hero, with its quaint immemorial usages, roused more enthusiasm than the stately public ceremonial. Another side of the mind of early Germany is to be gathered from the heroic legends and the fairy tales, many of the elements of which, we are assured, were even then in existence. Were these legends formed by a process of degradation; did they begin with telling about the gods, and were they afterwards applied to heroes and princes and common men? Or was the process in the opposite direction from this; were the stories, first of all, those of human warriors, their wars and loves, and did they then become mixed up with solar and celestial ideas? Were the fairy tales originally stories of the gods, and did they by popular and familiar treatment fall below the dignity of their original themes till they came to be a debased and broken-down mythology? or were they at first stories about beasts and about clever tricks, such as savages love to tell, and did they rise to something more dignified, till in some of them we may trace the stories of the gods? It is not necessary that we should answer these questions, which carry us back to an earlier time than that with which we are concerned; but any one who knows the tales, and will try to realise the state of mind of those who received them not as fancy but as serious fact, will know something of the religion of early Germany; of the strange beings, fairies, dwarfs, magicians, talking animals, animated sun and moon and winds, by which the German believed himself to be surrounded.
Later German Religion.—In Southern Germany the introduction of Christianity early put an end to any development of Teutonic religion which might have taken place there. The old faith, however, still maintained itself in more Northern latitudes. It was brought to Britain by the German invaders, continued there till the seventh century, and was brought in again in a more Northern form by the Norsemen, who in their turn "gradually deserted Thor and Odin for the white Christ."3 Bede tells hardly anything of the paganism which had been the religion of England a century before he wrote; in this he is like other Christian teachers who might have told but did not. But though it came to an end in England, Teutonic religion continued to prevail in the countries from which the invaders had come. In Frisia in the eighth century we hear of a goddess Hulda, a kind goddess, as her name implies, who sends increase to plants and is a patroness of fishing. A god called Fosete, or Forsete (Forseti in modern Icelandic=chairman), identified both with Odin and with Balder, was worshipped in Heligoland; he had a sacred well there, from which water had to be drawn in silence. There are temples, often in the middle of a wood, with priestly incumbents, and rich endowments, both of lands and treasure; and human sacrifice in various forms is said to have been in use. Idols are mentioned, even (at Upsala in Sweden) a trinity of idols; but this is what Church writers would naturally impute to heathens, and the statement is discredited. No Teutonic idol has survived; the loss to art may not be great, but such a relic would have settled the controversy.
3 Kingsley's Hereward the Wake.
Iceland.—Teutonic paganism reached its highest development in Iceland. Of this branch of it alone is there a literature, for many of the sagas are the fruit of a literary movement in Iceland anterior to the establishment of Christianity; and the historian Ari, who wrote within a century after that event, gives careful information of the earlier state of affairs. The reader of Burnt Njal sees that among the Icelanders life was short and precarious. With the spirit of adventure, which led them to be constantly setting out on warlike and piratical expeditions, they combined a strong tendency to local quarrels, which filled up their life at home with a constant series of blood-feuds. These latter are gone about in a methodical and business-like way; custom sanctions them, the meetings of the popular assembly do not seek to suppress or punish them if only they are conducted according to the rules. No public authority had as yet arisen to carry out the law between one household and another; the avenger has his recognised place and duty. Society is patriarchal as in other Aryan communities; each family is a community of blood-kindred for mutual defence and also for worship. The leading cult of Icelandic religion was the domestic worship of ancestors, conducted by the head of the household. The dead were buried in knolls or burrows near the dwelling, and their spirits were thought to inhabit these places; they are said to "die into the hill." Altars are erected and sacrifices offered there; the blood of the victim poured out upon the ground is supposed to be enjoyed by them. These knolls became the sacred places of their district, and many a belief existed about these quiet neighbours and the help they afforded to the living. "Elves" they were called, and they were thought of as a cleanly and kindly race. The spirits of bad men, on the contrary, lived an uneasy life, as demons, and were the workers of mischief.
Along with this belief in the spirits of the dead as inhabiting the burial hill of the household, there is another conception, namely, that the dead go to a distant region of the unseen world. In Homer also these two conceptions are combined. The Icelandic burial rites are founded on the latter view. The "departed" is going on a long journey, and his friends escort him as far as they can; shoes are bound on his feet, the Hel-shoes, for Hel is the name of the region of the dead. Gifts are given to him; horses, male and female attendants, hawks and hounds, are burned with him on the pyre, and his wife voluntarily accompanies him; all these he is to have with him in the country beyond.
In addition to the domestic cult we have that of local objects; holy wells, waterfalls, groves, stones are worshipped. Mother Earth is called on, so is Thunder, so is Heaven. But besides these minor worships there is the public one, connected with a large tribe or with a king's court. A temple on the same plan as a large dwelling-house forms a place of meeting and of sacrifice, an asylum, and a place of oaths and covenants. On a table in front of the high seat stands the bowl which, filled with blood and along with certain sticks, forms a means of divination. A gold ring also lies there, which a man puts on when he is about to swear an oath, and which the priest puts on at meetings.
The priest has the duty of keeping up the building and property of the temple and of maintaining the sacrifices. At the latter various rites are done with the blood of victims, and those present feast on the flesh and drink toasts. The first cup is for Wodan, various other gods are celebrated, and there is a cup of remembrance for the departed. Sacrifices are offered for the crops, for victory, for any great object on which the community is bent. In this ritual there is no evidence of any idols. Though the Icelanders are not without art, the great gods have not yet perhaps assumed to their minds such definite figures as to be thus set forth: no Homer has placed them clear before the inward eye. The rites are bloody, the altar has ever anew to be made to shine with the blood of victims. Human sacrifices are only resorted to in times of great common danger, as a terrible last resort; the god to whom the human victim is devoted is moved by the bloodshed to avert his anger, or to make greater exertions for his people. Bloodshed forms the strongest of all bonds. To link themselves together in an indissoluble brotherhood, two friends mingle their blood on the ground and then each of them treads on it. The shedding of human blood at the launching of a ship or at the laying of the foundation of a building is also known. Savage and cruel as this religion is, there are signs that it is softening, and that some of its darker rites are beginning to admit of commutation. When Christianity approaches, the Icelanders feel that it must make a great change, and that some of the cruelties which they regard as the good old customs, will have to be laid aside. We hear of the stipulation being made that if they receive baptism they shall not be required to give up the removal of unpromising children nor the eating of horseflesh.
The Eddas, in which Scandinavian mythology reaches its ultimate form, seem to belong to a higher plane of human life than the religion we have described, and it has appeared to many scholars of late years that they cannot be regarded as a pure product of paganism, but are in great part influenced by Christianity both in matter and in sentiment. The older Edda, written in verse, is said to have been collected by Sæmund Sigfusson the learned, one of the early Christian priests of Iceland, who lived about the eleventh century. The other Edda is in prose; it is a collection made about two centuries later. The form given to the myths in these collections is due to the Skalds, who flourished in Iceland in the early Middle Ages; but the legends themselves are older. Nothing is known precisely about their origin or early diffusion.
The Eddas may be compared in many respects with the Homeric poems. As in the latter, the gods form a family, the members of which come together to a certain place for meetings, while individually they have their own adventures, their loves, their jealousies, their jokes, their tricks. In the Eddas too we find that the gods are not, strictly speaking, eternal; they succeeded an older race of gods, and their turn too may come to pass away. They are called Æsir, which is the plural of As. The etymology of this is uncertain; compare the Sanscrit Asura, said to mean the living or breathing one. The Æsir are spoken of in later times, not in the Eddas, as if they had been a race of warriors; they are said to have come in to Scandinavia and got the better of those who lived there before, because they worshipped a superior set of gods.4 An historic reminiscence may lurk here. Before the Æsir there were giants, and the earth with all its parts is made of the body of one of these giants,5 whom the new race superseded as governors of the world. But the giants are still there and their spirit is unchanged; there is a danger of their interfering to subvert the rule of their successors.
4 See a similar statement about the Incas, above.
5 Compare "Purusha" in the Rigveda.
There are other cosmogonic myths besides that of the division of the giant Ymir. One is on this wise. Ere this world began, there was on one side Niflheim, the land of mist and cold, on the other side Muspelheim, the region of fire; between these two lay Ginnungagap, the north side of it frozen, the south side glowing hot, and life originated by the meeting, in one way or another, of the heat and cold. There are very primitive myths of the shaping of man out of two pieces of wood, of Night and Day as drivers of chariots and horses, of the sun and moon fleeing from wolves, and so on. A more poetic conception is the division of the world into Asgard, the garden of the Æsir; Midgard, the world of man; and Utgard, the world outside. In the first Odin has his seat Hlidskjalf; when he sits in it he can see and understand whatever is happening in any part of the broad world (is he the sun, then?). The third region is generally called Jötunheim, the home of the giants, an icy region at the extreme part of the habitable world. A bridge exists from the dwelling of men to that of the gods; it is called Bifröst, and is the rainbow.
The gods have various places of meeting; but their principal seat is under a great tree, the ash. Yggdrasil6 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. They are named Urd the past, Verdandi the present, and Skuld the future. Daily do they water the ash from the spring to keep its leaves fresh, and help it to contend with its numerous foes, for a great serpent is continually gnawing at its root, and it has also other troubles. This myth of Yggdrasil is the apotheosis of Teutonic tree-worship, and is richly suggestive.7
6 Yggdrasil=Odin's horse=the gallows. Is it the cross?
7 Carlyle in his Heroes, p. 18, draws out the spiritual significance of it and of Norse mythology generally.
The Gods of the Eddas.—We now come to the gods of the system. Odin is in the Eddas the founder of the world as now constituted. He has displaced the old formless race of gods, and is the leader of a new and vigorous race now ruling in their stead. The old scholars rationalised Odin into a chief who had led a migration from Asia to Norway in early times. He is the inventor of the art of writing by runes and the founder of poetry; thus he has the aspect of a culture-hero; that is to say, of a man of advanced views who, for the benefits he conferred on his people, was exalted first to a hero and then to a god. But the worship of Odin or Wodan is one of the earliest things we know about the German race. He is the god of the South-Germans from the very first. His earliest character is that of a storm-god. Whether his name is connected with the German wüthen, rage (Scot. wud) or with the Vedic Vata, who is a god of storm, he is from the first an impetuous being. The early myth of him is scarcely dead at this day; the peasant hears him rushing through the woods at night. That is the "wild hunt of Wodan," he says; the god is out with his followers, and woe to him who gets in his way! The early Germans thought of him as a kind being who fulfilled the wishes of men, and it was probably this side of his character that caused him to be identified with Mercury. In the Eddic theology he is a patron of war, as becomes the chief god of a warlike people. He arranges battle and dispenses victory; the heroes who fall in battle he receives into his heavenly army; they live with him in Valhalla or Valhöll, the hall of choice. Odin chooses those who are to go there; he is assisted in this by the Valkyries or choice-maidens. Life in Valhalla is a constant round of fighting, the wounds of which are healed at once, and feasting, the materials for which are ever renewed. Odin, like other great gods, bears traces of low surroundings, as if he had once lived among savages. He can turn himself into an eagle or other animal to gain his object, and he has engaged in disreputable adventures. But he tends to improve, and the Eddas show him at his best. Here he is called the All-father, the Ruler of all, who gave man a soul that shall never perish; and we hear that he needs no food and takes no share himself in the feasts of the heroes. All the righteous shall be with him in Vingolf (the same as Valhalla), but the wicked shall go to Hel, the kingdom of Hel or Hela, the goddess of the under-world.
Thor or Donar, Thunder, is said to be the mightiest of the gods; he is identified, as we saw, with Jove, but he is a rougher and more primitive deity. He drives in a chariot drawn by two goats, and is possessed of three things which have wonderful properties. The first is the hammer Mjölnir, which the Frost- and Mountain-giants cannot resist when he throws it; the second is the belt of strength, which makes him twice as strong when he puts it on; and the third a pair of gauntlets with which he grasps his mallet. Many stories are told of his prowess, of his conflicts with the giants, who, however, give him a good deal of trouble with their cunning; and of his catching the Midgard serpent which surrounds the world at the bottom of the sea. Being a god of storm, he forms a connection with agriculture, and thus gains a more sedate aspect; he has also to do with marriage, and a hammer is used symbolically at Icelandic weddings. Thor is only half-brother to the other sons of Odin; his mother was Fiörgyn, the earth; the worships of Odin and Thor, originally distinct, seem to have been united at an early period.
The god Tyr, son of Odin by a giantess, is the Eddic figure of the German Tiw or Ziu, etymologically equivalent to Zeus or Jupiter, but identified by the Romans with Mars. His greatness belongs to early times; he was then a sword-god, and had an extensive worship in various parts of Europe. In the Eddas he has scarcely any character, and seldom takes a prominent part in the legend. Loki, by etymology a fire-god (Germ. Löhe, Scot. Lowe),8 is in one account the brother of Odin, in another his son by a giantess. His character is fitful; sometimes he acts a brotherly part by the gods and helps them out of their difficulties by clever devices, and sometimes he provides entertainment for them; but for the most part he is an embodiment of cunning and mischief; his course is downwards, he tends to become a being purely evil, setting himself heartlessly against the wishes of the other gods, and acting so as to imperil them and their world till they are obliged to cast him out of heaven. He is thus a kind of Lucifer or Satan, and like the Christian devil, his ultimate fate is to be bound till the end of the world shall arrive. Baldur, the son of Odin and Frigga, is the best and brightest of the gods. Like Apollo, he has to do with light, and no pollution can come near him; he has also to do with the administration of justice, and pronounces sentences which can never be reversed. Heimdall also is a light and gracious god; he is the warder of the Æsir, and stays near the bridge Bifröst. Of him it is told that he wants less sleep than a bird, sees a hundred miles off by night or day, and hears the grass grow on the ground and the wool on the sheep's back. Bragi is the god of poetry and eloquence, the best of all skalds.
8 The etymology is not perhaps correct, but it suggested itself and influenced the view taken of this god, in very early times.
Of the goddesses, Frigga, wife of Odin, stands first, an august matron of mysterious knowledge, whom even gods consult, and by whom men swear; she has also to do with marriage, and the childless appeal to her. Etymologically she is scarcely to be distinguished from Freya, wife of Odur, who, however, is lighter in character, and is rather a goddess of love. The goddesses in the Eddas are more shadowy figures than the gods; there are others, and an attempt is made to reckon up twelve of them to answer to the twelve chief gods, but their names are taken from the qualities they represent, and they have little reality.
The story of the death of Baldur, brought about by the evil mind of Loki in defiance of the whole divine family, sounds the note of tragedy in the divine family of the Eddas. The gods themselves suffer, and are unable to retrieve the misfortune which has come upon them. With one accord they try to get Baldur brought back from the under-world, but they are foiled by the same agency of evil which carried him off. With the death of Baldur the gods feel that their rule, which, we saw, had a beginning, and with it the world they govern, for the two are inseparably bound up with each other, is coming to an end. The gods perish in the ruin of the world; and this is well, for sin cleaves to them and to their house, and they are not fit to endure. Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods, comes on; the universe is burnt up in a mighty conflagration, and while there are abodes of bliss and abodes of misery where some survive, the universe as a whole is entirely changed, and a milder race of gods will rule over a better world.
If this mythology were found to be of native Scandinavian growth, it would prove that Teutonic religion was capable of lofty development, and would throw back an interesting light upon its previous history. Here, it has been maintained, we see the Teutonic faith rising to monotheism. Odin has among his other titles that of All-father; he is rising above the other gods to a position of supremacy, which will fit him, if the process were allowed, as it was not, to advance somewhat further, to represent pure deity and to attract to himself an undivided reverence. Here also we find a religion which was formerly a rude intercourse between barbarous men and savage gods, clothing itself with an ideal element. As the Greeks found religion in beauty and the Romans in utility, so did the Germans find it at last in pathos. They attain to the conception of suffering deity; in Baldur a god falls victim to malice and wickedness, and the sorrow of his fall takes possession of the whole of heaven. Thus pain and sacrifice are hallowed, for man by the history of the gods, and his intercourse with them leads him into heights and depths unknown before.
But the conviction is now establishing itself that this phase of Teutonic religion is borrowed from Christianity, which was then seriously menacing the existence of the old faith, and that it is the shadow of their approaching extinction by the new religion, which occasions among the Northern gods this feeling of sadness. They feel themselves falling from their position; they are to be gods no longer, but are to yield to the world-order, based on a deeper law than theirs, which called them into being and now is preparing their dismissal. Distinctly Christian ideas enter the old world of gods; the ideas of sin, of sacrifice, of a final judgment, of a good god who dies, of an evil spirit who, after prevailing for a time, is chained up to await his doom. That a sense of guilt rests on the gods shows that they are abandoning their rule, and they acknowledge that their successors will be better than they have been.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED
Grimm's German Mythology, translated by Stallybrass, 4 vols.
Grimm's Fairy Tales. Mr. Lang writes an Introduction to the English translation in Bell's edition.
Mannhardt, Germanische Mythen, 1858, and Wald- und Feld-kulte, 1875, 77.
For the later Northern section, Vigfusson and Powell's Corpus Poeticum Boreale, especially the Excursus on Religion, i. 401.
Dasent, Burnt Njal; or Life in Iceland at the end of the tenth century.
Mallet's Northern Antiquities.
Thorpe, Northern Mythology.
De la Saussaye, The Religion of the Teutons, 1902, the most comprehensive statement of the whole subject.
Ralston, Songs of Russian People, and Russian Folk Tales.
Simrock, Handb. der deutschen Mythologie.
R. M. Meyer, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte, 1910.
Sir John Rhys, Oxford Proceedings, p. 201, sqq.
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