io8 Norivay and the Norwegians 



Vikings came iu contact — the Christian Celts. The 

 many recorded visions which came out of Ireland and 

 Scotland, and from Irish and Scottish monks, the 

 visions of Furseus, of Drihthelm, of Adamnan, of Tun- 

 dale, are a sufficient memorial of this fact. 



Moreover, towards the year 1000, the hearts of 

 all Christians in Europe began to beat with fear, or 

 with hope. For the millennary of the first coming of 

 Christ to earth was confidently fixed upon as the end 

 of the rule of the powers of earth, the period of the 

 return of Christ to reign in power and establish the 

 millennium of the Church Triumphant. We may guess, 

 from the fragments that liave come down to us, how 

 all these thoughts reacted on the imagination of the 

 framers of the Edda lays. 



By the side of the picture of the giants and the land 

 of the giants given us in the Edda poetry, we have 

 a picture of the underworld. Tliis borders so closely 

 on the giants' land, that the two cannot always be dis- 

 tinguished. But if I may venture on a conjecture, I 

 should say that, as the cold Jotunheim (giant-home), 

 the region of frost and snow, is characteristically Xorse, 

 the region of the underworld was originally chiefly Celtic; 

 and that the confounding of these two places, to the 

 extent that it occurs in the Edda, is really the mingling 

 of two different mythologies. 



The finest portions of the Edda poetry are those which 

 bring us in contact one way or another with the under- 

 world. They do this in various ways. Sometimes 

 they speak of the summoning from his tomb or funeral 

 mound of a dead man, some father or ancestor of the 

 person who conjures him ; more frequently a dead 



