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from the psychological conditions that surround it, but 
moulds to itself men of every shade of temperament. The 
Scandinavian of a thousand years ago had no Bacchus or 
Aphrodite to dream of and imitate ; but his deities were no less 
the mirror of his mind than these had been of that of his 
Grseco-Roman neighbour. For him the great figure on the 
spiritual horizon was Odin, sailing through the ocean on his 
magic ship Skidbladnir, learning the auguries of fate from the 
dead lips of the embalmed head of Mimir, or, as in the 
Vafthrudnismdl, holding strange converse with still older 
deities on the primal cosmogony. The wild legends of Odin 
Allfather, in their mystery and vague sublimity, show at the 
outset the current in which the ^thought of the Norsemen 
flowed. The other inhabitants of Asgard, the younger yEsir, 
partake of the same solemnity and force. Among them there 
existed the incarnation of good, Baldur, and the incarnation of 
evil, Loki, and these figures display in their very conception a 
clearness of vision in morality that one looks for in vain among 
the more cultured races of the South. The figure of Baldur, 
the impersonified goodness and beauty, against whom none of 
the destructive elements would exercise their function, is one of 
the most beautiful in the mythologies of the world, and the 
legend of his death, shot by the blind deity Hod, whose hand is 
directed by Loki, is too noble to have occurred to a debased or 
foolish people. Their cosmogony, with all the strangeness of 
its details, was not inconsistent with a shrewd kind of natural 
philosophy. It was believed that Midgard, the home of human 
creatures, was situated in the midst of the world, protected by 
a circular wall from the land of the Jotuns, the wild and lawless 
country that lay round the shores of the infinite ocean. Above 
Midgard, in a subtly-interwoven network, spread the roots of 
the ash Yggdrasil, the centre of the universe, under whose 
branches the high gods sat daily in judgment. The boughs of 
Yggdrasil covered the heavens, and its roots roofed the three 
divisions of the lower world, Midgard, and Hell, and the land 
of the malignant giants. This mystical ash-tree was regarded 
as the embodiment of vital nature, “as moved and ruled by the 
divine power, which had its seat in it as the soul has in the 
body.” At its top an eagle sat, emblem of spiritual force ; at 
its root lay Nidhdgg, the dragon of death, constantly gnawing 
it away. Four harts bruised its branches and bit its buds, 
significant, perhaps, of the constant destructive forces that war 
against nature. Up and down its trunk ran the squirrel 
Itatatdsk, carrying the words of malice and discord between the 
