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or debility, or in any sense seemed unfitted to struggle with the 
world, it was immediately exposed. To prevent ourselves from 
over-estimating the enormity of this custom, we must realize 
the ideal of the people, their determination to be a race of 
athletes or nothing. It was well enough for slaves or for 
Teutons to nourish ill-favoured or puny children : it would be 
ruinous for Norsemen. Their gods were heroes : Odin, king 
of men; Thor, of the gigantic hammer; Baldur, the essential 
loveliness ; and the highest attainment of mortals was to ascend 
to a faint shadow of the perfect strength and beauty of the 
deities. Viewed in this light, the exposure of diseased and 
deformed infants presents nothing violently inconsistent with 
the moral standard of the people. The act had little in com- 
mon with the horrible kinds of infanticide practised among 
many overcrowded Oriental peoples, where the poor children 
are put out of the way to indulge the parsimony or laziness of 
the parents. Again, such an infant had no spiritual existence, 
in the belief of an old Scandinavian. It was not till he grew 
to something of man’s estate, and began to emulate the high 
deeds of the gods, that the soul in him was supposed to germi- 
nate. Until the process of initiation, which was, curiously 
enough, performed by sprinkling water over the babe, had been 
gone through, the father had absolute power over the child’s 
life ; but as soon as this sort of pagan baptism had been per- 
formed, the exposure of the child was regarded as murder, and 
punishable by law. 
9. When the infant was not so unfortunate as to be doomed 
so miserably and so soon to end its life, it was prepared with 
the utmost rigour for a life of hardship and enterprise. Boys 
were more highly regarded than girls, and more pains w r ere 
expended on their education. The bodies of young children were 
habitually bathed in cold spring water, and subjected to almost 
uninterrupted exercise in the open air. The first thing a boy 
learned was to handle arms and to kill. There were certain sports 
among the young men, to which no boy was admitted till he 
had slain an animal, just as for a grown man it was the greatest 
of disgraces never to have seen human blood. It would be easy 
to point to passages in the Sagas which prove that, so far from 
its being held a crime to kill a man in fair fight, mothers were 
accustomed to rejoice when their young sons distinguished 
themselves in this way, believing that the deed gave promise 
that the boy would prove a virtuous vikingr. In the magnifi- 
cent opening of the “ Lay of Ilelgi Hundingsbane,” when, to 
the noise of shrieking eagles and the thunder of cataracts, the 
