The World before and since Odin.—Birth of Ymer.—The Giants of the Frost.—A Log split in Two.—The First Man and the First Woman—The Tree Ygdrasil and its Menagerie.—Thor’s Three Jewels. Freyr’s Enchanted Swoj’d.—A Souvenir of the National Guard of Bellville.—The Story of Kvasir and the Two Dwarfs.—Honey and Blood.—Invocation.

The world was not born.

Thick mists, unbroken by light, unbounded in limit, filled space.

After a long period of darkness, silence, and perfect repose, a faint light is seen, vague and uncertain, hardly deserving the name; something is moving unsteadily in this night. The giant Ymer has been born spontaneously out of the mixture and assimilation of these closely compressed mists, which sudden and severe frost has condensated.

At that time men of science had not yet discussed the question of spontaneous generation; not one academy made mention of the subject.

Ymer, the sole inhabitant, the Robinson Crusoe of this world of darkness, became tired of his solitude. Guessing how he had been born himself, he gathered the mists that surrounded him, piled them one upon the other, shaped them into a form resembling his own, and once more the North wind came and solidified the mists. As he was a giant, he created giants; he also created mountains, no doubt for the purpose of furnishing seats for these giants, for the highest among them did not reach up to their belts. This does not mean, that these mountains were less high than they are nowadays, but the sons of Ymer were of such size that without bending down a little, they could not have rested their elbows on the summit of Chimborazo, and what is more marvelous still, Ymer himself not only was taller than every one of his sons, but taller than all of his sons together, standing one upon the shoulders of the other! When he stretched himself out full length, the Alps might have served him as a pillow, while his feet would have rested on Mount Caucasus.

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In order to produce such giants and such mountains, he had, of course, to consume large quantities of the material furnished by the chaos of mists; the remainder of this gaseous substance, trembling in vacant space and losing its balance, fell back into the depths of the valleys, and formed the ocean.

Some few animals began soon to stir in the waters, and on the shores of that vast sea; sphinxes and dragons, hydras and griffins, kraken and leviathans, all creatures of a low order, but in their proportions adapted to this colossal world, this world of the infinitely great, and no doubt related in some manner to the antediluvian families of mammoths and pterodactyls, of ichthyosauri and plesiosauri.

A god of the first race, a creator without being created, Ymer naturally did not possess that skill and that cleverness which can only be acquired by long experience. However strange, therefore, it may appear, however inexplicable, the fact is, that this world, fresh with new life and freed from the original mists, was nevertheless covered with darkness. The only light which existed was an occasional phosphorescence of the sea or a few flashes of electric light, such as an aurora borealis sends forth; and this faint glimmer alone illumined the pathway of those vast creatures, those monstrous reptiles, who, dazzled for an instant, plunged back into the lowest depths of the waters, casting up huge waves and tall columns of spray.

It must have been a peculiarly curious sight, certainly, to see those Giants of the Frost, as they were called, wandering, through the darkness across the boundless plains and along endless shores, under a sky without light, looking for each other from one end of the world to the other. To be sure, they could accomplish the journey in a few long strides, and if they were peculiarly anxious to see each other, face to face, they had only to wait for the chance of a momentary flash or a faint twilight glimmer.

The sight was no doubt curious, but there was no one to behold it.

This state of things could not last long. With a new god a new world also came into existence. This new god was very different from the first, it was Light itself, condensed at the southern extremity of the heavens, far from this earth inhabited by giants.

One fine day—an unlucky day for them, however—these giants noticed that the sky above their heads was suddenly assuming a faint pinkish hue, then violet, and finally purple. At this they rejoiced. But suddenly a ball of fire appeared, and they were terrified. It was Odin, Odin followed by his celestial family, which consisted at least of a dozen principal deities!

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But no! no! I take it back! I rebel! No one can come in contact with these ancient myths, without knocking against some principle of astronomy. Astronomers find only seven principal deities in Scandinavian mythology, when they are called upon to transform them into planets, and twelve, when the question is about the signs of the Zodiac. That seems to me to make mythology a. little too easy. Does it not look as if the first men had been born with a telescope and a compass in their pocket, and as if they had erected an observatory long before they thought of building huts for themselves?

Fortunately I am not bound to follow their footsteps.

Certain historians of high authority have found out that Odin lived upon earth before he came to dwell in heaven. He was an illustrious conqueror, very expert at killing men, one of those scourges of God, who fall upon nations in order to break them to pieces. As a matter of course, these nations deified him after his death.

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I see nothing astronomical in all this.

Hence, I return to my own method, and propose to describe him, as he appeared to his Druids, his Scalds, and his worshippers.

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He arrived from the southern countries, no doubt from the Orient, bringing with him the sun, as an indispensable auxiliary in the great taskwhich he had undertaken, to reform this dark and ice-covered world: “For there was a time,” says the Edda, the bible of the Scandinavians, “when the sun, the moon, and the stars did not know the place they were to occupy. It was then the gods assembled and agreed as to the post which was to be assigned to each one of them.”

When the installation of the heavenly bodies had thus been agreed upon, Odin followed the example of all the Hercules of Egypt and of Greece, and began his benevolent career by freeing the earth of all the monsters by which it was infested. Ymer was the first to succumb to his blows, and after him, the other giants of the frost, “a race of evildoers,” adds the Edda. Evildoers? Whom did they aggrieve, I wonder? The complainants must have been the kraken, the griffins, and the serpents.

The world had hardly come into existence and already the right of the stronger had established the doctrine: VÆ victis!

Of all the giants of the frost a single one escaped. He must have been a married man, for his descendants became after a while so numerous as to trouble the Ases, that is to say, Odin and his companions, the other gods.

After the giants, came the turn of land and sea monsters, who were almost as formidable as they themselves. In the general destruction two monsters only survived: the wolf Fenris, with his fearful jaws, which enabled him to crush mountains and even to injure the sun, and the serpent Iormungandur, the great sea serpent of world-wide renown. Both these monsters were one day to aid the giants of the frost in avenging themselves on their conqueror.

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Odin thought he had now nothing more to fear, and returned to the realms of light, there to enjoy his glory in peace and to revel in the delights of Walhalla.

One morning he came down to see how the world was coming on since he had reorganized it, and he found to his great joy, that the new creation was assuming a more pleasing appearance. Grass was growing in the plains, on the slopes of hills, and even at the bottom of the rivers and the sea; here and there trees of varied forms and shapes arose and gave variety to the monotonous horizon; some, crowding together in groups on the mountain side, seemed to whisper confidentially to each other, as the breeze was lightly agitating their foliage, while others stood together in countless hosts, stretching away over hill and dale as far as eye could reach, but silent and immovable, like an army which remains motionless, while the chiefs are deliberating.

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Behind the green curtain of forests, deer, eland, and aurochs were bounding in herds, now and then showing their beautiful horns or their dark bushy brows at the opening of some clearing; goats were climbing about on the rocks and venturing close to the brink of precipices; birds were singing in the groves, now swinging playfully on the supple branches of willows, and now darting suddenly on swift wings through the air; fish were gliding silently under the surface of the waters, which reflected their silvery sheen or broke in soft ripples, while butterflies and insects were sporting and buzzing around beautiful flowers.

Odin smiled; the artist was pleased with his work.

But were animals, impelled by natural instincts only and exclusively occupied with the desire to satisfy their coarse wants, were such animals worthy to be the sole owners of such a charming abode?

It occurred to him to invent a being which, without participating in the divine essence, might still rise high above all other creatures. This time the divine artist wanted a spectator, to witness his work, to appreciate it intelligently, and afterwards to profit by it for some good purpose.

He was meditating on it during a walk on the sea-shore, when a piece of wood, a fragment of a huge branch of a tree which the wind had broken off, attracted his attention. It had evidently fallen into a river, which had carried it out into the high sea, and there it had been beaten and bruised by ebb and tide. He drew this poor shapeless stick of wood towards him, split it in two and made out of it a man and a woman.

“Do you hear? Do you understand?” Asks the Edda, at this point.

Now, what is this intended to convey to us? That man, exposed to the caprices of the elements, is nothing but a poor plaything in the hands of Fate? Very well, let us admit this explanation. But can the sacred book of the Scandinavians really presume to teach us that the origin of mankind must be looked for in two sticks of wood? We cannot but think that that would be a sorry jest, alike unworthy of the general solemnity of the Edda and of the mysterious majesty of ancient cosmogonies.

Besides, we ought not to forget that all the Northern nations attributed a divine character to trees; if in Germany the oak was held sacred, the hyperboreans held the ash tree in great respect, and the question is only whether our first father was made of the wood of an ash tree, an oak, or a willow.

This leads us naturally to the consideration of the ash Ygdrasil and its curious population of gods, birds, and quadrupeds.

The branches of this marvelous tree spread over the whole surface of the earth; its top supported the Walhalla and rose is to the uppermost heavens, while its roots penetrated to the very bottom of hell. Under its shadow dwell Odin and his Ases, when the government of the world requires his presence, or some important question has to be decided.

Two swift winged ravens are incessantly flying to and fro in the Universe, to see what is going on; then they come and perch, one on his left and one on his right shoulder, and whisper into his ear the news of the day. A squirrel, as swift in its movements as the two ravens, is perpetually running up and down the tree. If you doubt my word, hear what the poet says:—

But the poet does not tell the whole story.

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To act as a check upon the reports of the eagle, the ravens, and the squirrel, a vulture is perching upon the loftiest top of the sacred tree, who looks over all the horizons of the earth and the universe, watching for the slightest stir and giving notice of any important event by his cries or the flapping of his wings.

Still other animals, however, inhabit the great ash tree Ygdrasil. Some of these play a sinister part in the great menagerie; they are hideous reptiles, half concealed in the slimy marshes into which one of the roots of the tree finds its way, and ever striving to pour their venom into the mire; beneath another root a dragon is crouching, who constantly gnaws at it, and four starving deer, rushing through its branches, forever devour its foliage.

“Do you hear? Do you understand?” asks the Edda once more.

For the present we do not presume to interpret these descriptions, and before we attempt to penetrate into these dark mysteries, we will mention the principal chiefs among the Ases.

The mystic marriage of Odin and Frigg resulted in the god Thor, who is held in equal veneration with his father. As his duty is to carry thunder and lightning, it is he who shakes the earth whenever he drives through the clouds in his car drawn by two goats and producing a noise represented by the words: “Pumerle pump! Ptimerle pump! Pliz! Pluz! Schmi! Schmur! Tarantara! Tarantara!”. This onomatopoetic translation of the flashing of lightning and the rolling of thunder, is not my own; it comes directly from Dr. Martin Luther, the great Reformer.

Thor is also engaged in pursuing and destroying the giants of the mountains, degenerate children of the giants of the frost, in size at least. At a later period we shall meet with giants of still smaller dimensions. Alas! that here below everything that is great and strong has a tendency to decrease steadily!

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For this war against the giants Odin has bestowed upon his son three precious objects, which in the inventory of the Ases appear under the name of Thor’s Three Jewels. The first is his weighty hammer.

MjoÏner (some people call it his club), which goes forth by itself to meet giants and crushes their heads. One of the commentators upon the Edda professes to see in the giants of the mountains nothing but the mountains themselves, and in the hammer MjoÏner, nothing but lightning, which generally strikes their summit. We must evidently put as little faith in commentators as in astronomers.

The second of Thor’s jewels was a pair of iron gloves. As soon as he puts them on, his spear no sooner reaches the point at which it is aimed, than it returns to his hand, precisely as the falcon comes back to the keeper’s gauntlet, after having destroyed its victim.

The third jewel of Thor is his war belt; when he puts it on, his strength is twice as great as before; in fact, he becomes irresistible and would overthrow the great Odin himself. But Odin has nothing to fear on his part, for in spite of his brutal and passionate temper, Thor is always an obedient and submissive son.

Asa-Thor, that is to say, the Lord Thor, was most highly respected among men as the redhaired master of thunder and lightning, and as the destroyer of giants; and he was also greatly feared as an active, blustering god, of a troublesome, turbulent temper and of somewhat eccentric manners.

Another weapon, at least as marvelous as Asa-Thor’s famous hammer, was the sword of the god Freyr. This sword was endowed with an intelligence very rarely to be met with among swords, and punctually obeyed the orders of its master. Even in his absence, it went promptly and faithfully to carry out his orders, striking here and there at a given point, or making terrible havoc in the midst of a battle, without a hand at the hilt to direct its mortal blows.

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The good Freyr, as pacific a god as ever lived, was quite indifferent to battles and fights; hence he gave his orders quietly to his faithful sword, while he remained comfortably seated at Odin’s table, enjoying his strong beer and the rarest wines.

I cannot help wishing that they might have known the art of manufacturing guns after this system, at the time when I was a lieutenant in the Belleville National Guard. It would have been so pleasant to see a rifle move gravely to and fro, quite alone, in front of the City Hall and the Guard House; or to meet a patrol of four guns, accompanied by a corporal, but a flesh and blood corporal to cry out: Who is there?

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In the meantime the happy owners of these improved weapons might have been sitting, not at Odin’s table, but at the nearest coffee house or restaurant, drinking beer or wine just like the Scandinavian gods.

Unfortunately our manufacturers of arms have not yet reached that degree of skill, which our forefathers seem to have possessed, and thus I have never yet been able to enjoy such a sight.

The happy owner of this magic weapon, Freyr, presided over the general administration of the clouds; it was he who made fine weather or rain, a very troublesome office, which must have exposed him to countless petitions and most contradictory prayers.

His sister Freya, afterwards called Frigg, was Odin’s wife and the most honored goddess on earth as well as in heaven. She inspired and protected lovers, and very different from her sister in Greece, this Northern Venus enjoyed an unsullied reputation.

They say that once, when her husband had gone away on a long journey, she was so deeply grieved at his absence, that her tears ran day and night incessantly; these tears, however, differed from those of mortal beings; “they were all drops of gold which fell into her bosom,”—and hence the Northern people call the precious metal to this day Freyas tears.

One only among all the dwellers in Walhalla had been able to give her some comfort by singing his sweetest songs; this was the god Bragi, the god of poetry and beautiful words.

A tradition which deserves to be mentioned here, accounts for the manner in which he obtained this precious gift of eloquence and the art of poetry.

In the early days of the world, when the creating god had concentrated, so to say, all the active powers of humanity in a few individuals, and when a long life permitted these favored beings to carry on their studies till they reached a happy end, there lived on earth a wise man who possessed an art unknown, not among men only, but among the gods themselves. This was the art of perpetuating thoughts by word-painting, of reproducing them in outward forms, not to the eye by colors, but to the ear by sounds. This sage was called Kvasir. He had invented the Runes, the art of poetry, and the no less precious art of reproducing words and fixing them in writing. He cut his runes on beech tablets; if he had gone a step farther, he would have invented printing long before Guttenberg.

Kvasir was then the sole owner of the art of Poetry.

Two wicked dwarfs prowling about in search of treasures, took it into their heads, that the treasure of Poetry was better than any other, and forthwith determined to obtain possession of it. They killed Kvasir, into whose dwelling they had crept by stealth, and as they were masters in magic, like all the dwarfs of those days, they carefully collected his blood, and mixing it, in different proportions, with honey, put it into three vessels, which they closed hermetically. These three vessels contained respectively Logic, Eloquence, and Poetry. To keep them safe till the day on which they should be used, they buried them in the depths of a cave which was inaccessible to men and unknown to the gods themselves. But one of those travelling agents, who under the form of ravens, were continually wandering over the world in Odin’s employ, had been a silent witness of the transactions, the murder, the mixing, and the hiding of the three vessels. He returned instantly to the ash Ygdrasil and reported it all to his master. The god gave his orders, which the squirrel, no doubt, at once carried to the eagle, and the latter, who was continually on the watch on the top of the sacred tree, left his post for a few moments in charge of the vulture, and flew with rapid wings to the cave, from whence he returned laden with the three precious vessels. It is to be supposed that he carried one in his beak, and the two others, one in each of his claws.

He placed the mysterious vessels at Odin’s feet and at once returned to relieve the vulture and to resume his watch.

Odin opened first the vessel which contained Poetry and tasted the contents. From that moment he never spoke otherwise than in verse. He also tasted Logic, and henceforth he spoke and reasoned with such extreme accuracy, that he found no one to agree with him any longer; he tasted Eloquence, and as soon as he opened his lips, he might have been mistaken for one of our own most eminent lawyers. Gold chains seemed to come out from his lips, as was the case with Ogmius, with which he bound the ears and hearts of all his hearers.

Whilst he was thus enjoying himself, Bragi his son, and Saga his daughter, who were sitting by him, felt their mouths water and looked imploringly at him.

Setting aside the terror with which the Druids have surrounded Odin, he seems to have been occasionally good-natured, and certainly always acted like a kind father. He offered the vessel with Poetry first to Saga, courteously giving her the preference on account of her sex. She barely touched it with her lips. When Bragi’s turn came, he eagerly swallowed as much as he could, and without taking time to gather breath, he began a grand triumphal chant in honor of the feasts, the loves, the wars, and the greatness of the gods, the stars of the firmament, paradise, hell, and the ash Ygdrasil.

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In well chosen cadences he imitated the clanking of cups, the cooing of doves and of lovers, the tumult of battles, the harmonies of the celestial spheres, and all this with such energy, such fire and such grace by turns, that Odin was enchanted, and having become a master himself about five minutes ago, on the spot changed his name of the Long-bearded God, which he had borne so far, to that of the God of Poetry. Moreover, he entrusted to his keeping the threefold treasure which had been taken from Kvasir’s murderers.

This was that god Bragi who alone succeeded in comforting the beautiful and inconsolable Freya in her great grief.

Through him the Druids were instructed in the art of verse; to him is due that terrible Scandinavian poetry, which contains, according to Ozanam, quite as much blood as honey.

As to Saga, she became the goddess of Tradition. “The heart of history is in tradition,” says a master, a sage, and a poet.

Good goddess Saga, your lips, I know, never touched the vessel containing Eloquence, nor that which held Logic, far from it! And still I count upon you to support me in carrying out my work, which I have perhaps imprudently begun; for I begin to be overwhelmed with materials, the subject is a very grave one, and, in spite of the good advice of my learned doctor and the assistance of my two charming lady-companions, time and strength threaten not to suffice. Therefore I beseech you as well as my readers, to grant me a short repose, before I proceed any farther on my journey through Odin’s fantastic world.

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