Well, it is strange enough this old Norse view of Nature; different enough
from what we believe of Nature. Whence it specially came, one would not

like to be compelled to say very minutely! One thing we may say: It came
from the thoughts of Norse men;--from the thought, above all, of the

_first_ Norse man who had an original power of thinking. The First Norse
"man of genius," as we should call him! Innumerable men had passed by,

across this Universe, with a dumb vague wonder, such as the very animals
may feel; or with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder, such as men only

feel;--till the great Thinker came, the _original_ man, the Seer; whose
shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering capability of all into Thought.

It is ever the way with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all
men were not far from saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all

start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to
it, Yes, even so! Joyful to men as the dawning of day from night;--_is_ it

not, indeed, the awakening for them from no-being into being, from death
into life? We still honor such a man; call him Poet, Genius, and so forth:

but to these wild men he was a very magician, a worker of miraculous
unexpected blessing for them; a Prophet, a God!--Thought once awakened does

not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man
after man, generation after generation,--till its full stature is reached,

and _such_ System of Thought can grow no farther; but must give place to
another.

For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God, we
fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; a Hero,

of worth immeasurable; admiration for whom, transcending the known bounds,
became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate Thinking; and many

other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundlessgratitude, would the
rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for them the sphinx-enigma of

this Universe; given assurance to them of their own destiny there? By him
they know now what they have to do here, what to look for hereafter.

Existence has become articulate, melodious by him; he first has made Life
alive!--We may call this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or

whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was a man among men.
His view of the Universe once promulgated, a like view starts into being in

all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there.
In all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his

word it starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every epoch of the world,
the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker

in the world!--
One other thing we must not forget; it will explain, a little, the

confusion of these Norse Eddas. They are not one coherent System of
Thought; but properly the _summation_ of several successivesystems. All

this of the old Norse Belief which is flung out for us, in one level of
distance in the Edda, like a picture painted on the same canvas, does not

at all stand so in the reality. It stands rather at all manner of
distances and depths, of successivegenerations since the Belief first

began. All Scandinavian thinkers, since the first of them, contributed to
that Scandinavian System of Thought; in ever-new elaboration and addition,

it is the combined work of them all. What history it had, how it changed
from shape to shape, by one thinker's contribution after another, till it

got to the full final shape we see it under in the Edda, no man will now
ever know: _its_ Councils of Trebizond, Councils of Trent, Athanasiuses,

Dantes, Luthers, are sunk without echo in the dark night! Only that it had
such a history we can all know. Wheresover a thinker appeared, there in

the thing he thought of was a contribution, accession, a change or
revolution made. Alas, the grandest "revolution" of all, the one made by

the man Odin himself, is not this too sunk for us like the rest! Of Odin
what history? Strange rather to reflect that he _had_ a history! That

this Odin, in his wild Norse vesture, with his wild beard and eyes, his
rude Norse speech and ways, was a man like us; with our sorrows, joys, with

our limbs, features;--intrinsically all one as we: and did such a work!
But the work, much of it, has perished; the worker, all to the name.

"_Wednesday_," men will say to-morrow; Odin's day! Of Odin there exists no
history; no document of it; no guess about it worth repeating.

Snorro indeed, in the quietest manner, almost in a brief business style,
writes down, in his _Heimskringla_, how Odin was a heroic Prince, in the

Black-Sea region, with Twelve Peers, and a great people straitened for
room. How he led these _Asen_ (Asiatics) of his out of Asia; settled them

in the North parts of Europe, by warlikeconquest; invented Letters, Poetry
and so forth,--and came by and by to be worshipped as Chief God by these

Scandinavians, his Twelve Peers made into Twelve Sons of his own, Gods like
himself: Snorro has no doubt of this. Saxo Grammaticus, a very curious

Northman of that same century, is still more unhesitating; scruples not to
find out a historical fact in every individual mythus, and writes it down

as a terrestrial event in Denmark or elsewhere. Torfaeus, learned and
cautious, some centuries later, assigns by calculation a _date_ for it:

Odin, he says, came into Europe about the Year 70 before Christ. Of all
which, as grounded on mere uncertainties, found to be untenable now, I need

say nothing. Far, very far beyond the Year 70! Odin's date, adventures,
whole terrestrial history, figure and environment are sunk from us forever

into unknown thousands of years.
Nay Grimm, the German Antiquary, goes so far as to deny that any man Odin

ever existed. He proves it by etymology. The word _Wuotan_, which is the
original form of _Odin_, a word spread, as name of their chief Divinity,

over all the Teutonic Nations everywhere; this word, which connects itself,
according to Grimm, with the Latin _vadere_, with the English _wade_ and

such like,--means primarily Movement, Source of Movement, Power; and is the
fit name of the highest god, not of any man. The word signifies Divinity,

he says, among the old Saxon, German and all Teutonic Nations; the
adjectives formed from it all signifydivine, supreme, or something

pertaining to the chief god. Like enough! We must bow to Grimm in matters
etymological. Let us consider it fixed that _Wuotan_ means _Wading_, force

of _Movement_. And now still, what hinders it from being the name of a
Heroic Man and _Mover_, as well as of a god? As for the adjectives, and

words formed from it,--did not the Spaniards in their universaladmiration
for Lope, get into the habit of saying "a Lope flower," "a Lope _dama_," if

the flower or woman were of surpassing beauty? Had this lasted, _Lope_
would have grown, in Spain, to be an adjectivesignifying _godlike_ also.

Indeed, Adam Smith, in his Essay on Language, surmises that all adjectives
whatsoever were formed precisely in that way: some very green thing,

chiefly notable for its greenness, got the appellative name _Green_, and
then the next thing remarkable for that quality, a tree for instance, was

named the _green_ tree,--as we still say "the _steam_ coach," "four-horse
coach," or the like. All primaryadjectives, according to Smith, were

formed in this way; were at first substantives and things. We cannot
annihilate a man for etymologies like that! Surely there was a First

Teacher and Captain; surely there must have been an Odin, palpable to the
sense at one time; no adjective, but a real Hero of flesh and blood! The

voice of all tradition, history or echo of history, agrees with all that
thought will teach one about it, to assure us of this.

How the man Odin came to be considered a _god_, the chief god?--that surely
is a question which nobody would wish to dogmatize upon. I have said, his

people knew no _limits_ to their admiration of him; they had as yet no
scale to measureadmiration by. Fancy your own generous heart's-love of

some greatest man expanding till it _transcended_ all bounds, till it
filled and overflowed the whole field of your thought! Or what if this man

Odin,--since a great deep soul, with the afflatus and mysterious tide of
vision and impulse rushing on him he knows not whence, is ever an enigma, a

kind of terror and wonder to himself,--should have felt that perhaps _he_
was divine; that _he_ was some effluence of the "Wuotan," "_Movement_",

Supreme Power and Divinity, of whom to his rapt vision all Nature was the
awful Flame-image; that some effluence of Wuotan dwelt here in him! He was

not necessarily false; he was but mistaken, speaking the truest he knew. A
great soul, any sincere soul, knows not what he is,--alternates between the

highest height and the lowest depth; can, of all things, the least
measure--Himself! What others take him for, and what he guesses that he

may be; these two items strangely act on one another, help to determine one
another. With all men reverently admiring him; with his own wild soul full

of noble ardors and affections, of whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious
new light; a divine Universe bursting all into godlike beauty round him,

and no man to whom the like ever had befallen, what could he think himself
to be? "Wuotan?" All men answered, "Wuotan!"--

And then consider what mere Time will do in such cases; how if a man was
great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead. What an enormous

_camera-obscura_ magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in the human
Memory, in the human Imagination, when love, worship and all that lies in

the human Heart, is there to encourage it. And in the darkness, in the
entire ignorance; without date or document, no book, no Arundel-marble;

only here and there some dumb monumental cairn. Why, in thirty or forty
years, were there no books, any great man would grow _mythic_, the