w r4 &§6®M Htm*£k o> ^ys \ *****>****«*£. *\w •%> *>*», PRINCETON, N. J. 35 • EB 5//^ Division :4-/. ~~" ^3 Section.. ATt4?nber ■ CJ 0\ a _^ >A HEATHENDOM AND CHRISTENDOM THE VIKINGS IN WESTERN CHRISTENDOM A.D. 789 TO A.D. 888 BY C. F. KEARY, M A., F.S.A. AUTHOR OF "OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF," "THE DAWN OF HISTORY,' ETC., BTC WITH MAP AND TABLES NEW YORK G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS LONDON : T. FISHER UNWIN 1891 Non ha Vottimo artisia alcun concetto, Ctiun mar mo solo in se non circonscriva, Col suo soverchio. Michelangelo. PREFACE. The present volume is concerned with that period in the history of the Scandinavian peoples when they were growing, but had not yet fully grown, into nationalities, and when, therefore, their true national history had not begun. Every historic people has passed through this early formative period, its age of Sturm und Drang ; and it may be said that every nationality which is worthy of the name has looked back upon that age with a peculiar affection and with a sort of reverence. It has, in consequence, overlaid the faint traditions of it with a garment of mythology, out of which it is in most cases possible only here and there to separate a shred of historical truth. The result is that the very phase in the development of the people about which we most long to know, is the one about which we are condemned to the completest ignorance. The Viking Age of the Northern Folk differs from the correspond- ing epochs in the history of other nations in this — that it is illuminated by a faint ray of real history lent from the pages of contemporary but alien chroniclers, the chroniclers, I mean, of Christian Europe. Were it not for this faint gleam, the earliest age of the Vikings would have remained for us as a mere tradition, something known to have been, but not presentable iv PREFACE. in any realizable form ; much, in fact, what the Dorian Migra- tion is in the history of Greece. As it is, by the aid of the contemporary records I have spoken of, we can present the northern migration in a clearer guise. For all that, a distinction must be drawn between the earliest and, as I would call it, true Viking Age, and the actual history of the Scandinavian Folk as recorded by themselves. Viking expeditions continued to be made during the later historical period. But they took a different character from those of the earlier age, and they no longer absorbed so large a part of the activity of the people ; at any rate they no longer constituted, as they do for our period, the only phase of national activity whereof the records remain. Thus, though the expression Viking Age is often employed with a much wider significance, it would, I think, be an advantage, could its use be confined to just this epoch in the life of the Northern people and to no other ; to their age of Storm and Stress, the age of their formation. It would be an advantage, too, if it were more generally borne in mind that the history of the North begins now and at no earlier time. The Vikings of this period are for us the whole Scandinavian people ; we know no other — if, at any rate, we except a notice here and there of the kings of Southern Denmark. But the pre-eminence of the antiquaries of the North, overshadowing the study of Scandinavian history, has rather tended to obscure this fact. All histories (almost) of Scandinavian lands begin with prehistoric antiquities, which are not history. Or it may be that the historians of these countries have not liked to realize how far down in time their history begins ; so that prehistoric discoveries or unauthenti- cated traditions preserved in the sagas of a later age have been brought in to fill up what is for History in the proper sense of the word a mere blank. PREFACE. v Such, then, is the interest attaching to the age of the Vikings from the point of view of Scandinavian history. But its records are so shadowy that it would not be possible to claim for it a very large amount of attention upon that score alone. For universal history — or say for the history of Europe generally — it has a much deeper interest, as one phase, and a very important one, of the long struggle be- tween Christianity and the Heathenism of the North. And it is under this aspect that the history is treated in the present volume. Otherwise there would be no adequate excuse for the three chapters with which the volume opens, nor for the one with which it concludes. These four chapters are not, strictly speaking, concerned with the Vikings ; but they are concerned very intimately with the relations of Heathenism — that is to say Teutonic Heathenism — to Christianity and to Christian Europe. It has always been the intention, or at any rate the hope, of the present writer to carry on the study of this epoch one stage further ; namely, to the formation and to the early history of the Scandinavian conquests and colonies in France, in the British Isles, in the islands of the North Atlantic ; and, as a pendant to this external history, to the rise of the Edda and Saga literature and of the mythology which they enshrine— the last articulate voice of Teutonic Heathen- ism. If such an enlarged study were ever completed, then the three opening chapters of this volume would serve as an introduction to the whole, and the concluding chapter as a link between this volume and the next. The half-title, too, ' Heathendom and Christendom,' would stand not for this volume only, but for any — one or more — succeeding one likewise. I may, perhaps, be allowed to add that, to the best of my recollection, this book was begun in the earlier part of 1882 ; viii CONTENTS. PAGE CHAPTER IV. THE FIRST CONTESTS. i. First Danish attack on. Christendom. — ii. Charlemagne's Saxon war. — iii. First Viking raids, A.D. 789-807. — iv. Charlemagne and Godfred ... ... ... ... ... ... 121 CHAPTER V. CHARACTER OF THE VIKINGS. i. Shipbuilding in the Baltic. — ii. The Vikings as 'adventurers' and as soldiers. — iii. Enforced exile. The ideal Viking leader. — iv. The Scandinavian countries. — v. Abandonment of the ancient gods. Fate. — vi. Strangeness of the Christian world to the first Vikings .„ ... ... ... 155 CHAPTER VI. THE VIKINGS IN IRELAND. i. Baldness of all narratives of early Viking raids. — ii. Polit'cal con- dition of Ireland. Viking raids, A.D. 807-833. Turgesius • occupies half Ireland. — iii. Raids on England from Ireland. Death of Turgesius. The three Viking ' kingdoms' in Ireland 185 CHAPTER VII. LEWIS THE PIOUS. THE CONQUESTS OF CHRISTIANITY. i. Extension of Christianity towards the Baltic— ii. Character of Lewis the Pious. — iii. Civil war in Denmark. Conversion of Harald. — iv. Mission of Anscar to Denmark and Sweden ... 20S CHAPTER VIII. CIVIL WAR. i. Forces tending to the disintegration of the Empire. Church and State. Rise of nationalities. Second marriage of Lewis. Birth of Charles (the Bald).— ii. Outbreak of the Civil War. The ' 1 ield of Lies.'— iii. Restoration of Lewis. — iv. Death of Lewis th<- l'ious.—v. Battle of Fontenoy. Peace of Verdun ... 235 CONTENTS. - ix PAGE CHAPTER IX. RAIDS IN THE FRANK1SH EMPIRE, A.D. 834-845. i. Viking raids at the mouth of the Rhine ; of the Seine ; of the Loire ; in England. Nantes plundered. Vikings up the Garonne and off the coast of Spain. — ii. Attack on Hamburg. Ragnar Lodbrok. Attack on Paris. Miracle ... ... ... 269 CHAPTER X. DEFENCES BROKEN DOWN, A.D. 846-858. i. Peaceful relations between Christians and Scandinavians. The Swedish mission. King Horik and Anscar. — ii. Fresh attacks on Frisia and France ; Oscar's fleet at Bordeaux, Rorik's on the Rhine, &c. Attacks on England. Battle of Ockley. The Vikings begin to winter in France and England. — iii. Charles the Bald and the Bretons. The Vikings on the Loire. Abdication and death of Lothair. — iv. Second civil war in Denmark. Charles the Bald and the Aquitanians. — v. Siege of the Vikings in Oissel, A.D. 858. Lewis the German invades West Francia. The siege of Oissel raised. — vi. Effects of the breakdown of the Oissel siege ... ... ... ... ... ... 295 CHAPTER XI. DECAY AND REDINTEGRATION, A.D. 859-866. i. Changes in the Carlovingian Empire. — ii. Danes attack Norse- men in Ireland. — iii. Means of defence adopted by Charles the Bald. Cavalry. Fortifications. Condition of peasantry. — iv. Rise of new Houses in France and Germany. The Welfings. The Liudolfings. Robert the Strong. Hincmar. — v. Vikings on the Seine and Somme. Death of Robert the Strong ... 329 CHAPTER XII. THE GREAT ARMY. i. Expedition by Hasting and Bjorn into Spain and into the Mediterranean. Siege of Luna. — ii. Legends of the death of Ragnar Lodbrok. Review of the Viking attacks on England up to A.D. 866.— iii. Coming of the Great Army. The Army in Northumbria ; in Mercia ; in East Anglia. Destruction of monas- CONTENTS. PAGB teries. Martyrdom of Eadmund. — iv. The Army in West Saxony ; at Reading. Battles of Englefield, Reading, Ashdown, Basing, Merton. Accession of ^Elfred. Battle of Wilton. The Vikings in London ; at Torksey ; at Repton. Exile of Burgred, king of Mercia. — v. Norse and Danish blood in England. Guthorm's army in Wessex. Battle of iEthandune. Peace of Wedmore ... ... ... ... ... ... 358 CHAPTER XIII. PAUSE IN THE VIKING RAIDS. Pause in the Viking raids on the Continent. Condition of the kingdoms north of the Alps, A.D. 866-870. Death of Lothair II., A.D. 869. — ii. Invasion of Lotharingia by Charles the Bald. Partition of Meersen. Death of the Emperor Lewis II., a.d. 875. — hi. The Carling House towards the end of the ninth century. — iv. Charles the Bald emperor. Renewed Viking attacks on France. Death of Lewis the German. Charles the Bald invades East Lotharingia. Battle of Andernach and defeat of Charles ... ... ... ... ... ... 405 CHAPTER XIV. CHARIES THE FAT THE INVASION OF GERMANY. Death of Charles the Bald. — ii. Reign of Lewis the Stammerer. — iii. Boso, king of Lower Burgundy. Vikings return from England to the Continent. Battle of Thuin. Total defeat of Saxons on Liineburg Heath. Defeat of Vikings at Saucourt. — iv. Advance of Godfred's army up the Rhine. Besieged by Charles the Fat at Ashloh. Shameful termination of the siege. — v. Death of Lewis, king of West Francia. Renewed attacks on France. Desperate condition of Western Christendom, A.D. 882-3. — vi. Godfred and Hugh of Lorraine. Murder of Godfred ... 43S CHAPTER XV. THE SIEGE OF PARIS. Death of Carloman, king of West Francia, Decembei, 884. ( harles the Fat inherits the empire of Charlemange. Siegfred's army advances up the Seine and begins the Siege of Paris, A.D. 885. — ii. Cessation of attacks till January, 886. Renewal of the siege. Death of Bishop Go/lin. Odo departs to seek as- CONTENTS. xi PAGE sistance from the emperor. Death of Duke Henry of East Francia in attempting to relieve garrison. Charles arrives before Paris ; pays ransom and allows Vikings to proceed to Upper Burgundy. — iii. Deposition of Charles the Fat, A.D. 887. Arnolf, king of Germany. Separation of Latin-speaking peoples. Kingdoms of France, Upp~r Burgundy, Lower Burgundy, Italy ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 468 CHAPTER XVI. THE CREED OF CHRISTENDOM. i. Nature of the rivalry of creeds between Heathendom and Christen- dom.— ii. The Pope and the Emperor. — iii. The Pope and the Frankish Church. The false decretals. Nicholas I. and Hincmar.— iv. Nicholas I. and Lothair II. ; the Pope and the Lotharingian Church. Judgment upon Lothair II. — v. Popular aspect of the rivalry between the Pope and the Frankish Church. The Sacramental doctrine. — vi. Echoes of Old German Heathenism. — The Merseburg formulae. Popular Christianity: Heliand, Muspilli ... ... ... ... ... 497 TABLES ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 542 INDEX .« ... ... ... ... ~. ... 551 r^ L_— 5£% w~~ ritain was cut off from connection with the Continent. When the great age of Sturm und Drang— the age of what are called the Folk-wanderings ( Volkerwanderungen), and of the fall of Rome — had passed, these shores were again brought into connection with Gaul, were once more visited by Gaulish vessels and Gaul by English. Only in the interval both lands had been overrun by a Teu- tonic conqueror. Gaul was on the highway to change into Francia — France ; and Britain was becoming, or had become, England. Only a short time did the interruption of intercourse between Britain and the Continent endure. But still there was an inter- ruption ; and it so happens that the mythology of that interval has left us a precious relic which typifies what in the eyes of men who still made part of the 'world' of the Roman Empire was the condition of those who had been separated from it. The relic I speak of is the myth current among the fishermen of Northern Gaul touching the mysterious island ' Brittia ' ; a place as they deemed to which souls were wafted after death, where, as Claudian thought,2 Ulysses had invoked the shades from Hades and poured blood into his trench — Est locus, exlremum pandit qua Gallia littus, Oceani pnetentus aquis, ubi fertur Ulixes Sanguine libato populum movisse silentem. 1 These two provinces were both on the west side of the Rhine. They were, however, much less Romanized than those provinces further south which lay north or east of the Upper Rhine and south of the Danube ( Rhsetia, Noricum). 2 In Rufin. i. 123-8. The place which Claudian chooses is the edge of Gaul opposite Britain. But Procopius' story shows that the myth be'onged to our island. ROME AND NOT-ROME. 5 Ulic umbrarum tenui stridore volantum FIel)ilis auditur questus. Simulacra coloni Pallida defunctasque vident migrare figuras. The same myth, as Procopius relates it in prose, is of an island, ' Brittia,' half of which was a habitation for the living, but the other half was set apart to be the home of ghosts. Between the two regions stretched a wall which none could pass and live; whoever did cross it instantly fell dead upon the other side, so pestilential was the air. But serpents and all venomous things dwelt on the other side, and there the air was dark and spirit-haunted. The fishermen upon the Gaulish coast were made the ferrymen of the dead, and on account of this strange duty, we are assured, they were exempt from the ordinary incidence of taxation. Their task fell upon them in rotation ; those villagers whose turn had come were awakened at dead of night by a gentle tap upon the door, and a whispering breath calling them to the beach. There lay their boats, empty to all appearance, and yet weighed down as if by a heavy load. Pushing off, the fishermen performed in one night a voyage which else they could hardly accomplish, rowing and sailing, in six days and nights. When they had arrived at the unknown coast, they heard names called over and voices answering as if by rotation, while they felt their vessels gradually growing light ; at last when all the souls had landed the boats were wafted back to the habitable world.1 This description has often been quoted before. The great value for our purpose of this piece of mythology lies in its boldly attaching itself — or with the faintest disguise — to a land formerly so well known as Britain was to the Romans — Britain, the birth-place of Constantine. The shores about which the Gaulish fishermen themselves entertained so strange a belief, whither they imagined that some of their 1 Bell. Goth.'w. 20. 6 HE A THENDOM. villagers were set apart to ferry the dead, must have been tha shores of Britain known to them ; and therefore in the popular mythology of our near neighbours our island must have been altogether a home of the dead.1 And something of this superstition long attached to us — the land of the Angli was in later centuries confused with the home of the Angeli.2 If, however, we limit ourselves strictly to the myth as given by Procopius, it is only the country beyond the wall, i.e., the Roman Wall, that has so ghastly a reputation. Granting, I mean, that this wild myth concerning ' Brittia ' could never have sprung up save when our island and our Roman roads were cut off from the great system of Europe ; still it was not so wild as quite to forget the difference between conquered Britain and those unknown unconquered regions in the far north. It was at the wall where the Roman roads came to an end, that all that was natural and human too, ended, and we approached the borders of the Earth. This region beyond the wall is that same Caledonia which one of its own chieftains was made by Tacitus to speak of as the end of all territories and of all freedom. Such was, I deem, the attitude in which the Roman subject stood — not to all the rest of the world — but to those parts of Northern Europe which lay outside the domains of Rome. To the commoner people, at any rate, all those regions were strange, misformed, monstrous, inhuman, ghostlike. And when Christianity walked along the paths which had been pre- pared for her by Rome, Christendom, too, looked upon this part of the unchristian world in the same way. In time, as Christianity cast her net over many.people beyond the Roman pale, they began to look with her eyes, and to regard as she did their unconverted brethren. That feeling has been 1 "As the passage of Claudian likewise suggests. * Dudo, De mar. et act. prim. due. Normannia, ii. 5. ROME AND NOT-ROME. 7 crystallized and preserved (by chance partly, no doubt) in our word, heathen, the German Heide, from heath, Heide. Partly by chance, because heath at one time might mean an enclosure in the country, heathen be no more than a translation of the Latin paga?ius, villager. But the earliest signification of heath was very soon forgotten, and the word very soon came to mean what it means with us, a moor, a wild, uncouth, uncultivated region, remote from human kind. The associations in popular imagination with all such places were necessarily far more terrible than they are with us : what was unknown was always then uncouth, that is to say, monstrous, terrifying. The German races, though they were, as compared to the classical peoples, essentially rustics, had in their minds as vivid a picture of the horror of deserted regions as any that speaks in classical poetry. Side by side with that myth of the Gauls about Britain, side by side with the above-quoted passage from Claudian, or even with the more awful vstcvia of the Odyssey which suggested it, we might place some pictures drawn from our earliest poem Beowulf, of that arch-heathen Grendel, and of the land in which he dwelt. I call him an arch-heathen, for he is the embodiment of all terrors attaching to the moors and misty fells, the marshes and the dark peat- pools, to whatever, in fact, lay far-off from human dwellings. He himself is a ghoul or a giant, a giant just of the same kind as the giant of our folk-tales; only that unfortunately we cannot realize what likeness such beings put on in days when men really believed in their existence. There is a giant in the Edda called Hraesvelg, Corpse devourer : Grendel, too, feeds on human flesh ; he lives far from mankind in the dwellings of the Fifel-race ; but at night he stalks along under the misty hills, till he comes to men's habitations, where he can find some food for his cannibal mouth, 8 HE A THENDOM. Came from the moor, under the misty hills, Grendel stalking. . . . He bare 'God's anger on him,' so writes our poet, a Chris- tian telling a heathen legend.1 We have, then, in Beowulf, and its picture of Grendel, the due counterpart of Procopius' imagery. That stands to us for the type of a place cut off from intercourse with Rome, a heathendom before Christianity, we might say ; this stands to us for any place cut off from intercourse with humankind, and in a spiritual sense it typifies the idea of heathendom generally, as the descendants of the heathens themselves con- ceived it. The Goths had another myth which illustrates the same thought. It is reported by the Christian Goth Jordanes — in days when the Gothic nation had all been Christianized — and relates to those beings of fear, the heathen Huns. Jordanes tells us that a former king of the Goths had banished from his dominions all the sorceresses,2 that these had gone east- ward and found a home in a certain wood. 3 -There they cohabited with the wild beasts of the forest, and out of this unnatural connection sprang the obscene race of the Huns.* In every legend such as this the feeling which underlies it is the same; it is the horror which mankind universally conceives of all that is mysterious and unknown. The description in Beowulf might have been written with equal force if the poem had been a purely heathen one ; and the story which Jordanes retails may very well have had its origin in heathen days. It is only that Christendom adopted this strain of popular superstition 1 Compare the epithets hraundrengr, hraunbi'ii, frequently applied to giants in the Edda (as in Haustlong, HymiskviSa, &c.), also bergbm ', hellisbui. 2 ' Haliorunas.' 3 This wood is the JduiviSr (Iron wood) of the Eddas. Cf. Rydberg, Teutonic Mythology, p. 151. 4 Jordanes, De Goth. Orig, c. 24. GERMANY. 9 and applied it to the part of the world to which it was specially applicable — that is to say, the heathen north. It would have been absurd to speak of the classical pagans in such a manner. No one could think of the descendants of Pericles, or the possessors of the primeval wisdom of the East as a wild, half- human people, haunting the ways of wolves. Thus heathen, when we apply the word to the unconverted northern nations, Germans or Scandinavians, has a meaning quite distinct from that of pagan, as the word wras used in the early days of Christianity. And as paganism was pretty well disposed of before Christianity came in contact with heathenism, and Christianity itself had changed in the interval, the attitude of Heathendom and Christendom f ce to face with one another is a thing to be studied in and by itself, not confounded in one long history of the spread of Christianity over Europe. No time would be wasted which should help us to gain that sense of the unknown in space which our forefathers could possess, but which is so strange to modern thought. In vain the philosopher tells us that our life is hemmed round with mystery ; it is the physical expression of this mystery that we require, in order to realize the ideas of former ages on this matter. To think that nothing known lies beyond such a wood, that that far headland bounds the world of men ; could that be possible to us in the present day, then we might have some conception of what heathen and its cognate words would mean to a Christian of the early Middle Ages. And we should through this knowledge also be half-way towards an under- standing of the conflict which had to go on in the heathen German's own soul before he could bring himself to cast out his early gods to wander through such desolate places ; as Odin (Wuotan) and his following were cast out to become fiends, the Wild Huntsman and his crew ; or as the same god was left alone upon the Harz transformed into the Prince of Darkness. io HEATHENDOM, Such a conflict went on in each mind ; and the epos of this mental struggle is typefied by the epos of visible warfare between Heathendom and Christendom, whereof again the battles and sitges of the first Viking Age (our more special study in this volume) form in the mass a single act. The details of this warfare are often very difficult to ascertain, and seem common- place and uninteresting. But the conflict as a whole in its inward and outward phases was stupendous, and stupendous in its results. II. We have been in a position to see how there was, in a certain sense, a heathendom before Christianity. Every northern country which was cut off from connection with Rome (as Britannia was for a time) sank at once into this tenebrous con- dition. And all those lands whither the Roman roads had never reached and the Roman rule had never spread, dwelt in it perpetually. Such a land was Caledonia beyond the wall ; sich was Ierne, * gelid Ierne,' as a Roman poet miscalls the land of warm mists and rains, a land which Agricola thought of conquering, but where, in fact, the Roman arms had never been seen. But the true home of this heathenism before Christianity (as of the heathenism after Christianity) lay not in these western extremities of the world, but in the eastern ones, in all the great German Germany beyond the Rhine, and in the Baltic c* untries of which the Romans had so faint a notion. There was a Roman Germany. First, those provinces south of the Danube whereof we have spoken, Rhoetia, Noricum — now, roughly speaking, Wiirtemburg, Bavaria, Carinthia, German Austria, Styria. There were the Decumates Agri(the 'Tithe Lands '), which correspond with the modern Grand Duchy of Baden, and a small part of Wurtcmberg. In that region there ROMAN GERMANY. n was another wall of Hadrian, a vallum protected by a series of forts which ran due west from Albensberg on the Danube (a little above Regensburg), and was joined eventually by the wall of Trajan, running due north beyond the Main to the slopes of t»he Taunus. At this last range of mountains, for all the land east of the Rhine, begins unconquered Germany. You may stand to day and look across towards those Taunus hills from Mainz or Worms, across that great plain which was once the Rhine's bed, and which since history dawned has been the battlefield of so many nationalities and so many creeds; while a clear, star-lit sky is over your head you will see, maybe, as I have seen, over there the flashes of sheet-lightning and hear the faint echoes of thunder. The sight of these hills, the roll of that thunder, cannot be without a deep significance for any traveller whose mind is in the least degree imbued with the lessons of history. The hills are for him a symbol of the beginning of the reign of Thorr and Odin. Of deeper sig- nificance still perhaps is another mountain range which lies farther to the north and to the east. This is the Harz, which gave, I suppose, its name to the Cherusci, the great champions of heathendom before Christianity. And we know what a reputation the Harz preserved all through the Middle Ages as the hearth on which smouldered the last embers of heathenism after Christianity as it died away in witchcraft. West of the Rhine lay two Roman Germanias, Germania Superior and Germania Inferior, the precursors of Alsace and Lorraine, that is to say, of Alsace and the greater Lorraine of early Middle Age history. To protect this Roman Germany were built the great camps or founded the great cities and colonies which lay along the banks of the stream or a little way behind it. There was Treves (Augusta Treverorum) the most important of all. There was Castra Vetera on the Rhine itself, the chief of the Roman camps, but one of the few places I2 HEATHENDOM. which did not preserve its importance into Christian days ; there was Colonia Ubiorum, or Colonia Agrippina, what we call Cologne ; Moguntiacum (Mainz) ; Argentoratum (Strass- hurg) ; Vangiones (Worms), ' celebrated,' a Roman historian complacently says, c for many a defeat of the barbarians ' — there is no need to enumerate them all. Truth to tell, almost all the picturesque medieval towns which the traveller of to-day knows (knows and loves) along the banks of the Rhine, Bonn, Remagen, Andernach, Oberwesel, Coblentz, and the rest1 have had a Roman origin. In Christian days the greater of these military strongholds grew to be likewise strongholds of the faith, archbishops' and bishops' sees ; the three greatest archbishoprics of Germany, the three great spiritual elec- torates, Treves, Cologne, and Mainz, were all in this region of Roman Germania. Over against these strongholds stood in imperial days the wild forest haunts of the Germans, the Taunus or the Teutoberger Wald, places which were pregnant with great events. There is one other river of Germany, one other river in Europe only, one may say, which has been fortified as a rampart against heathendom much as the Rhine has been. This river is the Vistula. Along all its banks which are German you find the fortified towns or convent fortresses, raised in the thirteenth century by the Teutonic knights as a bulwark, not now against heathen Germans, but against heathen Slavs. Marienburg, Marienwerder, Graudentz, Culm, Thorn, are the counterparts of Colonia Agrippina, Bonna, Confluentes, Moguntiacum, Argentoratum, and the rest. Only there is this difference, that whereas the greater number of the Roman forts upon the Rhine which Christendom inherited are upon the west bank, the fortresses of the Vistula stood within the 1 Bonna (Ara Ubiorum), Rigomagus, Antunacum, Vosavia, Confluentes. GERMAN WARFARE. 13 heathen territory and defended the river already won by Christendom. Beyond the boundaries, as we have traced them, of Roman empire you came tc that land which the historian spoke of, in words which have been quoted a thousand times, as in universum, on the whole, either rugged with forest or dank with marshes, where people did not dwell together in towns, nostro ?nore, but apart and scattered. Many centuries later it was said of the territory of the Saxons (between the Lower Rhine and the Elbe) that there a squirrel might travel for leagues (' seven leagues ') without ever having need to touch the ground. These dark and trackless forests had a terror of their own. Two things, says a recent writer,1 were, during their efforts to conquer Germany, strange and terrible to the Roman generals and the Roman legionaries — the Ocean with its tides and the endless stretches of dark woodland in the interior. Upon the one the ships were suddenly, as if by unseen hands, dragged from their moorings, hurried away, and tossed upon some rocky shore. In the other, as the legions were painfully struggling through the dense forest, not less suddenly, and again at the touch of unseen, but not superhuman, hands, the trees would begin falling to right and left and rear of the army, a network of fallen trees. They had been half felled through days before in anticipation of the advance. As the Romans pressed forward they were suddenly brought face to face with a huge abatis — broti it was called in Northern warfare. Behind it the enemy were entrenched ; arrows and javelins began to fly out from behind the impro- vised stockade ; the broti stretched great wings far into the forest ; if this were carried by assault you came upon another and another, and the enemy scarcely visible all the while. x Vigfusson, Grimm Centenary, ii. i4 HEATHENDOM. Meantime other trees had been falling, falling, and fresh abatis had been growing up on other sides and to the rear to cut off all retreat. He was a lucky or a very skilful general who could bring his army out thence unbroken. Perhaps he had been wise enough to post supports to come up at the critical moment ; if they could reach him, he was saved ; if they failed to reach him he was destroyed. This is how Caesar was saved the day he overcame the Nervii,1 and this is how Varus was destroyed. Another favourite method of defence among the Germans was by means of trenches.2 Sometimes they were mere traps into which an advancing line might precipitate itself; some- times they concealed an ambush. Add to these terrors the wild and fearful howling, more like that of beasts than of men, 3 which echoed and re-echoed in the forest wilderness, and we have a picture of some of the physical terrors which dogged the advance of the Romans into this ancient land. But we should, I think, be estimating very wrongly if, because these difficulties were never overcome, we were to assume that they w^ere insurmountable, or that they were felt to be so by the Romans either of Augustus' or of Tacitus's day. A few chance sayings of the Roman historians have 1 Not of course that the land of the Nervii lay in that special region of ' heathen ' Germany of which we are speaking, for their territory was by the Scheldt. But they were a German people, and, like their brethren to the east and north, made use of something like brotis in their battles — only that their stockades were more like hedges and made of smaller trees. ' Nervii . . . teneris arboribus incisis atque inflexis, crebris in iatitudinem ramis et rubis sentibusque interjectis, effecerant ut instar mnri hoe sepes munimenta proeberent, quo non modo intrari sed ne perspici quidem posset.' And later, ' Sepibus densissimis, ut ante demonstravimus, interjectis, prospectus impediretur ; neque certa subsidia conlocari, neque quaque parte opus esset provided/ &c. Bell. Gall. ii. 17, 22. Cf. Tacitus, Antral, i. 63 ; Ammian. xvi. it, 8 ; xvii. 1, 9 ; 10, 6. 3 See Ammian. xvi. 12, 27 ; xvii. 1, 8, 9. 3 Plutarch, Marius 16, for the Cimbri and Teutones. Cf. Tacitus, Annal. i. 65, &c. ROME'S RELATION TO HER NEIGHBOURS. 15 been exaggerated by our vanity as Teutons and made to receive this interpretation. It is rather the opposiie of this feeling which we have to try and realize. It is not easy for us who have been made wise by the event to understand how low a place the nations of Northern Europe held then in the estimation of civilized mankind. Our thoughts are naturally turned to the future, but theirs were necessarily con- cerned only with the past, that is to say, with the remains of Alexander's Empire in the south and east, with the vast field of Hellenistic culture in Asia and Africa. ' Who,' as Tacitus says, 'would ever leave Asia and Africa for those inclement Northern lands?' The Romcns had few thoughts to spare for the people whose small, one-roomed, wooden huts lay scat- tered among the German forests, or for those wilder people still, perhaps, of Caledonia and Ierne. India was far more interesting to them than heathen Germany or the flat lands at the mouth of the Rhine. The way Tacitus speaks of even the Gauls is very much the way we speak of the Hindus, or, at any rate, of the Mohammedans of India — as of a people who, no doubt, once were powerful, but whose day is over, and who are now sunk irretrievably in idleness and effeminacy. The same historian tells us how little the rebellion of Civilis — which arose on the Batavian island, and nearly lost to Rome Northern Gaul and the province of Germania Inferior — was noticed amid the excitement of civil dissensions in Italy.1 It would be no unjust comparison to liken that rebellion to an abortive Indian mutiny, had such an one been set on foot by Sikhs and Nepiule e. Agricola's campaigns in Britain we might compare to the taking of Scinde. By such com- parisons only can we arrive at some notion of the relation in which Rome stood to her northern subjects and neighbours. 1 Historia, lib. iv. T6 HEATHENDOM. Germany again — unconquered Germany, the Germany of Tacitus — we must compare to Afghanistan, and the great defeat of Varus to the destruction of General Sale's force in the Kyber. The circumstances of the two defeats were not dissimilar, and their consequences were almost identical. Each begot in the mind of the greater nation something of a superstitious fear, an almost superstitious exaggeration of the dangers which lay in wait for the invader. The policy of Augustus that the Rhine should form the boundary of the Roman Empire was identical with our dominant policy in respect to Afghanistan, with no more and no less of reason for the one course than for the other. The forest warfare of Germany was difficult, as we have said ; the woods, the brotis, the swampy ground, lay in wait for the legions and auxiliaries, as the Kyber or the Bolan lay in wait for our men. But I do not think it can be seriously maintained that in the one case or in the other there was anything like an insuperable difficulty in the way of conquest. It was not a reasonable, but far more a superstitious, fear which held back the Roman arms. Drusus seemed born to play the part of Clive to this unco, quered world. He made a fleet to sail upon the German Ocean,1 the first that ever dared its fitful tides. But, alas, this fleet was destroyed by the treacherous ebb and flood : Germanicus suffered a like misadventure. During the commands of Drusus and Tiberius in Germany the Roman ramparts extended some way beyond the Rhine. Aliso, a strong fort on the Lippe (near the modern Paderborn), seemed to cover all the country between the Rhine and the Ems. Drusus cut a canal, navigable by his fleet, from the former 1 ' Usque ad obis extremum,' Augustus says in his proclamation. Pliny says he went to the extremity of the Cimbric Chersonese H. N. ii. 67 ; but this is improbable ; cf. Bunbury, Anc. Geog. ii. 190. DRUSUS AND TIBERIUS IN GERMANY. 17 river, through Friesland, to the ocean. Tiberius crossed the Weser and advanced as far as the Elbe. But after the ' Great Defeat ' of Varus, Augustus undid their work and commanded the Rhine to flow as the boundary of the empire. It may have been a sound policy x or it may have been a political superstition that governed the emperor's decision in this case ; but it was not any pressing danger, nor even any insuperable difficulty in the way of a conquest of Germany. In the popular mind, for the common soldier or for the chance merchant adventuring into these territories, there would mingle, I doubt not, an element of superstition not political, connected with this land of enchantments. There the divine power dwelt unseen in the midst of awful groves ; the women of this race were wonderfully given to the study of magic and enchantments. Is it not rather strange that the only pure relics of heathen Germany which have come down to us are in the form of two incantations?2 As the camp story went, when Drusus had made his march over the Weser, and threatened the Elbe, one of these wise women, these Volvas, cast her spells upon him ; as a gigantic female figure — the figure of German/a personified — she appeared to him in a dream and warned him to turn back. He did so ; but still fate overtook him ; he had a fall from his horse and died within the year. And almost from that time forward the empire of Rome beyond the Rhine began to shrink. It reached the limits of its flood when Tiberius in his fleet sailed to the mouth of the Elbe and there joined hands with an army which had marched thither overland, and awed the Germans upon the other bank so that they dared not attack. 3 It then began to ebb. As Tacitus 1 Mommsen, Provinces of the Roman Empire, trans., i. 54. Cf. Tacitus, Annal. i. 11. 2 See Chapter XVI. ; and cf. Germ. 10. 3 Twenty years, A.U.C 742-762, we may reckon the duration of this extended Roman Empire in Northern Germany, of which Aliso was the capital. See Mommsen, Provinces, i. 367. 18 HEA THENDOM. writes : *The Elbe which formerly we knew, we now know by report only.' We have already seen how some four centuries later the flood of empire ebbed from Britain, and ghosts and the crea- tures of popular superstition came in to occupy its room. III. In the region beyond the Elbe, where the Romans never set foot, we might expect to lie the very strongholds of what I have called pre-Christian heathendom, the ancient beliefs of Germany which knew no touch of foreign in- fluence. There the great confederation of the Suevi stretched from the shores of the Baltic down almost to the border of the Roman provinces in Southern Germany. It is from among the Suevi of Northern Germany1 that come the few and slight pictures which Tacitus is able to draw for us of the religion of Germany in his day. Somewhere be- tween the Elbe and the Oder, in the territory of the Suevian Semnones — maybe on the site of the Spreewald, where there survives to-day a people who seem to belong to a bygone heathen past — stood that grove, the most sacred in all Germany, where it was believed that the great god of the Teutonic nations had been born. This great god is without question the Wuotan or Odin of later times, a divinity who, 1 The earliest distinction among the nationalities of Teutonic origin was probably between those of the Eastern Baltic and of the great sandy plain of North Germany and the Germans of the west— the Harz, the Thuringian, and Teutoberger Forests, &c. — who came into contact more or less with Rome. The Scandinavians, if we are to judge by early Runic inscriptions, were closely allied in language to the Germans of the Vistula (Goths). On the other hand, craniologically the Danes are very different from the Swedes and Norsemen. Judging by place-names we should say that the whole of Roman Germany v\as originally Celtic, and even a large part of Germany which was never Roman. Harz, for example, is probably a Celtic word. It is obvious, therefore, that the Suevic confederation comprehended many people not ethnologically very nearly allied. TACITUS ON THE RELIGION OF THE GERMANS. 19 whether or not he were the actual personification of the wind, had all the character of a god of tempests. To him alone among the German gods were human sacrifices offered. Tacitus tells us that they were offered in this grove. It was so holy a place that none might enter it but with a chain round his neck to show his subjection to the divinity. If a man fell down while in the wood he might not raise himself or be raised up again ; he must crawl out on hands and knees. Another picture still more impressive belongs to some of the Suevi farther to the north, whose territory lay upon the shore of the Baltic — very likely to the modern Mecklenburg and to the island of Rugen. This picture is of the worship of the chief female divinity, as the other of the chief male ; her name was Nerthus or Mother Earth. Her home was in an island of the Baltic by the side of a lake surrounded by a wood. Every year she was brought out of this secret place, ferried over to the mainland, and there in a car drawn by white oxen she made her progress through the territories of her worshippers. None saw her face ; her car was shrouded by rich tapestries, and none but her priest might approach it. The picture is almost like that of the Ark of the Lord when it was brought out to the armies of Israel.1 But there is this difference in the two pictures — that whereas the latter came forth as an ensign of war, Nerthus, wherever she travelled, was an emissary of peace. 1 Happy is the place, joyful the day which is honoured by the entertainment of such a guest. No wars can go on, no arms are borne, the sword rests in its scabbard. This peace and rest continue till the priest takes back the goddess, satiate of converse with mortals.' Yet even in this picture of primi- tive and simple rustic rites there lingered a something terrible. 1 It is also like that of the earperitum as used in the later ritual of Ancient Rome, but which had no place in 1 lie Dritnitive ritual. 20 HE A THENDOM. When the goddess returned to her island, the l chariot, the veil, and if you like to believe it, the goddess herself, are washed in a secret lake by slaves who immediately after are them- elves drowned therein. Hence comes a mysterious horror and a holy ignorance of what has taken place, for that is beheld only by men who are themselves immediately to perish.' * Of the northern parts of Germany, Tacitus can tell us little more than is contained in these two fragments of its creed. We have just the names of some of the people who dwelt east of the Suevi along the southern shore of the Baltic ; of these the Guttones, dwelling by the mouth of the Vistula, were, we may believe, the fathers of the famous Goths, and the most nearly allied of all the German nations to the Scandinavians of later history. In truth, along all this northern stretch of Germany, from the Weser to the Vistula, we should find in these early days the people who effected most towards the carving out of Mediaeval Europe from the remains of the Roman Empire; the Lombards between the Weser and the Elbe, the Saxons at the foot of the Cimbric Chersonese; the Angli north of them, in Jutland along with the Jutes; the Burgundians, not close to the Baltic shore, but in Poland, Prussian and Russian, east of the Vistula; and finally the Goths (we may believe) in East Prussia. The Franks alone among the greater Teuton races are wanting from this category. And the Franks, if they were really none other than the ancient Sigambri, belonged to a similar and neighbouring region, the flat country of the Lower Rhine. When we first catch sight of them they are settled in the island of Batavia, the low island at the mouth of the Rhine and Saal, whence their name Salic Franks.2 To Tacitus and the Romans 1 Tacitus, Germ. 40. 2 Those higher up the river, the Ripuarian or river-bank Franks, were in the ancient land of the Sigambri. Nevertheless the Franks are not ■ HERE NA TURE ENDS* 2 1 of his day these nations, all but the Sigambri, were little more than names. Some of them, he tells us, were conspicuous for their loyalty to their kings — the Western Germans being more independent and republican. Finally, we come to the Baltic itself, which the Romans heard of only as a part of the Northern Ocean. And beyond the Baltic Tacitus affords us one slight peep into the Scandinavian coun- tries— a mere glance, but one not wanting in impressiveness. On the other side of that sea, he says, lies the island of the Suiones, a land rich in arms and ships and men ; and beyond the Suiones' land another sea, ' sluggish and almost stagnant, which we may believe girdles and encloses the whole world. For here the light of the setting sun lingers on till sunrise bright enough to dim the light of the stars. More than that, it is asserted that the sound of his rising is to be heard, and the forms of the gods and the glory round his head may be seen. Only thus far, and here rumour seems truth, does the world extend.'' The Cimbric Chersonese (Denmark), moreover, the Latin writers frequently confounded with the Homeric land of the Cimmerians at the edge of the world. Here, then, we come to the true counterparts of the lands upon the other side of the North Sea, which were the end of all land and of all liberty And if the importance of these distant territories was small in the eyes of the Romans, we must own that to the imagination of those days an interest attached to them which it is no longer possible for us to attribute to any country. It is impossible for us to read without a strange emotion the passages which speak of lands like these supposed to lie upon the very borders to be classed with the Low German stock which is the most closely allied to the Gothic, nor yet with the true High German Alamanni and Bavarians, but with Thuringians (\leimu.n-di/ri) as Middle German. 22 HEATHENDOM. of the earth. Illic usque tantum Natura (' Here nature ends '). It is a tremendous phrase. The Scandinavian ' island ' which the ancients knew, and which they called sometimes Scanzia, sometimes Scandia J or Scania, sometimes Scandinavia, did not signify the whole of the Scandinavian peninsula, but probably only that lower bulge of Sweden, part of which still bears one of these names, Scania, Skane ; while another name has been extended to include a vast stretch of territory, of whose existence the Romans had no idea. This original Scandinavia (Skane, Halland, Smaland), with Jutland and the Danish islands, belongs to the low-lying deeply-wooded region of the Baltic shores far more than to upland Sweden and Norway, the lands farther to the north, which fall away from the great backbone of Scandinavia. The traveller of to-day, who passes along the well-known canal route from Gotenborg to Stockholm — the most familiar of northern highways — passes not far from the dividing line, between the Baltic Lowlands and Scandinavia Proper. Geolo- gically speaking, it is but a day or two since all was dry land, where now lies the bed of the Baltic;2 only since the territory which should unite the Baltic shores sank beneath the waves, the forests of pine and birch have, over a great part of the remaining dry land, given place to forests of hard-wood trees, (hiefly beech. A poet, a Hans Andersen, might speak of the buried lands still weeping to rejoin their brethren who feel the 1 Ptolemy has four islands of Scandia, one large and three very small — the Danish islands, or possibly Sweden, Bornholm, Oland, and Gottland, if we suppose the region approached from the Vistula. 2 In Skane the fossil remains of many animals are found, which must have migrated thither from the south, and therefore over what is now the bed of the Baltic. Skane was, in the Stone and Bronze Ages, much more thickly inhabited than any other part of Scandinavia, while the country north of the Dai-Elf was almost uninhabited. THE BALTIC. 23 upper air, and sending up through the water golden tears, that amber, namely, which is such a noted product of the Baltic, and has brought it so large a share of whatever wealth it at any time has gained. Amber and furs were the staple of such trade as existed between the Baltic lands and Rome. The Swedes are described by a writer of late Roman days as great hunters of the animals valued for their fur, 'whose skins,' says our author, ' find their way through countless hands to Rome.' It is said that a certain knight of Nero's day was the first Roman wrho ever looked upon the Baltic. He was a civil, peaceable knight, engaged in the amber trade.1 But we ought not to omit to say that, according to one theory, there was in much earlier times a Greek trade to the Baltic lands, travelling by a more easterly route. This, mounting the Borysthenes (Dnie- per), might navigate to no great distance from the sources either of the Dwina or the Vistula, and then descending these streams, might debouch into the Baltic. We are not without evidence in support of this theory ; and it is quite possible that to this early Greek trade, rather than to the Roman, the Baltic nations were indebted for the most priceless of all gifts, the gift of letters.2 IV. Out of the vast ocean which covers three quarters of our 1 Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxxvii. 11. Cf. Bunbury, Anc. Geog. i. 595. Ukert Geog. der. G. u. R. I. ii. 307, III. i. 89, ii. 5. On the traces of a trade route down the Vistula to the Baltic, and hence to Sweden, especially to islands of Gottland and Oland, see O. Montelius, Civilization of Sweden in Heathen Times (tr. of Sue riges Tom t id), pp. 98, 99. 2 Taylor, hist, of Alphabet and Greeks and Goths ; on the other side see L. Wimmer in Aarbog- for Nordisk Oldkyndighedy 1874. Miillenhoff [Deutsche Alterthumskunde, i. 213-217), says that the Greeks certainly did not get their amber from this sea. (It is well known there are, further, some difficulties attaching to the translation of the word i'lXtKrpov, at any rate before the time of Plato.) 24 HEATHENDOM. globe there are three portions connected in a special degree with the history of the world. The first is the Mediterranean, on which the light of history first shines, and round which almost all the peoples of the ancient world were grouped — Egyptians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians. Very striking is it to see the dawn of history breaking over that sea, in Egypt first, then over the Eastern shores, passing westward to Greece and Italy and the Mediterranean coasts of Gaul, and on to Spain. The third of these ocean regions is the Atlantic, which, as we know, through the lands to which it leads the way, has redressed the balance of the Old World. But the middle region is certainly the Baltic, which is a sort of anti- thesis of the Mediterranean. The western portion of the Baltic, dotted over with its countless isles, which seem to invite men to the art of seafaring, is as a Northern ^Egean or ant- yEgean : x for as the ^Egean was the first sea in which true history begins, so the Baltic is the last almost of European seas to which that light has reached. We, Angles and Saxons, and even the Lombards and Burgundians, may look upon ourselves as belonging to this Baltic region, as well as the Goths, and the Scandinavian nations proper. For there is no natural boundary separating the different peoples of the great northern plain. Not so the Hoch Deutsch people who were so long in contact with Roman civilization, and have in their veins so large an infusion of Roman blood, whose country, too, is utterly different in character from the sandy plain of the north.2 1 Compare Munch's remarks on the Aitstrvegr in Not she 7-ks. Hist. i. 286. 2 Many changes of population (and still more of the names of the popu- lation) took place between the Roman possession of Rhsetia and Noricum and the tithe lands, and the re-appearance of these districts after the Frankish conquests as the lands of the Alamanni and Bajuvarians (Baioarians, Bava- rians). We may, however, consider these true Hoch Deutsch peoples as more deeply affected by contact with Rome than any other part of the Ger- man race. The history of these peoples is almost a blank between the THE SCANDINAVIAN COUNTRIES. 25 We imagine the Scandinavian lands proper as desolate beyond almost all other lands of Europe in this remote past. And yet Tacitus speaks of them as rich in arms and ships and men. With regard to the ships there is no doubt he is right. There must have existed in the Baltic countries from most antique days, certainly for as much as five hundred years before Tacitus's day an art of ship-building. For on certain stone carvings — hallristingar, hill-carvings, as they are called — found in Sweden and in Denmark, we have pictures of ships; and the pictures here presented must date from at least half a millenium before Tacitus wrote.1 The boats there shown, as far as we can judge of them, nearly answer to the descriptions by Tacitus of the boats in use on the Baltic in his day ; and curiously enough they correspond very closely to the build of boats in use among the Vikings many centuries later. Only that Tacitus tells us one fact, which distinguishes in a marked degree the Scandinavian ships of his age from the Viking ships — namely, that they had no sails. Of the Viking ships we will speak again at the proper place. That the Baltic countries were once rich in arms we might judge from the remains of the Bronze Age in these countries. For in no other part of Europe do we find such beautiful bronze weapons as in Denmark and South Sweden — unless it be in those prehistoric cities and treasure-houses of the Greek race, which recent excavations have brought to light — the ex- cavations at Ilium, I mean, or Tiryns.2 In these two particulars, therefore, Tacitus's almost solitary time of their incorporation or semi-incorporation into the Frankish kingdom at the end of the fifth century, and of the labours among them of Boniface, at the beginning of the eighth century. 1 Montelius, Civilization of Sweden (Wood), pp. 73-5. 2 The likeness between the Scandinavian bronzes and these pre-Hellenic ones has been noticed. It is difficult to say what conclusions, if any, are to be drawn from this fact, cf. Aarbog for Nordisk OZdkyndighed, 1882, p. 279 sqq. (S. Miiller). 26 HEATHENDOM. item of information about the Scandinavian lands seems con- firmed. The third statement, that they were rich in men, is the hardest to give credence to. Yet one fact, at any rate, may be alleged in support of it : among those powerful German nation- alities which became the overthrowers of the Roman Empire, the greater number kept the tradition of a migration by their forefathers from the Scandinavian peninsula to the mainland of Europe. The Goths had this belief. We know how they and the Gepidse were supposed to have come over in three keels (Ostrogoths, Visigoths, and Gepidae), to the mouth of the Vistula — those three keels which unfortunately figure in many a Teutonic migration myth, our own among the number. The Lombards, too, believed that they had come from Scandinavia.1 Jordanes had the same belief as Tacitus about the prolificness of the Scandinavian land. He calls it (the ' island ' of Scanzia) ' the workshop of races,' ojjicina gentium sive vagina nationum. All this points to a common belief in the teeming soil of Scan- dinavia, which Tacitus only retails. That the belief was founded on fact I do not mean to main- tain.2 It may have had its rise in mythology. There may have been some peculiar sacredness attaching to the Scandi- navian 'island,' or some special myth connected with it, which made it the origin of the first human pair, in the same sense that that sacred grove of the Semnones was the birthplace of Wuotan. Old Teutonic belief related how three of the great gods, walking through the world, had found two trees or two 1 These names do not nearly exhaust the list of Teutonic nationalities, whose traditions pointed to a Scandinavian origin. Penka {Hei'kutift der Arier, p. 142) gives an exhaustive list of them. It includes the names of the Goths, Gepidse, Heruli, Lombards, Angli and Saxones, Franks, Burgundians, Vandals, &c. Some nations, e.g., the Cimbri and Teutones, can only be traced as far back as to the Cimbric Chersonese. The Danes, on their side, probably migrated to Denmark from the south of Sweden. a See below, p. 30, note 2. SCEAF. 27 logs of wood, ash and elm, and out of these had created the first human pair.1 If that was supposed to have happened in Scanzia, this myth would be enough to make Scanzia the officina gentium of later tradition, and enough to hand on to Tacitus a history of the number of nations who had proceeded thence. For I think that the traditions just related of the origins of the Goths and the Lombards, and so forth, instead of precisely confirming Tacitus' statement, only account for it. At the head, or near the head, of many Teutonic genealogies we find the name of a mythic being called Sceaf,2 Skef — which is Sheaf. And the fragments of myth obtainable about Sceaf show him to have been a half-divine being, a demi-god or lesser god, to whom was entrusted a mission not unlike the mission given to Triptolemus by Demeter, the duty of scattering abroad among mankind the seeds of a higher culture. In the myth of Sceaf a ship takes the place of the serpent-chariot of Triptolemus. At the dawn of the world's history this divine child was wafted in a boat to the coast of Scandinavia or Denmark. He was found sleeping with his head upon a sheaf (whence his name, say the myths, speaking obviously in a late Euhemeristic fashion), and the boat, too, was full of weapons till then un- known to mankind. According to a recent writer on Teutonic mythology, this Sceaf is identical with a certain Norse god, Heimdal, who was himself one of the creators of the human race. 3 This last identification is of secondary importance here. Sceaf lived to be a very old man, and reigned peaceably in the land of his adoption. Under him mankind entered upon a 1 Voluspd, 17, 18 {Corp. Poet. Boreale). 8 Sax. Chr. s.a. 855. Three MSS. make Sceaf the ancestor of the West Saxon kings. MS. A has Sceldwa ( = Danish, Skyld). Beowulf makes the miraculous child, Scyld, son of Sceaf. 3 Rydberg, Tent. Myth. 87-9, 90-3. &c I have not space, unfortu- nately, even in an appendix, to follow out the ramifications of the Skef- Skyld myths and genealogies. 28 HE A THBNDOM. new and higher life. When very old he was carried down and placed once more in the boat which had borne him to those shores, ' by no less gifts accompanied than when a child he had come thither,' men knew not whence. This is what our poem Beowulf tells us of his end.1 I trust I shall not be accused of extravagance if I surmise in this history of Sceaf some reminiscence of a culture brought to the Baltic from Greece or from Rome in prehistoric ages. It may be that some new kind of corn was introduced into the north then; it is far from improbable that the ships which made their way down the Vistula to the Baltic were the first ships — as distinguished from rude canoes — which ever plied in that sea. And the unmistakable resemblance between some of the prehistoric bronze weapons of Greece and the Bronze Age weapons of Scandinavia might suggest that these weapons were those on which the Sheaf was sleeping when he came to the far north.2 Or, to put the matter more plainly, suppose Greek wanderers to have come northward to see what they could pick up in the way of trade. Suppose them to have brought with them a sheaf or sheaves of corn never seen in those parts before, and alon<* with them weapons of new kinds ; how easily might this history turn into the legend of the mysterious being Sceaf carried in a boat, sleeping upon his arms. I do not mean that the Triptolemus myth was necessarily carried north. In fact, I scarcely think that that could have been the case. For how would the dragon-drawn chariot have been converted into a ship ? Yet even this is possible ; it is just possible that the Dragon-ship had its origin in the ship of Sceaf. The boats of the hallristningar are shaped like the Viking ships. They have the same long curved stems and 1 I.e., of Scyld's end. See previous note. 2 See, however, above p. 25, note 2. SCEAF. 29 stern-posts which seemed to invite the boat builders of the Viking days to carve them into the likeness ot a dragon or worm.x This, I know, is mere speculation. What remains is this myth of Sceaf — the boat-borne, the father of men (Heimdal?), or at the least the father of a new civilization. His myth, his worship, if he ever were actually a god, cannot be unconnected with the worship of the Demeter of the North, the Earth Mother who was brought from some island of the Baltic to be borne around among her worshippers in Germany. And there is, I think, enough in this myth — taken in connection with Tacitus's account of Nerthus — to explain the belief current among so many of the great Teutonic nations that they had sprung from Scandinavia.2 This belief, whatever its origin, gives, it will be acknowledged a special interest to the Scandinavian countries, even from the days when we first catch sight of them. Long before their inhabitants actually come into the field as the last champions of heathendom, they stand at the background of the nearer Teutons ; a dark and mysterious background, giving, if I may say so, a sort of religious sanction to their existence. The Teutons did not really all spring from Scandinavia. But they thought they had done so ; they thought they had come from 1 The word Draki (Dragon) our drake in 'fire-drake' was especially used in the north in connection with ships (see Vigfusson's Diet. s.v. Draki). It is extremely antique in spite of its undoubted foreign origin from draco or Spdyjvv. The hallristningar ships are, moreover, even more like Greek or Roman galleys than the later ships of which remains are found in Scandinavia. They are, many of them, for instance, furnished with rams. 2 I will remark further that there appears, generally, to have been something sacred about an island in the eyes of the Scandinavians : that peace-steads were frequently made on islands ; that the sacred character of the island was the origin of the holm-gang, and of the exceptionally numerous treasures found upon some of the Scandinavian islands, e.g., on Bornholm, Oland, and Gottland. 3o HE A THENDOM. the borders of that sluggish sea which girdled and enclosed the whole earth. In some way that we cannot quite understand this belief was founded upon their religious creed. Once more, considering the matter in another light, we may divide the German races into four divisions. We begin with those people of the south and the people west of the Rhine who were absorbed into the Roman Empire, or came into peaceable contact with it and accepted much of its civilization. We come next to the people east of the Rhine, the nations of the Taunus, of the Teutoberger Wald and the Harz, who resisted the advance of the Roman arms and robbed Rome of her conquests.1 Then we come to the people of the vast sandy plains south of the Baltic, who, next after the Franks, were foremost in the great era of invasion, when Germany was aggressive and no longer on the defensive merely. Finally, we reach the Scandinavian lands from which came the second great army of conquest by heathendom over Christendom. All four sections were of essentially the same race; indeed that division of speech out of which the present various branches of the Teutonic family are formed (the Lautverschie- bung as the grammarians call it) only began to take place about the Christian era. We cannot doubt that the funda- mental creed of all these people was likewise essentially the same for all. What was this fundamental creed or, at any rate, what the distinctive features of it? is a question which interests us particularly. For the battle between Heathendom and Christendom was waged in all wrays and with all manner of weapons, material and spiritual.2 1 These would be chiefly the ancestors, at any rate the forerunners, of the Thuringians, the Franks, and the Hessians (Chatti). The last were included in the Frankish nationality. 2 In regard to the supposed Scandinavian origin of the Teutonic nations, to which reference has been made above, we ought not to leave out of account the new theory of Aryan origins which has been developed with SCANDINAVIAN ORIGINS. 31 much learning and ingenuity by Dr. Poesche, and by Dr. K. Penka in his two books, Origines Ariacce, and Die herkunft der Arier (1886). (Though one title reads like a translation of the other, they are two separate works.) According to this theory, not the German races alone, but the whole Aryan stock has had its origin on the Scandinavian peninsula. It is impossible here to discuss that theory at length, or even to explain its provisions. It is not quite correct to say that Dr. Penka supposes the whole Aryan stock to have migrated from the extreme north. The Indo-European race itself, he supposes to be a mixed one, half Scandinavian and dolichocephalous, half Turanian and brachycephalous, whose amalgamation dates from very remote prehistoric times ; but he suggests that the language of the Aryans originally belonged to the dolichocephalous fair race of the Scandinavian peninsula. The race is supposed to have come into existence under sub- glacial conditions, to which its fair type is due, and at the termination of the glacial era to have migrated northward, in order to keep to a climate more congenial to its physique. In Scandinavia alone, it is said, have we, in the kitchen-middens, human remains which bridge over the gap between the palaeolithic and neolithic eras. The theory is ingenious ; 1 do not profess to be able to gauge its probability. But there are very obvious difficulties in the way of its acceptance ; and among those who are not specialists or who do not (as Mr. Freeman has happily said) think it is the height of learning to accept the last new German book, it will probably wait some time for acceptance. It is scarcely, I presume, necessary to point out to the reader that this theory has, no more than any of the observations made on p. 21, above, concerning the essential unity of the nationalities of the Baltic shores and of the northern plains of Germany, nothing to do with the theories put forward in Mr. Du Chaillu's recent work, and implied in the title: The Viking Age ; the Early History, Manners, and Customs of the Ancestors of the English-speaking Nations. CHAPTER II. THE CREED OF HEA THEN GERMANY. I. Christianity passed through three stages on her road to the conquest of Europe. From being an offshoot of Judaism, she became the religion of the ' Gentiles,' that is to say, of the peoples formed mainly by Grseco-Roman culture : then she extended her empire over the heathens. The second stage alone of these three is clearly illuminated for us. Of the Christian community — Christian Church if you like to call it so — while it was still Judaic under the presidency of Peter and James, of its quarrels with Pauline Christianity, we get a hint only, no clear idea. But of the acts of Paul and his writings, of the acts and writings of the succeeding ' fathers,', all drawn from the Graeco-Roman world, we have abundant remains. On entering the third stage darkness again falls round us. We have in reality but a very slight and fragmentary history of the contests between Christianity and heathenism, of the failures and successes of the forgotten army of missionaries who went out to convert the Teutonic races. And we are without that which alone could give full meaning to such accounts as we possess, a picture of the creed on which Christianity made war. STRA Y GLIMPSES OF ANCIENT BELIEFS. 33 Were it only possible to recover in their entirety the beliefs of our heathen forefathers ! But this is for ever impossible. We must content ourselves with stray glimpses of it ; some (very slight ones) in the pages of classical writers ; some others recovered from the recorded creed of one branch of the Teutonic nation in a later age. This creed, though it is so much later in date, must preserve some elements of great antiquity. In addition we know, and it is a great thing to know, the character of the land in which the ancient Germans lived ; and we know something of the life they lived there in ancient days, before the spirit of movement had begun to breathe through all the German races, and to inaugurate that epoch of Wandering which preluded the fall of Rome. At the present day if we wish to find a country, a dis- trict, wrapped round in a garment of myth ; if we wish to see landscapes, churches, old manor-houses, an ancient tree, a solitary mere, touched and gilded by that Aberglaube which is, as Goethe says, the poetry of life, we shall not turn to the busy changing inhabitants of the neighbouring town, who have heard and forgotten a hundred tales of wonder; but to the people of the nearest villages, who have lived in them from father to son, who have treasured up with much slower apprehension, but far more faithful memories, the mythology of the place, until it has grown into their lives and formed — eine Kette Der tiefsten Wirkung. For a like reason it cannot have been in the power either of the Germans of the early Wanderings, or of those northern pirates, part of whose history is our special concern here, to have invented the essential beliefs of Teutonism. They were, in truth, things incapable of invention by any one, as we 4 34 CREED OF HEATHEN GERMANY, understand that word ; but beliefs which grew up by a natural process out of the ancestral life of the Teutons and all its surroundings. However much the stand-point of those who looked from outside into the heathen lands may have differed from the stand-point of the inhabitants, the character of the countries themselves remained the same for both. It was accident and the popular superstition of the Gauls which converted Cale- donia into a land of ghosts. But for all that Caledonia was then what it still is, stern and wild, girt by the melancholy ocean, and for all that men could know in those days, at the outer extremity of the whole world. So with Germany — or the Germanies, including the Scandinavian lands — Tacitus's description, ' dank and gloomy,' applied to them all. His picture of the Germans dwelling apart 'by stream, or grove, or plot of open ground,' might serve best for the Germans near the Rhine or in the broken country eastward as far as the Thuringian forest and the Harz. But the vast unfruitful plains of North Germany compelled men to live apart for the sake of sustenance. There was less of choice here, but more of necessity. All these lands must have been densely wooded. The entire country known to the Romans certainly was so. In the centre and south lay the boundless Hercynian forest, which stretched beyond the regions where even stray merchants and travellers had penetrated. It threw out a wing northward to include the Teutoberger forest, Varus's fatal wood, the Thuringian forest, and the Cheruscan Harz {Mons Melibcecus), a wing south- west to take in the present Black Forest, the Silva Marciana of Roman days. Without doubt the plains immediately to the south of the Baltic were not less thickly overshadowed by primeval woods. The Cimbric Chersonese was densely covered. Centuries later the coasts alone of the Scandinavian PHYSICAL FEATURES. 35 countries were inhabited or tilled. Munch x draws a fine pic- ture of the Scandinavian peninsula in prehistoric days, sub- merged under its thick black forests as under some huge black sea, out of which the bare hill-tops rose like islands, and on these hill-tops the nomadic Finns, or Lapps, the only inhabitants of the interior in those times, pastured, as the Lapps of the north do to-day, their cattle and reindeer. Such is his picture, needing modification, perhaps, in the last touch,2 but none in its essential features. The early Norse sagas tell us of this or that hero who penetrated into the peninsula and created for himself, as it were, a new country, a new world, by felling a clearing in the primeval forest. Such an one was Anleifr Tretelgja, Olaf Tree-feller, who is spoken of in the y?iglinga.^ He is half mythical; but he or his antitype must have lived ages after Tacitus wrote what he wrote of the forests of Germany. We know, too, something of the way of life among these ancient Germans. They lived apart; but yet their scattered houses formed a group which we in these days should call a village. Yet we must not picture to ourselves the English village, with its two rows of houses close side by side and ' dressed,' like two ranks of soldiers facing inwards, on the long village street. Even to-day in Germany you may find an arrangement far more primitive than this — houses scattered in so far that they face all ways, and the high-road loses itself among the multiplicity of paths between them.* In Sweden and Norway, 1 Det Norske Folks Historie, beginning. 2 It seems pretty certain that the Finns and Lapps have not reached Scandinavia by migrating northwards as was once supposed, but from the north. That they ever reached further than half way down the Scandinavian peninsula is not proved. 3 Ynglinga Saga 46 (Heimskr.). The Danes in England, we know, earned the name of ' tree-fellers.' 4 Villages of this description are specially characteristic of the Rhine country. See R, Ilennmg, Das Deutsche Hates, p. 22. 36 CREED OF HEATHEN GERMANY. wherever there is room enough, we see something resembling much more the primitive village of the Teutons, houses dotted about far apart over a considerable plain. To-day this area is generally a clearing. But forest villages are still to be found. In these one house can often see none of its neighbours ; each one has its own small patch of cultivated ground. Among the various households of the village the land was distributed in such a manner that we may divide its portions into three — the allotment, the farm, and the common. Some people will have it that the principles of land tenure too resolved themselves into three — private, communal, and common : meaning by communal land that held by the com- munity as a whole, and not in private ownership, and redis- tributed each year, or at stated times, by authority of the village council — council of eldermen, aldermen, or whatever it might be called. This theory of the farm land held as communal land is at the least doubtful.1 But what is not doubtful is that beside the private allotment belonging to each house or house- hold, beside the portion of farm -land which was held by each household but not held under quite so ' good ' a title, there was the large district of common, or rough pasture, as it was some- times called, in which no individual rights existed. In countries where the squirrel could travel for leagues without touching the ground, the common of the village must have been merely that portion of the forest over which the community claimed as a body settlers' rights. The nearer portions of the forest were no doubt used by the villagers for feeding their cattle and swine. But there was beyond them a more desolate tract which served to separate the village from its neighhours.2 And when a number 1 I have not attempted to enter the thorny path of controversy on the subject of the so-called 'Village Community.' I have merely followed Waitz. Verfassungsgesch. i. 93 sqq. 2 This came to be the true ' forest ' of feudal times. THE VILLAGE AND THE GAU. 37 of villages were inhabited by members of the same tribe, a whole group of them, forming what the Latin writers called a pagus, and the Germans themselves called a Gau, was divided from the neighbouring Gau by a still wider and more impene- trable belt of forest. For the Gau was the tribe, the embryo state ; and Caesar tells us that it was a point of honour with each German state to have as wide a tract of uncultivated land as possible between itself and its next neighbours.1 This surrounding belt of wood, this gloomy and waste region, in the near part of which the ancient German villagers tethered their cattle or herded their pigs, and in the farther recesses hunted wild game, had a special name in the social economy of the Teutons. It was called the Mark. As each village had its own mark, so had, in a wider sense, each country or nation. When the tiny embryos of commonwealths, the Gaus expanded into states, the marks, too, grew in importance, and became great territorial divisions, till out of them new countries were in their turn made ; such was our Mercia (Myrcna) ; such the marches between England and Wales; Denmaik, the Danes' mark (the south of Jutland originally) ; La Marque, which afterwards separated that country from Germany and the Low Countries ; the Wendish Mark or Mark of Brandenburg, which divided Germany from the Slavonic lands. The guardians of the mark were turned into marquises, marchios, markgrafs. At the beginning these guardians were only the chief warriors of the tribe; they had often (we may believe) their home in the waste, and stood there as watchmen between the village and the rest of the world, so that none might come to the village if they came to do it harm. These were par excellence the warriors of the tribe, and in some degree they constituted a class apart. But let us remember that the word Mark, which we think of * B. G. iv. 3. 38 CREED OF HEATHEN GERMANY. as the boundary between two possibly hostile states, has ety- mologically, and therefore had originally, no other meaning than forest* We can best understand the incidents of warfare waged by more civilized peoples against the Germans of Germany, the incidents of the campaigns of Drusus and Tiberius, of Marcus Aurelius, of Gratian or Julian, or, again, of Charlemagne's campaigns against the Saxons, if we remember that there must have been a distinction between the ordinary villagers, the more peaceful folk who cultivated the clearings near at hand, and the men of the mark, the warriors who dwelt in the sur- rounding forest, who when they were not engaged in war were probably hunters merely. There would be a certain lurking suspicion or latent antagonism between the village householder and the mark warrior, analogous to the antagonism which existed between the Franklin and the Thane at a later day. No doubt from the markmen came the band of Gesellen — Comites the Latin writers call them — who attached themselves to the person of the king or general, and shared his fortunes. If the leader should desire to reward these followers of his by any grant of land (though such reward was exceptional 2), that gift must have come from the surrounding forest ; it could not be carved out of the village community itself. 3 Thus might arise a certain aloofness from civil village life on the part of the Gesellen, the prototypes of the Thanes. They were, it may be, to a great extent unmarried men ; they had given few pledges to fortune; they had not (generally) acres to be trampled 1 So Grimm, Deutsche Mythol. 4th ed.,p. 56. Fick is not so clear, Verg. Wbch. ii. 434. The use of the word mark to signify a village community has no authority in its favour. 2 The Comites, we know, ate at their leader's table, and for pay they got arms or ornaments — personalty — things for personal wear or use. 3 On the king's rights in this uncultivated territory, and afterwards in the mark of any new territory see Waitz, Verfassungsg. iv. 116. THE MARK. 39 upon, fruit-trees to be cut down, graneries to be burned. The villagers might, if they chose, give in to the conqueror. But the prince and his comrades had escaped, had hidden them- selves in deep woods and morasses, and would return and ravage the enemies' country again next year. This is the history of most of the operations against the Germans, notably of those of Charles the Great against the Saxons and against Widukind. The mark or forest which formed a sort of neutral territory between two villages or two Gaue would serve as the meeting- point between them ; for the same reason that during the Middle Ages meetings of rival powers were constantly held upon an island or on a boat in the middle of a stream, as in the case of the island at Runnymead for one example, or, for another, that earliest of treaties made between Romans and Teutons, the treaty signed by Athanaric the Visigoth and the Emperor Valens, where the contracting parties met in a boat upon the Danube ; x or again on the same principle whereby a duel between Norsemen always took place upon an island, a fact which earned for the duel the name of holmgang. What an island was in the midst of a boundary river, such would an open glade be in the midst of the boundary mark. At the meetings which took place therein no doubt the sanctions of religion were called into request, and the glade in the forest, or the grove close beside it, a place not often visited, came to be a sacred place. II. The Germans are described as building no fanes, making no images for worship, but in their forest recesses calling upon the Unseen Presence {secretum Mud), which they honoured 1 Ammian. Marc, xxvii. 5, 9. 40 CREED OF HEATHEN GERMANY. by the name of various gods (or by various names).1 The word for grove is in many Teutonic languages a convertible word with te?nple : 2 this fact proves, better than a thousand examples, how entirely the religion of the Germans was bound up with their forest life. Grimm says : c Individual gods may have had their dwellings on mountain-tops or in rocky caverns, but the universal worship of the people found its home in the grove.' From a writer of the eleventh century we have a precious fragment of ancient belief — the description of a sacred grove in Sweden while Sweden was still heathen. This grove was at the most sacred spot in all the Scandinavian peninsula, Upsala, which has inherited (one might say) its bishopric and univer- sity of to-day from the sacred grove of heathendom. * Every ninth year,' says our authority (Adam of Bremen), ' a festival is celebrated at this place by all the provinces of Sweden ; and from taking some part in it none is exempt. King and people alike must send gifts ; and even those who have embraced Christianity are not allowed to buy themselves free from attendance. The manner of the sacrifice is this : nine of each kind of living tiling is offered, and by their blood the gods are wont to be appeased. The bodies are hung in the grove which surrounds the temple.' So that the Swedes did build temples at this date. But our author tells us further : ' The grove itself is thought so sacred that single trees in it are accounted a kind of gods, to the extent of receiving sacrifices of victims. There hang the bodies of dogs and men alike to the number, as some Christians have assured me, of seventy-two 3 together.' * ' Germania, c. 9. 3 Grimm, Deutsche Mythol., 4th ed., p. 54 ; Nachtrag, p. 32. * I.e., nine times eight. 4 M. Adami Descript. insular, aquil. 27 (Pertz, vii. 380). SACRED TREES, 41 The last item in this picture seems to glance back to a very primitive worship, not so much a cultus of the secret presence in the grove, rather to a mere fetich-worship of individual trees ; and no doubt this element did mingle with a higher and more imaginative faith. Further relics of this primitive fetich-worship, so to call it, are to be found in the records, which are numerous enough, of sacred trees, sacred oaks especially, among the heathen Teutons, as among the Cells. The few details which have come down to us of Christian missionary labours among the heathen Germans speak often of the felling by the Christians of these trees ; sometimes a church was erected upon their site. The most typical of these instances, the felling of the so-called Jupiter's Oak (Thor's Oak) at Gaesmera (Geismar in Hesse), we shall speak of again in the next chapter. There were in addition the sacred trees — for they must have been sacred — under which the German people met to hold council. Each village had once its own sacred tree, the prototype of the May-pole — in some degree the prototype too of our Christmas-trees. May-poles are practically ex- tinct with us ; nowhere, I believe, are they fixtures now as was * the May-pole in the Strand ' a century ago. But in very many villages in Germany they are fixtures; nay, in many cases they are growing trees, tall pines which have been stripped of all their lower branches. The sacred village tree would be the place of assemblage of the village council. I imagine it standing a little way apart from any of the houses ; for it had another duty to perform. It was the tree of judgment. Victims, including human ones, as we have seen, would be required for offerings to the tree-fetich. x For 1 c Stato tempore in silvam . . . coetmt, ccesoque publice homine . . .' (Tacitus, I.e. 39). These remarks assume the existence of a village council. There is for times near to the historical no trace of village councils exercising 42 CREED OF HEATHEN GERMANY. the human victims captives of war would serve in an age which had grown too merciful for the sacrifice of its own tribesmen ; or, failing prisoners of war, there would be criminals ; those, for example, who had been traitors to their own tribe or had deserted to the enemy— proditores et transfoigce x — those who had made themselves outlaws, and so no longer members of the community, would be the natural and appropriate victims. And they are they to whom the Teutons decreed the punishment of hanging. Varg-tre (Wolf-tree) — that is to say, outlaws-tree — is one of the most usual names for gallows in the Old Norse poetry. Now, let us remember what Tacitus tells us, namely, that to the chief god of the Germans, to Wodin alone, were human sacrifices offered,2 and we see that the gallows-tree, which was likewise the sacred tree of the village, must have been dedicated specially to Wodin (Wuotan). To the lower minds, then, and in earlier days, the sacred tree was the village fetich ; but to the higher minds or at a later time it was merely Wodin's tree, the symbol of the unseen supreme god. This is, I imagine, why in the Eddie mythology the gallows- tree is called Ygg's-horse — Wodin's horse (Yggdrasil); and why this same Yggdrasil is the sacred tree of the whole world, which, of course, means no more than that a picture drawn from the single village or tribe-stead has been expanded to serve for the whole world, a macrocosmos created out of a microcosmos. I dare say that the importance of this world- tree is heightened in the Eddas through the influence of the judicial functions which would be necessary to provide victims for the fetich-tree (Waitz, I.e.). I do not mean, therefore, that at any time proximate to an historical era such sacrifice of human victims to the sacred tree took place in each village. But it began in single villages, only later was confined to groves particularly sacred. Compare Lat. tribiis. Germ. Dor/. x Germania, 12. 3 Ibid., 9. MEIDHR. 43 Christianity and Christian mythology, whereby the cross be- comes the tree of life. But 1 doubt if there is here anything more than the emphasizing of a myth already ancient and in itself perfectly natural. If a sacred tree decayed or lost its branches, it need not lose its holiness, and there would in this fashion arise a number of very antique tree-stumps or tree-trunks, bare of leaves and branches, which were still a sort of fetich to the people, which were primevally old, and stood in the midst of venerable groves. They would become mere poles or columns, like the dead May-poles of to-day. Such was, I have little doubt, the Irminsul, Ermine-Saule (Pillar of the Hermiones), which Charlemagne captured and cut down. There is a word used in the Eddas, meiftr ( Vinga-meitSi a, * on the gallows wood ' ), which seems especially to designate this wood when it has become dead. But from the passage in which this word occurs we gather that the dead wood retained a peculiar sanctity.1 III. We have now, I think, got together the materials to form some picture of the familiar life of the ancient German in days when he was still attached to his ancestral home, before the stir and excitement, the Sturm und Drang of the Wandering Age had begun. We see men living beneath or hard by the gloom of a primeval forest, subject to those uncertain visions of light and shade which belong thereto, to its thousand echoes — from the fall of rushing waters, the cries of animals, the crash of stems or branches in the hollow distance, the sobbing of the wind, or the roar of the storm coming from afar. We see the village houses standing apart, gleaming white from among the trees,2 and still farther apart, 1 See below, p. 52- 2 Being frequently of white- washed clay. 44 CREED OF HEATHEN GERMANY. and deeper in the forest, the houses reserved for the march- men, the guardians of the waste. We see the elders of the village withdrawing on one side to sit under some sacred tree or near some holy grove. Thither each member ,of the com- munity brings at stated times his offering — A savage place, as holy and enchanted as could make it long ages of past worship, and dreadful sacrifices witnessed from then to now, and preserved in memory by the skeletons of the victims hanging in the grove, whitening its darkness. When Germanicus made his attack upon the Chatti in the Teutoberger Wald, and by a victory wiped out the shame of the defeat of Varus, he found the skulls of the Roman victims fixed to the trees, and the Roman eagles which Arminius had suspended in the groves to the gods of his fathers.1 We read not seldom in mediaeval romance of some cruel and beautiful maiden — a Melusina or some other — whose lovers had to pay with their lives the penalty of trying to win her. Sometimes the court round her castle is filled with their bleaching bones.2 The story itself is as old as the world almost. But this particular form of it reproduces the picture of the dreadful grove of the Teutons, and the maiden of the myth is not unconnected, I deem, with the priestesses of Wodin. We shall see so much hereafter. We have only to widen the picture which we have drawn of the ancient Teuton village, leaving out some lesser details, to get a notion of the whole state and its creed, its ' cosmological conception/ as it is called in philosophy, and its conception of the supernatural environment of life. In the place of the 1 Tacitus, Ann., i. 59; cf. also 61. In ii. 12 a grove is spoken of as dedicate to Thor (Hercules). 2 E.g., King Rut her. WODIN. 45 sacred village tree we should get one which was honoured by the whole community as was the Irminsul among the Saxon Angrarii, or the Geismar oak among the Hessians. For the sacred grove near the village we should get a grove held sacred by the whole country, such as the groves in which stood the trees just spoken of, or the grove of the Semnones, or that in which Nerthus dwelt, or the grove at Upsala. But the local fetich-worship would somewhat fall into the background and the more spiritual worship of the people as a whole would emerge. And thus all the great gods of the Teutonic pantheon would come before our eyes. If the ancient Germans built no fanes, the grove served them as a temple ; if they made no images of their gods, the indi- vidual trees often served them, as Adam of Bremen witnesses, for visible and tangible gods. Still, there was a more imaginative side to their creed. There was a Great God who was not of the fetich kind. He was, says Tacitus, a ' sacred presence ' only. Was he ? It is hard to believe in so great a step as from the worship of individual trees to the worship of a being unseen, unfelt, wholly apart from physical phenomena. Some of the Germans may have been capable of that, but surely not all, not many. The Great God whom we know as Wodin, Odin,1 must have drawn something from his surround- ings. Why was his presence reserved so peculiarly for the grove? Granting he was unseen, he may yet have been felt. Without doubt his presence was expressed by the thousand mysterious sounds and breaths of the forest, but most of all by the wind, which is the forest's very essence or spirit. We have been thinking at present of the western side of 1 The Lombardic name is Gwodan (Paul., Diac, i. 9); the Saxon, Woden {Forma Abrenunt. in Pertz's Leges, i., and Merseburg Formula); the English, Wodin (Saxon Chronicle) ;\he Scandinavian, Odin. As the English form is the most familiar, it will be the one employed hereafter. 46 CREED OF HEATHEN GERMANY. Germany, of those forests which had known the presence of Roman soldiers, where Germanicus had found the bones of slain legionaries whitening on the trees. As we passed from this region to the east and north, towards the Baltic shores, we should exchange the mixed forests of hard wood and firs for forests which were almost entirely ' black ' — i.e., of fir or pine. For the sandy soil of North Germany will scarcely support a hardier and tardier growth. If the birthplace of Wodin really were near the modern Spreewald, then that birth must have taken place in a black forest. If in these days we wish to feel the mystic presence of the Great God of the Germans, we must do as our worshipping forefathers did, withdraw from the concourse of men, find out some forest solitude, and wait there. Let it be, if you will, in one of the great stretches of woodland which are to be found in East and West Prussia ; or, better still nowadays, go to the vast primeval forests which lie upon the upper slopes of the Scandinavian peninsula, far away from the fjords and the too frequent steps of tourists. There you will feel, as you should, the strange and awful stillness which from time to time reigns in pine-forests such as these. Presently the quiet is broken, first by a sigh which arises, as from the ground itself, and breathes throughout the wood. Anon, from a distance a sound is heard so like the sound of the sea that you might swear (had you never been in such a wood before) that you could hear the waves drawing backwards over a pebbly beach. As it approaches the sound grows into a roar; it is the roar of the tempest, the coming of Wodin. I can imagine that the sealike sound of the forest wind may have been in part the reason why the Scandinavian Odin appears sometimes as a sea-god, or at least as a god who has a home beneath the sea. 'Sunkbench (Sokkvabekk?-)? says an Eddie poem describing the palaces of the gods — - WODIN AND THE FOREST WIND, 47 Sunkbench is called tbe fourth, which the cold waves Ever murmur above : There Odin and Saga l drink all day long Gladly from golden cups. 2 Another, however, and a stronger reason is that Odin's wife, Frigg, who is the Nerthus of Tacitus,3 is in part a goddess of the sea — though she is still more an earth-goddess. And when in mythology a god and goddess are married, each necessarily acquires some portion of the nature of the other. How Nerthus comes to be a goddess both of the earth and sea is no doubt a matter which needs some inquiry, but we have no space for it here. That she is so seems almost certain. It is Tacitus who calls her Nerthus, and adds, * id est Terra mater? But that very word Nerthus must be connected with Njord of the Eddie mythology; and Njord most certainly was a god of the sea. Frigg appears clearly as an earth- goddess : but her palace is Fensalir, ' Fen-Hall,' or even ' Wave-Hall.' And now we return to Wodin and the forest wind. It will be said by some that this description is purely imaginary. I make a distinction between what is imaginative and what is imaginary. If you choose not to go into the study of mythology or of beliefs of any kind till you have first stripped yourself of your imagination, you will travel indeed lightly burdened, and you will arrive at strange re- sults. Because, as belief of all kinds is born of the imagina- tion, and Aberglaube is, as Goethe says, the poetry of life, you will have taken the precaution of going into the dark unpro- vided with a lantern. To avoid doing this you are not obliged, however, to give free rein to your fancy. Nor have we done 1 The Seeress. 2 Grimnismdl 7 (Bugge) {Corp. Poet. Bor., i. 70). 3 Proved to be so by her relations to the Lombards. Cf. Tacitus, Ger??iania, 40, and Paul., Diac, i. 8. 48 CREED OF HEATHEN GERMANY. so here. Pat shortly, the case stands thus : We know that the Germans lived a forest life, that their groves were their temples, that they did not, as a rule, make images of the gods, that they did not even imagine their Great God visible to sight, but thought of him as an unseen {secrehwi) presence. But they must have been strangely advanced in their religious notions, and on that side quite out of pace with their culture in other respects, if they could dispense with all sensuous apprehension of their divinity. I do not think, therefore, a picture which would make some of the Teutons identify their Great God with a visible great tree, oak or ash or pine, and others more imaginative, hear and feel his presence in the forest wind, so deserving of the epithet imaginary, as a theory which would give the god a naine and nothing more, no sensible reality at all. Nay, it would require some strong argument to show that Odin, who is a god of battles before he is anything else, who rides through the air on the swiftest of horses, whose son is the Thunder-god, his son and his comrade in battle, was not the god who rode on the whirlwind and directed the storm. For men have at all times — and of this their language is the best witness — confounded the storm and the fury of battle, the storm of battle, I might say, with the battle of the elements. The storm of spears and Odin's wrath is the name for battle in the Edda songs. There was a sound familiar to the Roman soldier of the later empire, in days when the greater part of the Roman soldiery were of barbarian origin. It was called barritus, a word which is said to be a German gloss ; x it is certainly not 1 Forcellini, s.v. THE BARRITUS. 49 a Latin one. If the word is German, then the barritus must be a German institution. This was the manner of it. It was raised by the Roman legionaries before going into battle ; and it seems to have been made by placing the rim of the shield below the mouth, and then raising a long more or less musical howl or cry, the shield serving as a sounding-board. The barritus began in a gentle murmur and gradually swelled to a great body of sound, audible afar off, and expressly com- pared by some of the classical writers to the roar of the sea. The soldiers augured well or ill of the success of the coming battle, according as the barritus rose haimoniously into full swell or no. The sound must have been the very counterpart of the sound of the wind in a pine-forest. It may be, it even seems to be, this very practice and this very sound which is referred to in an Eddie poem, where Odin is made to say of his favourites going into battle — I sing under their shields.1 All depends, I know, upon whether it be decided that the barri- tus really was a German institution, and that seems to depend more than anything upon the etymology of the word — a question upon which I am not capable of speaking. There are considerable difficulties in the way of accepting it ; and I give this illustration only for what it may be worth. It illus- trates the character of Wodin as a god of battles; it is not needed to establish it.2 1 Hdvamdt, 19 [Corp. P.B.) 'under randir ek gol' — which we might translate 'under their shields I yell.' Comp. the description of the bar- ditus in Tacitus, G. 3. But see next note. 2 Grimm first suggested the reading of barritus for bardiius in Germ 3. He was followed by Orelli. But I believe there is no MS. authority for the change. ' Bard,' a poet, is a Celtic not a Teutonic word. Barritus is believed to be a Teutonic gloss (see Forcellini, s. v.) However that may be, it is not spoken of by the classical writers as used by the German 5 50 CREED OF HEATHEN GERMANY. Add to the foregoing picture that Wodin sometimes wanders over the earth in a more peaceful character; that he visits men in their homes, when they do not know him, and at such times takes the form of an old grey man, one-eyed, wrapped in a cloak. This we may take to be the wind visiting the earth in a gentler fashion. III. Thor or Donar, the god next greatest after Wodin, nobody has ever questioned was the Thunder; for his German name has remained unchanged. And looking upon Odin as the tempest of the air, it is appropriate enough that Thorr is a son of Odin and of Earth (HldSyn) ; that he does not ride a-horseback through the clouds, but thunders over the hills in his chariot. Thorr is red-bearded; from the flash of light- ning. He is the parent of more than one Rodbard (Rothbart), Robert or Robin of Middle Age romance. To us he is most familiar as wielder of the hammer of Thor, the bolt ; mjolnir, the crusher, it was called in the north. It is on this account that he is called Hercules by Tacitus ; Wodin, as we know, being identified with Mercury. Jupiter is the true equivalent for Thor, and this equivalence was recognized by the Germans of the border when they adopted the Roman week of seven barbarians, but by the soldiers (very probably of German origin no doubt) in the Roman army. The wild howling of the Goths was answered by the more rhythmic sound of the barritus, is what Ammian says, speaking of the battle of Marcianopolis. We also hear of the same sound being raised by the Roman soldiers in Mesopotamia. There is nothing, of course, in all this to prove that the barritus was not a Teutonic barbarian invention. Rydberg assumes, without hesitation, that it was a war-cry familiar to all the Germans. The barritus is mentioned in the following places in Ammian, xvi. 12, 48 ; \xi. 13, 15 ; xxvi. 7, 17 ; xxxi. 7, II. Many of the occasions on which it was used were (it will be seen) by the Romans troops in the East. THOR, TIU. 5 1 days, but named the days after their own divinities — Thors-day, Wodins day, Tius-day, Freyjas-day, and so forth.1 By the side of Wodin Thor is a somewhat rustic figure. He has been spoken of as the peasant's god, or say rather the franklin's or the bonder's god, whereas Odin is the warrior's godpar excellence, the god of the thane, the earl, or the prince, the begetter of royal houses. It cannot, however, be said that this distinction always holds.2 There is evidence that Thor was cherished more even than Wodin in the popular myth- ology of the Middle Ages. And, strange to say, this cherishing has in his case taken away from his reputation in our eyes. He is, in reality, more familiar to us than any other god of the northern pantheon, for he is the hero of half the nursery stories of giants and trolls. But that is a familiarity which brings with it contempt ; and it would be impossible now-a-days to invest either Thor or his antagonists the giants (jolnar) with one tithe of the seriousness, or even majesty, which they once possessed for the Teutonic mind. The third of Tacitus' triad, whom he calls Mars, is Tiu or This, or, in the north, Tyr. But though Tiu was a great god with the Germans in Tacitus's day, he has sunk to be a rather shadowy person in the Edda mythology, and the traces of him in local names and popular legends are very much fewer than in the case of Wodin or Thor. In days much more distant than those of Tacitus, Tiu must have (one thinks) been the supreme divinity of the Teutons. And we 1 Sunday is probably really taken from the Roman sun-worship, not from any god in the Teutonic pantheon, and Monday in like manner. Saturday may likewise be from the Roman Saturn. 2 There is, in fact, plenty of evidence of Thor being placed before Odin in the hierarchy of many of the Teutonic nations. Cf. Dudo, bk. i., and the Forma abremtntiationis in Pertz, Leg. i. : ' Ec forsacho allum dioboles wercum end wordum, Thunaer ende Woden ende Saxnote' ( = Tyr?) Ac- cording to Adam of Bremen Odin was essentially a god of battles ; Thor a protector against sickness, loco czr, 52 CREED OF HEATHEN GERMANY. can thus trace his decline through three stages. But as we have no picture of him in his days of greatness, we cannot say much concerning his character. In the Eddas Tyr is a rather shadowy counterpart of Odin ; and his name (one proof of his former greatness) is used very often as the abstract name for god. Thus fimbul-tyr, great tyr, great god, when used in the Eddas, does not mean this divinity, but Odin. In revenge for this decline of the Mars-god in Tacitus' triology, we gain from the Eddie Pantheon two other gods of great importance, of whom the classical writers give but slight hints. These are Frey and Balder, beings very much alike in character, one of whom certainly was known to the continental Germans. As Balder or Phol the god appears in one of the two incantations which I have said are almo t the only genuine documents of German heathendom which have come down to our day. From that single fragment we can form no conception of the place which Balder held in the creed of heathen Germany. In the Norse mythology he is a young god, young and remarkably beautiful, and fair in com- plexion ; he is essentially a god of peace. He is generally spoken of as one that is already dead, who has descended into the lower- world — to a place of mild happiness not of torture1 — to Hades not Gehenna, therefore — has gone down into Hell in that older significance of the phrase which our prayer-books have retained. He is to come again, moreover, according to the Eddie myth, after the destruction of the world at Ragnarok, and reign over a renovated earth. Altogether Balder is endowed by the Edda poets with so many of the attributes and so much of the history of the 'White Christ,' that we cannot now say how far he is to be looked upon as a real 1 See Rydberg, Teutonic Mythol. 248, sqq. BALDER, FREY. 53 creation of ancient German belief. But then we must remember that this ' White Christ,' known to the sagas, has evidently borrowed something from the native god Balder. So we may say, perhaps, that though the milder aspects of this god of the Peace-steads have been emphasied, they have not been in- vented, and that Balder was from the beginning (like Frey) a god of spring and of the sun, of vegetation and of the blessings of the soil. Frey is much more genuinely heathen than Balder, but likewise more exclusively Scandinavian. He is to be wor- shipped, the Gylfaginnitigx tells us, ' for good harvests and for peace.' He, too, is evidently a god of sunshine and of spring. At Upsala Frey formed one of a triology, which included Odin and Trior, excluding Tyr;2 the three grave- mounds of these gods are still shown there. Frey was, too, the progenitor of the Yngling race, which ruled in Sweden and in Norway. That there was some being like him in character among the gods of the ancient Germans we must believe ; most probably this was Balder, so that Frey can hardly be classed among the divinities of the ancient Germans. For the peaceable side of life, however, the principal divinities would naturally be those of the female sex. Nerthus is the most important of that number whose name can be recovered. She, as we knowr (like Balder in this), proclaimed peace wherever she went. She was, as we have already seen, not unlike the Demeter of the Greeks; she had apparently her myth of wandering, and her Triptolemus-myth, the mission of Skef as the civilizer of mankind. And if we take the analogy of the Eddie religion, we may believe that by the side of this matronly goddess, Terra Mater, stood a younger one — x Younger Edda {Edda Snorrd). * Adam of Bremen loco cit. 54 CREED OF HEATHEN GERMANY. a sort of Persephone — formed, so to say, out of the elder chthonic being. We know how difficult it is in Greek art, and the more difficult the farther we go back, to distinguish between Demeter and Persephone.1 A similar confusion of mother and daughter, of older and younger goddess, is repre- sented in the likeness in name between Frigg, the wife of Odin, and Freyja, the daughter of Njord, the sister and feminine counterpart of Frey.2 There are other names for the matron goddess, Mother-earth, in the German mythology. Perchta, Bertha is one, a name which survived late in German folk-lore. But we are not concerned, happily, with the names of our divinities ; were it so the obscurities and ramifications of our subject would be increased a hundredfold. Tacitus speaks of another goddess worshipped by a part of the Suevi. But he does not give her native name. He calls her Isis. Pars Suevorum et Isidi sacrificat. That this Isis was essentially different from Nerthus we cannot believe. She was probably only the Earth-mother looked at from a different point of view, of which we have next to speak. For the everyday creed of the ancient Germans, we must be content with the faint outlines which we have been able to draw — with the awful War-god of the grove; sometimes how- ever seen in a milder aspect as a wanderer among the homes of men ; with Thunder driving in his chariot over the hills ; and with other divinities of less importance, who fight at his side and at the side of Wodin. Then with a peaceful spring god 1 E.g., in the Harpy Tomb from Xanthos in the British Museum. See on this subject Gerhardt, Gr. Myth. § 240, 4; and in Akad. Abt. ii. 357 ; and Overbeck, Gr. Ktmstmyth. ii. 442, 448. 2 Freyja is the daughter of Njord, who is the male counterpart of Nerthus as Frey of Freyja. Therefore Nerthus may as easily be identi- fied with Freyja as with Frigg. Frigg, like Freyja, belongs to the race of the Vanir, not to that of the /Esir. 1 do not know whether any connection has ever been suggested between Nerthus and Nirrtis, the Chthonic goddess of the Risr Veda. GODDESSES. 55 who can wield arms well enough if called upon. And, finally, with Mother-Earth, who like her husband Wodin, is at times a wanderer among mankind, who loves peace and happy festivals, but about whom there is likewise something mysterious and terrible — ' a holy ignorance and mysterious horror ' as Tacitus says. Whence came this fear and mystery ? we will now ask. IV. There is to every creed another side beside its familiar every- day aspect ; and there was such to the creed of the ancient Ger- mans. It had a mysterious, a mystic or magical side. In this the chief parts were played by Wodin and Nerthus. That pro- cession of the goddess Nerthus, as it is described to us, partakes of the nature of a dramatic representation, a symbol of the mythic wanderings of the Earth-mother, in just the same way that the Eleusinian journey symbolized the wanderings of the Greek Mother-Earth. And when we find Tacitus telling us that pars Suevorum worshipped Isis, we must suppose that he recog- nized for that goddess, at any rate (whether he had Nerthus in his mind or no), that she stood at the head of a mystery. For the Romans only knew Isis as a goddess worshipped in this fashion. It would be impossible for a Roman author to speak of a German goddess as Isis, unless he thought he saw a mystery connected with her worship. I use the word ' mystery ' here in a very definite sense. I do not mean merely that there was something awful and hidden or half understood about the divinity. That may be predi cated of any god. I mean that there were connected with certain selected divinities, ceremonies which were recognized to be in a special sense mysterious and holy, possessing magical properties, conferring miraculous powers, needing a selected body of priests or priestesses to keep up the tradition of them, and transmit their divine influence. $6 CREED OF HEATHEN GERMANY. It is the special note of a mystery that it so often outlives the stage of belief in which it had its origin and to which it naturally belongs. We know how eminently this was the case with the classical mysteries, especially with two of them, the Mysteries of Isis and the Eleusinia. It is reckoned that we can trace the history of the latter almost absolutely unchanged for a thousand years.1 No creed could well remain the same for so long, least of all among the quick-witted Greeks. The Eleusinia long survived the official recognition of Christianity ; they were finally uprooted by the monks coming into Greece in the wake of Alaric's invading army in a.d. 391. Much the same was the history of the mysteries of Isis and Serapis,2 which after they had already been transmitted through countless centuries, Egypt bequeathed — in a changed form no doubt — to Rome, and which Rome adopted when her own beliefs were fading. It is the same, if I may be permitted to say so, with the Christian mysteries, which are essentially primitive and mediaeval in character^ and not really in harmony with the Christianity of to-day. If therefore we find, as we do, a ceremony almost identical with the ceremony of the progress of Nerthus surviving in a part of Lower Germany as late as the twelfth century, and recognized by the Christian writers of that time as a survival of heathenism, we have strong confirmatory evidence of the mystic significance attaching to the acted progress of the Earth goddess.4 1 P. R. Forster, Raub u. Ruckkeh> der Persephone. If we were to follow the anthropological method (a loose - ne g nerally) of tracing some part of the ceremonies to savage customs, the period might of course be extended almost indefinitely. * Serapis, of course, is only a Roman divinity under this name, which is a corruption of Apis. 3 As we shall have hereafter some occasion to note. See Chap. XVL 4 See Chron. Rudolfi Abb. Sanct. Trud. (Pertz, xii. 309) and Grimm A M. i. 214. MYSTERIES. 57 And I myself — though this must remain a matter of infer- ence only — have very little doubt that the story of the boat- borne Sceaf is, in its turn, closely connected with the worship of Nerthus, and that we have here another mystery associated with the parent one, much as the story of Triptolemus was associated with the worship of Demeter. There always arises a certain community between a god and the goddess who is his wife. Demeter ought no doubt as a chthonic divinity to be married to a god of Earth, whereas she is married to a god of Heaven. But then her other self, her daughter is married to the chthonic Aidoneus ; and Demeter's husband Zeus himself sometimes shares in her nature — there is in Greek mythology a Zeus Chthonios, as well as a Zeus of heaven. So it is in the relations between Wodin and Nerthus ; and the point at which meet the naturally opposite characters of the heavenly War-god and the peaceful Earth, is where we find Wodin, as we have said we do find him, wandering over the earth disguised as an old man, clad very often in beggar's weeds. This portrait of him is like the picture of Demeter in her wanderings, sitting down in the guise of a slave near the palace of Keleos. Wodin was not always treated so well as was Demeter by Keleos's daughters. On one occasion he came to ihe house of a king GeirroS. He was seized as a beggar, an outlaw, and placed between two fires. And there is more in this story than meets the eye at first sight, for by a comparison with other myths, GeirroS is seen to be a sort of King of Death.1 On another occasion more distantly alluded to, Wodin was still worse handled, was actually hung, as an outlaw on the 1 The Geruth of Gorm's (the northern Odysseus') voyage in Saxo Grammaticus (Ed. Miiller and VelschowJ p. 420. See also below. 5 8 CREED OF HEATHEN GERMANY. vargtre, that is to say, upon his own tree, an offering to himself In one of the earliest Eddie fragments the god is made to say— I know that I hung on the gallows tree1 Nine nights long ; To Odin offered, with a spear wounded, Myself to myself.2 These myths are the foundation of the mysteries of Wodin. The number nine was an especially sacred one to the Germans. Their original week was one of nine days. We have noted some instances already of the recurrence of the number. In the Upsala celebration which took place every ninth year, nine of each kind of living thing was offered.3 And with this picture of the Upsila sacrifice in our thoughts, we * need to listen to the mystic verses quoted above. Nothing, I know, is more misleading in ordinary mythology (open-air mythology, if I may use the expression), than a reliance upon chance identity of numbers. But it is the peculiar mark of mysteries and philosophies of a mystic kind that numbers have in them, or are supposed to have, a deep meaning. Juggling with numbers is, in fact, a special form of magic among people at a certain stage of culture. It is possible that one detail, that of the wounding with a spear, may be a semi-Christian addition to the picture of Wodin on the gallows-tree.* But I do not think the picture, as a whole, is Christian, but genuinely and anciently German, con- 1 ' On the gallows tree,' vin^a-meiffi a. See ante p. 43. 2 Corp. P. B. i. 24. llavamal (Edda, Bugge) 138. 3 Cf. also the ninety-nine victims at the sacrifice in Leire, which also took place every ninth year. Thietmari, Chr. i. 9 (Pertz, iii. 739-40). There were nine regions in Niflhel (Vaff>. 43); nine giant-maids of the Ocean or Island Mill (Ey-liid) [C.P.B. ii. 54], three nines of maidens (Valkyriur) ; see below. 4 Rydberg has shown that there was nothing antique in that supposed custom of spear-risting. MYSTERY OF WODIN. 59 nected with the natural character of the god. The complete genealogy of the ancient rites of sacrifice from the days of the grove of the Semnones to the time of the sacrifices in the grove at Upsala, is clear and self-consistent, and does not admit of any Christian element. And with the one exception of the passage 1 with a spear wounded,' the picture of Wodin hung upon the vargtre^ and offered as an offering to himself, is on all fours with these ancient rites. The story of the mystery alluded to in the verse just quoted, I believe to be only a variant of the story of Wodin and GeirroS. GeirroS, we have said, proves to be a god of the under-world. Wodin, when he had hung nine nights upon the vargtri, de- scended (so we gather) into some under-world, and brought thence wisdom or inspiration as his prize — nine all-powerful Rune songs — I peered down, I caught up the Runes ; Crying I caught them up, down I descended ; Mighty songs nine I learned from the far-famed son Of Balthorn, Besli's father.1 There are to be found very many stories and traces of more which tell of Wodin's descent into the lower-world for the sake of bringing up wisdom as his prize. The most famed descent was that to the well of Mimir, a king of a portion of the lower- world. On that occasion Wodin had to leave as a pledge one of his eyes, out of which Mimir made a cup to drink from. It is only a variant of this myth which is alluded to in the aboveverse — for the son of Balthorn and brother of Besli is Mimir. This story of Wodin's descent to the under-world in search of magic fits in well enough with the natural character of the 1 Hdv. 139, 140. 60 CREED OF HE A THEN GERMANY. supreme God of the Teutons.1 Wodin is first the Tempest-god, the rusher over land and sea, the god of battle, the chooser or warriors, the inspirer of battle fury, that fury to which the Northmen gave the name of berserksgangr. But he is, secondly, the wanderer over the earth, the teacher of writing (magic writing), wisdom, and incantations. If Wodin in his first cha- racter commended himself best to the warrior portion of the population, Wodin in his second character would be worshipped more by the peaceful section ; for in the most warlike states there always is a peaceful section of the population. Now I think it might be shown that the practice of mysteries arises in all cases out of ancient rustic rites, rites which are attached to the soil, not brought in by conquerors. Among the Romans under the Empire the conquered races, Egyptians and Syrians, supplied the bulk of magicians and soothsayers; the Finns did the same for the Scandinavians. Always the weaker part of the population possesses and guards these mysteries and magic rites. It might be urged as an argu- ment that the Germans were autochthonous, that we find among them the women as chief soothsayers. This fact all the classical writers witness. c Caesar found that the reason of the delay [of Ariovistus in coming to an engagement] was that a custom prevailed among 1 Vigfgusson thinks that Odin's name is connected with the root 6d, inspiration. One of the verses of Havamal (160) says : — J>at kann-ek id"fimtanda es gol fiodreyrir Dvergr fyr Dellings durom. Vafyrudnismal (24) says of Delling : — Dellingr heitr hann es Dags fatfir. So that the Great inspirer (I>i6