The Edda [pp. 123-126]

THE LADIES REPOSITOR Y.
blood of the North. In songs and sagas were
perpetuated among them the ancient Northern
memories; in songs and sagas they celebrated
the Scandclinavian contemporary princes."
Thus the religious legends and heroic poems
of the Icelanders, which the original settlers
had brought with them from Scandinavia, were
preserved, and, in the course of time, reduced
to writing. They form the chief source of our
knowledge of Scandinavian or Nortlhern mythology. The Icelandic bishop, Svenson, who,
in I643, broughlt them again to lighlt, in a collected form written on vellum, gave to the collection, thus found, the name of "Edda "-a
word of Icelandic origin, signifying "greatgrandmother," or "ancestress "-in recognition
of its value as the "ancestress" of Scandinavian poetry and mythlology. He afterward
sent the entire collection to the learned Torfaeus, an interpreter of Icelandic manuscripts
un(ler King Frederick III of Denmark. In the
year I787, it began to be publishled in Col)penhagen, under the title of" Edda Saemundar hinns
Frode" (Edda of Semunid the Wise, or the
" Saemuncdic Edda"), with a Latin translation
and " Lexicon Mytliologicum."
What now passes under the general name of
"Edda" is properly divided into two Eddas
the "Elder or Poetic Edda," and the "Younger
or Prose Edda." Soemund Sigfusson, a Christian priest of Iceland, born in o1056, and eclucated in Germany and France, undertook the
laudable task of gathering from the lips of the
scalds, and committing to writing, tile virious
poems composed by unknown authors at riemiote
periods. His collection thus made, comprising,
according to Simrock, thirty-seven poems, was,
as mentioned above, discovered by Bislopl Svenson in i643, and forms the "Elder or Poetic
Edda." True, some antiquarians and critics
have endeavored to prove that Saemund himself was thle author, as well as the collector, of
the poems of the "Edda Poetica;" but others,
and among them the Howitts and, to some
extent, Simr-ock, have furnished proofs in favor
of a far higher antiquity of these poems than
the period in which they were collected and
written dclown by him. Indeed, it would be vain
to attempt to fix a limit to the antiquity of some
of them. They seem to possess all the characteristics of the remotest antiquity, and to
carry us back to the East, the original home
of the Gothic race. Semund himself is said to
have been a poet of a high order, as his "Sunsong" shows; but the poems seem to show
that he sacredly left them as lie found them,
even with their blanks and loppings; and only
connected the disjointed portions by single
prose links, containing the sense which still
lived in tradition.
This "Edda Poetica" is the grand depository
of the mythology of the North. It contains a
poetic account of the lives and adventures of
Odin and other Scandinavian gods and heroes,
of their ideas concerning the creation of the
world, the origin of mali, and their knowledge
of morals, etc. But, unlike the " Iliad" of the
Greeks or the "Nibelungen-lied" of the Germans, it is not worked up into one grand and
connected whole; no Homner has as yet arisen
in Scandinavia to mold the various lyrics of tlhe
"E(dda Poetica" into one sublime epic. They
show us what the myths of the ancient Greeks
would have been without Homer. "They remain," say the Howitts, in a somewhat exaggerated style, "huge, wild, fragmentar-y, full of
strange gaps rent into their very vitals by the
accidents of rulde centuries; yet, like the ruins
of the Colosseum, or of the temples of Paestum,
standing aloft amid the daylight of the present
time, magnificent testimonies of the stupendous
genius of the race which reared them....
The obscurity which hangs over some of them,
like the deep shadows crouching amid the ruins
of the past, is prolbably thile result of dilapidations; but amid this, stand forth the boldest
masses of intellectual masonry. We are astonished at the wisdom which is shaped into maxims, and at the tempestuous strength of passions
to which all modern emotions appear puny and
constraine(l. Amid the br ight sunlight of a faroff time, surrounded by the densest shadows
of forgotten ages, we come at once into the
midst of gods and heroes, goddesses and fair
women, gianits and dwarfs, moving Iabout in a
world of wonderful construction, unlike any
othler worlds which God hais created or man
has imagined, but still beautiful beyond conception. Thle mysterious Vala, or prophetess,
seated someviher-e unseen in that marvelous
heaven, sings an awful song of the birth of gods
and men, of the great Ygdrasil, or Tree of Life,
whose roots and branches run through all regions
of space to which existence has extended; and
concludes her thrilling lhymin with the terrible
Regnarok, or Twilight of the Gods, when the
dynasty of Odin disappears in the fires which
devour creation, and the new heavens and the
new earth come forth to receive the reign of
Balder and of milder natures. Odin himself
sings his High Song, and his ravens, Hugin and
Munin, or Mind and Will, bring him news firom
all the lower worlds, but can not divest his soul
of the secret dread that the latter will one day
fail to return, and the power which enabled him
to shape the sky, and all the nine regions of life
i
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