The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Edda, Vol. 2, by Winifred Faraday

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Title: The Edda, Vol. 2
The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology,
Romance, and Folklore, No. 13

Author: Winifred Faraday

Release Date: July 23, 2004 [EBook #13008]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Popular Studies in Mythology, Romance, and Folklore, No. 13

The Edda

II

The Heroic Mythology of the North

By

Winifred Faraday, M.A.

Published by David Nutt, at the Sign of the Phoenix, Long Acre, London
1902

Author's Note

The present study forms a sequel to No. 12 (_The Edda: Divine Mythology
of the North_), to which the reader is referred for introductory matter
and for the general Bibliography. Additional bibliographical references
are given, as the need occurs, in the notes to the present number.

Manchester,
July 1902.

The Edda: II. The Heroic Mythology of the North

Sigemund the Waelsing and Fitela, Aetla, Eormanric the Goth and Gifica
of Burgundy, Ongendtheow and Theodric, Heorrenda and the Heodenings,
and Weland the Smith: all these heroes of Germanic legend were known
to the writers of our earliest English literature. But in most cases
the only evidence of this knowledge is a word, a name, here and there,
with no hint of the story attached. For circumstances directed the
poetical gifts of the Saxons in England towards legends of the saints
and Biblical paraphrase, away from the native heroes of the race;
while later events completed the exclusion of Germanic legend from our
literature, by substituting French and Celtic romance. Nevertheless,
these few brief references in _Beowulf_ and in the small group of
heathen English relics give us the right to a peculiar interest in the
hero-poems of the Edda. In studying these heroic poems, therefore,
we are confronted by problems entirely different in character from
those which have to be considered in connexion with the mythical
texts. Those are in the main the product of one, the Northern,
bran