rdice. "To fight a good
fight," this was the way to Valhalla. Odin sent his Choosers to every
battlefield to select the brave dead to become his companions in the joys
of heaven.

Sec. 3. The Eddas and their Contents.

We have observed that Iceland was settled from Norway in the ninth
century. A remarkable social life grew up there, which preserved the
ideas, manners, and religion of the Teutonic people in their purity for
many hundred years, and whose Eddas and Sagas are the chief source of our
knowledge of the race. In this ultimate and barren region of the earth,
where seas of ice make thousands of square miles desolate and
impenetrable, where icy masses, elsewhere glaciers, are here mountains,
where volcanoes with terrible eruptions destroy whole regions of inhabited
country in a few days with lava, volcanic sand, and boiling water, was
developed to its highest degree the purest form of Scandinavian life.

The religion of the Scandinavians is contained in the Eddas, which are
two,--the poetic, or elder Edda, consisting of thirty-seven poems, first
collected and published at the end of the eleventh century; and the
younger, or prose Edda, ascribed to the celebrated Snorro Sturleson, born
of a distinguished Icelandic family in the twelfth century, who, after
leading a turbulent and ambitious life, and being twice chosen supreme
magistrate, was killed A.D. 1241. The principal part of the prose Edda is
a complete synopsis of Scandinavian mythology.

The elder Edda, which is the fountain of the mythology, consists of old
songs and ballads, which had come down from an immemorial past in the
mouths of the people, but were first collected and committed to writing by
Saemund, a Christian priest of Iceland in the eleventh century. He was a
Bard, or Scald, as well as a priest, and one of his own poems, "The
Sun-Song," is in his Edda. This word "Edda" means "great-grandmother," the
ancient mother of Scandinavian knowledge. Or perhaps this name was given
to the legends, repeated by grandmothers to their grandchildren by the
vast firesides of the old farm-houses in Iceland.

This rhythmical Edda consists of thirty-seven poems[326]. It is in two
parts,--the first containing mythical poems concerning the gods and the
creation; the second, the legends of the heroes of Scandinavian history.
This latter portion of the Edda has the original and ancient fragments
from which the German Nibelungen-lied was afterward derived. The