ir. From him came a race of wicked giants. Afterward,
from these same drops of fluid seeds, children of heat and cold, came the
mundane cow, whose milk fed the giants. Then arose also, in a mysterious
manner, Bor, the father of three sons, Odin, Vili, and Ve, who, after
several adventures,--having killed the giant Ymir, and made out of his
body Heaven and Earth,--proceeded to form a man and woman named Ask and
Embla. Chaos having thus disappeared, Odin became the All-Father, creator
of gods and men, with Earth for his wife, and the powerful Thor for his
oldest son. So much for the cosmogony of the Edda.

On this cosmogony, we may remark that it belongs to the class of
development, or evolution, but combined with a creation. The Hindoo,
Gnostic, and Platonic theories suppose the visible world to have emanated
from God, by a succession of fallings, from the most abstract spirit to
the most concrete matter. The Greeks and Romans, on the contrary, suppose
all things to have come by a process of evolution, or development from an
original formless and chaotic matter. The resemblance between the Greek
account of the origin of gods and men and that of the Scandinavians is
striking. Both systems begin in materialism, and are radically opposed to
the spiritualism of the other theory; and in its account of the origin of
all things from nebulous vapors and heat the Edda reminds us of the modern
scientific theories on the same subject.

After giving this account of the formation of the world, of the gods, and
the first pair of mortals, the Edda next speaks of night and day, of the
sun and moon, of the rainbow bridge from earth to heaven, and of the great
Ash-tree where the gods sit in council. Night was the daughter of a
giant, and, like all her race, of a dark complexion. She married one of
the AEsir, or children of Odin, and their son was Day, a child light and
beautiful, like its father. The Sun and Moon were two children, the Moon
being the boy, and the Sun the girl; which peculiarity of gender still
holds in the German language. The Edda gives them chariot and horses with
which to drive daily round the heavens, and supposes their speed to be
occasioned by their fear of two gigantic wolves, from Jotunheim, or the
world of darkness, which pursue them. The rainbow is named Bifrost, woven
of three hues, and by this, as a bridge, the gods ride up every day to
heaven from the holy fountain below the earth. Near this fountain dwell
th