he infinite importance
of Valor, how man thereby became a god; and that his People, feeling a
response to it in their own hearts, believed this message of his, and
thought it a message out of Heaven, and him a Divinity for telling it
them: this seems to me the primary seed-grain of the Norse Religion,
from which all manner of mythologies, symbolic practices, speculations,
allegories, songs and sagas would naturally grow. Grow,--how strangely!
I called it a small light shining and shaping in the huge vortex of
Norse darkness. Yet the darkness itself was _alive_; consider that. It
was the eager inarticulate uninstructed Mind of the whole Norse People,
longing only to become articulate, to go on articulating ever farther!
The living doctrine grows, grows;--like a Banyan-tree; the first _seed_
is the essential thing: any branch strikes itself down into the earth,
becomes a new root; and so, in endless complexity, we have a whole wood,
a whole jungle, one seed the parent of it all. Was not the whole Norse
Religion, accordingly, in some sense, what we called "the enormous
shadow of this man's likeness"? Critics trace some affinity in some
Norse mythuses, of the Creation and such like, with those of the
Hindoos. The Cow Adumbla, "licking the rime from the rocks," has a
kind of Hindoo look. A Hindoo Cow, transported into frosty countries.
Probably enough; indeed we may say undoubtedly, these things will have
a kindred with the remotest lands, with the earliest times. Thought does
not die, but only is changed. The first man that began to think in this
Planet of ours, he was the beginner of all. And then the second man, and
the third man;--nay, every true Thinker to this hour is a kind of Odin,
teaches men _his_ way of thought, spreads a shadow of his own likeness
over sections of the History of the World.

Of the distinctive poetic character or merit of this Norse Mythology
I have not room to speak; nor does it concern us much. Some wild
Prophecies we have, as the _Voluspa_ in the _Elder Edda_; of a rapt,
earnest, sibylline sort. But they were comparatively an idle adjunct of
the matter, men who as it were but toyed with the matter, these
later Skalds; and it is _their_ songs chiefly that survive. In later
centuries, I suppose, they would go on singing, poetically symbolizing,
as our modern Painters paint, when it was no longer from the innermost
heart, or not from the heart at all. This is everywhere to be well kept
in mind.