t about either that, or the
_hell_ before, or the _twilight_.[3] I have been there and have seen it
all in Mallet's 'Introduction to the History of Denmark' (it is in
French), and many other places." It is a far cry from Mallet's "System
of Runic Mythology" to William Morris' "Sigurd the Volsung" (1877), but
to Mallet belongs the credit of first exciting that interest in
Scandinavian antiquity which has enriched the prose and poetry not only
of England but of Europe in general. Gray refers to him in his notes on
"The Descent of Odin," and his work continued to be popular authority on
its subject for at least half a century. Scott cites it in his
annotations on "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805).

Gray's studies in Runic literature took shape in "The Fatal Sisters" and
"The Descent of Odin," written in 1761, published in 1768. These were
paraphrases of two poems which Gray found in the "De Causis Contemnendae
Mortis" (Copenhagen, 1689) of Thomas Bartholin, a Danish physician of the
seventeenth century. The first of them describes the Valkyrie weaving
the fates of the Danish and Irish warriors in the battle of Clontarf,
fought in the eleventh century between Sigurd, Earl of Orkney, and Brian,
King of Dublin; the second narrates the descent of Odin to Niflheimer, to
inquire of Hela concerning the doom of Balder.[4] Gray had designed
these for the introductory chapter of his projected history of English
poetry. He calls them imitations, which in fact they are, rather than
literal renderings. In spite of a tinge of eighteenth-century diction,
and of one or two Shaksperian and Miltonic phrases, the translator
succeeded fairly well in reproducing the wild air of his originals. His
biographer, Mr. Gosse, promises that "the student will not fail . . . in
the Gothic picturesqueness of 'The Descent of Odin,' to detect notes and
phrases of a more delicate originality than are to be found even in his
more famous writings; and will dwell with peculiar pleasure on those
passages in which Gray freed himself of the trammels of an artificial and
conventional taste, and prophesied of the new romantic age that was
coming."

Celtic antiquity shared with Gothic in this newly around interest. Here
too, as in the phrase about "the stormy Hebrides," "Lycidas" seems to
have furnished the spark that kindled the imaginations of the poets.

"Where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep
Closed o'er the head of your love