[226] There remains to us of this poetry the very precious fragments contained in the Edda and in Voluspa. The Edda, whose name signifies great-grandmother, is a collection, fairly ample, of Scandinavian traditions. Voluspa is a sort of Sibylline book, or cosmogonic oracle, as its name indicates. I am convinced that if the poets of the north, the Danes, Swedes, and Germans, had oftener drawn their subjects from these indigenous sources, they would have succeeded better than by going to Greece to seek them upon the summits of Parnassus. The mythology of Odin, descended from the Rhipæan mountains, suits them better than that of the Greeks, whose tongue furthermore is not conformable here. When one makes the moon and the wife (der Mond, das Weib) of masculine and neuter gender; when one makes the sun, the air, time, love (die Sonne, die Luft, die Zeit, die Liebe) of feminine gender, one ought wisely to renounce the allegories of Parnassus. It was on account of the sex given to the sun and the moon that the schism arose, of which I have spoken, in explaining the origin of the temple of Delphi.
The Scandinavian allegories, however, that I consider a débris of Thracian allegories, furnishing subjects of a very different character from those of the Greeks and Latins, might have varied the poetry of Europe and prevented the Arabesque fiction from holding there so much ascendancy. The Scandinavian verses, being without rhyme, hold moreover, to eumolpœia. The following is a strophe from Voluspa:
“Avant que le temps fût, Ymir avait été;
Ni la mer, ni nes vents n’existaient pas encore;
Il n’était de terre, il n’était point de ciel:
Tout n’était qu’un abîme immense, sans verdure.”
“In the beginning, when naught was, there
Was neither sand nor sea nor the cold waves,
Nor was earth to be seen nor heaven above.
There was a Yawning Chasm [chaos] but grass nowhere.…”