The Irish Race in the Past and the Present

by Augustus J. Thébaud

Their system of worship, with its creed and rites, is much more precise in character and better known to us than that of the Celts. If we open the books which were written in Europe at the time of the irruption of these Northmen, and the poems of those savage tribes preserved to our own days, and comprised under the name of Edda, besides the numerous sagas, or songs and ballads, which we still possess, we find mention of three superior gods and a number of inferior deities, which gave a peculiar character to this Northern worship.

They were Thor, the god of the elements, of thunder chiefly; Wodan or Odin, the god of war; and Frigga, the goddess of lust; the long list of others it is unnecessary to give. Their religion, therefore, consisted mainly: 1. In battling with the elements, particularly on the sea, under the protection of Thor; 2. In slaying their enemies, or being themselves slain, as Odin willed —the giving or receiving death being apparently the great object of existence; 3. In abandoning themselves at the time of victory to all the propensities of corrupt nature, which they took to be the express will of Frigga manifested in their unbridled passions.

Such was Scandinavian mythology in its reality.

Modern investigators, principally in Germany and France, find in the Edda a complete system of cosmogony and of a religion almost inspired, so beautiful do they make it. At least they have made it appear as profound a philosophy as that of old Hindostan and far-off Thibet. By grouping around those three great divinities, which are supposed to be emblematical of the superior natural forces, their numerous progeny, that of Odin especially, together with an incredible number of malicious giants and good- natured ases—a kind of fairy—any skilful theorist, gifted with the requisite imagination, may extract from the whole an almost perfect system of cosmogony and ethics. Then the disgusting legends of the Edda and the sagas are straightway transformed into interesting myths, offsprings of poetry and imagination, and conveying to the mind a philosophy only less than sublime, derived, as they say, from the religion of Zoroaster.

It is, as we said, in Germany and France chiefly that these discoveries have been made. The English, a more sober people, although of Scandinavian blood, do not set so high a value on what is, in the literal sense, so low.

Pity that such pleasing speculations should be mere theoretical bubbles, unable to retain their lightness and their vivid colors in the rude atmosphere of the arctic regions, bursting at the first breath of the north wind! How could sensible men, under such a complicated system of religion and physics, account for the uncouth pirates of the Baltic?

As useless is it to say that they brought it from the place of their origin—Persia, as these theorists affirm. To a man uninfluenced by a preconceived or pet system, it is evident at first sight that no mythology of the East or of the South has ever given rise to that of Scandinavia. There is not the slightest resemblance between it and any other. It must have originated with the Scandinavians themselves; and their long religious tales were only the bloody dreams of their fancy, when, during their dreary winter evenings, they had nothing to do but relate to each other what came uppermost in their gross minds.

Saxo Grammaticus, certainly a competent authority, and Snorry Sturleson, the first to translate the Edda into Latin, who is still considered one of the greatest antiquarians of the nation —both of whom lived in the times we speak of, when this religious system still flourished or was fresh in the minds of all— solved the question ages ago, and demonstrated beforehand the falsehood of those future theories by stating with old-time simplicity that the abominable stories of the Edda and the sagas were founded on real facts in the previous history of those nations, and were consequently never intended by the writers as imaginative myths, representing, under a figurative and repulsive exterior, some semblance of a spiritual and refined doctrine.

We must look to our own more enlightened times to find ingenious interpreters of rude old songs first flung to the breeze nine hundred years ago in the polar seas, and bellowed forth in boisterous and drunken chorus during the ninth and tenth centuries by ferocious, but to modern eyes romantic, pirates reeking with the gore of their enemies.

Because it has pleased some modern pantheist to concoct systems of religion in his cabinet, does it become at once clear that the mythic explanation of those songs is the only one to be admitted, and that the odious facts which those legends express ought to be discarded altogether? At least we hope that, when philosophers come to be the real rulers of the world, they will not give to their subtle and abstract ideas of religion the same pleasant turn and the same concrete expression in every-day life that the worshippers of Odin, Thor, and Frigga, found it agreeable to give when they were masters of the continent and rulers of the seas.