It is an awful consummation that is predicted by Erda and symbolized in this descending phrase—the destruction of a world as the outcome of that contest which since time began has been the basis of religions and mythologies. No civilized people has escaped being confronted by that problem, but all peoples have not solved it alike. In our own religion the spectacle of its tragical consequences has held the world in awe for nearly nineteen hundred years. Generally in the legends which the human imagination, fired by religious instinct, has created to symbolize the eternal conflict, the hero who goes to destruction is an ideal man. Sometimes he is a god; but only the daring imagination of the Northern myth-maker was equal to the task of making that hero the chiefest of the gods, and connecting his downfall with the end of the race to which he belongs. In this awful flight of the Northern imagination, this sublime achievement of the Northern conscience, lies the essential difference between the religious systems of the classic Greeks and our savage ancestors. The Greeks, profoundly philosophical as they were, would yet have shrunk back appalled from such a solution of the great problem as the Teuton provided in his Götterdämmerung. Logic might force them to recognize the necessity of it or something like it, but they would not permit logic to compel them to contemplate it. Once the stern mind of Æschylus seemed on the point of disclosing a divine tragedy approximate in its proportions. Prometheus, chained to the rock on Mount Caucasus, comforts himself in his bitter agony with thoughts of the time when grim necessity shall force Zeus to right his wrongs. But observe that the end of his sufferings is not to follow as an act of retributive justice, but is to be purchased by a compromise. The time will come when Zeus will need his help, for of all the gods Prometheus alone knows how the plot will be laid and how Zeus can escape it:
"I know that Zeus is hard,
And keeps the right supremely to himself;
But then, I know, he'll be
Full pliant in his will
When he is thus crushed down.
Then calming down his mood
Of hard and bitter wrath,
He'll hasten unto me,
As I to him shall haste,
For friendship and for peace."
This is the nearest approach that the Greeks came to a parallel with the most tremendous conception of Northern mythology. Does it strike you as strange? It need not. Remember, the loveliness of their country and climate kept before the Greeks perpetually the benignant aspect of their gods. It is true they found themselves as little able as our ancestors later to maintain these embodiments of a primeval conception of idealized humanity in a state of sinlessness; but when brought face to face with the contradictions which followed, they extricated themselves as best they might by the makeshift of a compromising reconciliation, or flew to the extreme of unbelief. The moral obliquity of the gods was recognized, but was not permitted to throw a shadow over the radiant ones in the Olympian court. You may observe an illustration of this mental trait in the unwillingness of the Greeks to call unpleasant things by their right names. The Euxine, or Hospitable Sea, was once righteously called by them the Axine, or Inhospitable Sea. The dreadful Furies, with their heads covered with writhing snakes, after they had scourged Orestes through the world, were given a temple and worship at Athens as the Eumenides—the kind or good-tempered ones. These Furies belonged to the class of gloomy deities, which was the offspring of conscience and the sense of moral responsibility. They were bound to present themselves to a thinking people, but a people who basked always in Nature's smile were equally bound to subordinate them to the gods of nature that were the embodiment of cheerfulness and light. To contemplate the latter was a delightful occupation; the former were viewed through a veil which concealed their hideousness.
There was nothing in the surroundings of our ancestors to encourage such a species of indirection. The natural powers which confronted them oftenest were inimical. They did not live in the sunlight of Nature's smile, but in the shadow of her frown. The simple right to exist had daily to be conquered. The vague apprehensions of a sinless, an absolute and omnipotent Deity, which flitted furtively across their minds, took deeper and deeper root when the logic of necessity began to taint their dynasty of gods with weakness and crimes. But, like the Greeks, they could give such a conception neither form, habitation, nor name. It remained hovering in the background. As their physical life was a ceaseless struggle with Nature in her sternest aspects, and as the more cruel of those aspects were connected with the phenomena of winter, it was natural that when the conception of overshadowing Fate had to be personified in the process of mythological construction, the Nornir should have been imagined as daughters of the giants of the North—harsh, cruel, vengeful, implacable. The terrible Fimbul winter was to precede Ragnarök. All their training taught them to look the actual in the face. They lived in war, and death possessed terror only to those who could not die in battle. Destruction was a conception with which they were familiar; destruction was the logical outcome of all activities. So soon as they began to contemplate a race of gods who were offenders against that moral law which was the outgrowth of the primitive religious instinct, just so soon such a people had to provide for a catastrophe which would resolve the discord. The Greek tragedian made Prometheus the symbol of humanity and achieved his aim by a reconciliation with offended Deity. The Norse myth-maker chose the chief of the gods as his representative, raised the issue between him and unpersonified moral law, and compelled the god to go down to destruction with all his race to satisfy a vast and righteous necessity. "If," says Felix Dahn, "a religion has become thoroughly corrupt, then, unless the nation professing it is to be destroyed along with its civilization, a new religion, satisfying to the needs of the period, must either be introduced from without—as Christianity was introduced in the Roman world in the first centuries of the Empire—or the existing religion must be purified and reconstructed; as was the case with Christianity in the sixteenth century through the Protestant Reformation, and also, indeed, through the very material Catholic improvements achieved by the Tridentine Council.
"But beside these two there is a third means of resolving the difficulty; this third was seized upon by the Germanic consciousness. It is the tragical remedy.
"The Germanic gods, too, placed themselves in irreconcilable and unendurable opposition to morality; and the Germanic conscience condemned them every one to destruction—to death! That is the meaning of the Götterdämmerung; it is a peerlessly great moral deed of the Germanic race, and it stamps Germanic mythology with its tragic character.
"Destruction because of an irreparable rupture with established and peaceful order in Religion, Morality, or Law, is essentially tragical.
"The Götterdämmerung a sacrifice? A stupendous deed of morality? Aye, indeed, that it is!"[D]