Rome and Greece can not parallel this marvelous story:
The gods convene
On Ida's plains,
And talk of the powerful
Midgard-serpent;
They call to mind
The Fenris-wolf
And the ancient runes
Of the mighty Odin."
What else can mankind think of, or dream of, or talk of for the next thousand years but this awful, this unparalleled calamity through which the race has passed?
A long-subsequent but most ancient and cultivated people, whose memory has, for us, almost faded from the earth, will thereafter embalm the great drama in legends, myths, prayers, poems, and sagas; fragments of which are found to-day dispersed through all literatures in all lands; some of them, as we shall see, having found their way even into the very Bible revered alike of Jew and Christian:
The Edda continues,
"Then again
The wonderful Golden tablets
Are found in the grass
In time's morning,
The leader of the gods
And Odin's race
Possessed them."
And what a find was that! This poor remnant of humanity discovers "the golden tablets" of the former
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civilization. Doubtless, the inscribed tablets, by which the art of writing survived to the race; for what would tablets be without inscriptions? For they talk of "the ancient runes of mighty Odin," that is, of the runic letters, the alphabetical writing. And we shall see hereafter that this view is confirmed from other sources.
There follows a happy age: