New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1905
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1905,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1905.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
TO
NORMAN HAPGOOD
CRITIC AND FRIEND
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The invocation of Ingimund to Odin, [on page 38], is adapted from Fragments of a Spell Song, preserved as an insertion in the Great Play of the Wolsungs, and to be found, both original and translation, in the Corpus Poeticum Boreale of Vigfusson and Powell, Oxford, 1883.
For dramatic reasons, various liberties have been taken by the writer with those elements of this play which are drawn from Scandinavian mythology. For example, according to mythology, the Fenris-wolf is the offspring, not of Odin, but of Loki; the wolf and Baldur are not brothers; no mention is made of the wolf’s Pack. Moreover, in the Old Icelandic utterances of the Pack—for purposes of sound merely—a preterite form has twice been used for a present tense, as in Ulfr sofnathi, “the wolf sleepeth.”