Than to where Odin
To meet the wolf goes.
Odin goes to meet the Fenriswolf in Ragnarok (the twilight of the gods; that is, the final conflict between all good and evil powers); but now let the reader compare the above passage from the Elder Edda with the following passage from the seventeenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles:
Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars’ Hill and said: Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious; for as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.
It was of this same unknown God that one of the ancient Greek poets had said, that in him we live and move and have our being. Thus did the Greeks find Jehovah in the labyrinth of their heathen deities; and when we claim that the Norse mythology is more divine than any other system of mythology known, we mean by this assertion, that the supreme God is mentioned and referred to oftener, and stands out in bolder relief in the Norseman’s heathen belief, than in any other.
It is a noticeable fact that long before Christianity was introduced or had even been heard of in Iceland, it is recorded that Ingemund the Old, a heathen Norseman, bleeding and dying, prayed God to forgive Rolleif, his murderer.
Another man of the heathen times, Thorkel Maane, a supreme judge of Iceland, a man of unblemished life and distinguished among the wisest magistrates of that island during the time of the republic, avowed that he would worship no other God but him who had created the sun; and in his dying hour he prayed the Father of Light to illuminate his soul in the darkness of death. Arngrim Jonsson tells us that when Thorkel Maane had arrived at the age of maturity and reflection, he disdained a blind obedience to traditionary custom, and employed much of his time in weighing the established tenets of his countrymen by the standard of reason. He divested his mind of all prejudice; he pondered on the sublimity of nature, and guided himself by maxims founded on truth and reason. By these means he soon discovered not only the fallacy of that faith which governed his countrymen, but became a convert to the existence of a supreme power more mighty than Thor or Odin. In his maker he acknowledged his God, and to him alone directed his homage from a conviction that none other was worthy to be honored and worshiped. On perceiving the approach of death, this pious and sensible man requested to be conveyed into the open air, in order that, as he said, he might in his last moments contemplate the glories of Almighty God, who has created the heavens and the earth and all that in them is.
Harald Fairfax (Haarfager), the first sovereign of Norway, the king that united Norway under his scepter in the year 872, is another remarkable example in this respect. He was accustomed to assist at the public offerings made by his people in honor of their gods. As no better or more pure religion was known in those days, he acted with prudence in not betraying either contempt or disregard for the prevailing worship of the country, lest his subjects, stimulated by such example, might become indifferent, not only to their sacred, but also to their political, duties. Yet he rejected from his heart these profane ceremonies, and believed in the existence of a more powerful god, whom he secretly adored. I swear, he once said, never to make my offerings to an idol, but to that God alone whose omnipotence has formed the world and stamped man with his own image. It would be an act of folly in me to expect help from him whose power and empire arises from the accidental hollow of a tree or the peculiar form of a stone.
Such examples illustrate how near the educated and reflecting Norse heathen was in sympathy with Christianity, and also go far toward proving that the object of mythology is to find God and come to him.
Still we must admit that of this supreme God our forefathers had only a somewhat vague conception; and to many of them he was almost wholly unknown. Their god was a natural human god, a person. There can be no genuine poetry without impersonation, and a perfect system of mythology is a finished poem. Mythology is, in fact, religious truth expressed in poetical language. It ascribes all events and phenomena in the outward world to a personal cause. Each cause is some divinity or other—some god or demon. In this manner, when the ancients heard the echo from the woods or mountains, they did not think, as we now do, that the waves of sound were reflected, but that there stood a dwarf, a personal being, who repeated the words spoken by themselves. This dwarf had to have a history, a biography, and this gave rise to a myth. To our poetic ancestors the forces of nature were not veiled under scientific names. As Carlyle truthfully remarks, they had not yet learned to reduce to their fundamental elements and lecture learnedly about this beautiful, green, rock-built, flowery earth, with its trees, mountains and many-sounding waters; about the great deep sea of azure that swims over our heads, and about the various winds that sweep through it. When they saw the black clouds gathering and shutting out the king of day, and witnessed them pouring out rain and ice and fire, and heard the thunder roll, they did not think, as we now do, of accumulated electricity discharged from the clouds to the earth, and show in the lecture room how something like these powerful shafts of lightning could be ground out of glass or silk, but they ascribed the phenomenon to a mighty divinity—Thor—who in his thunder-chariot rides through the clouds and strikes with his huge hammer, Mjolner. The theory of our forefathers furnishes food for the imagination, for our poetical nature, while the reflection of the waves of sound and the discharge of electricity is merely dry reasoning—mathematics and physics. To our ancestors Nature presented herself in her naked, beautiful and awful majesty; while to us in this age of Newtons, Millers, Oersteds, Berzeliuses and Tyndalls, she is enwrapped in a multitude of profound scientific phrases. These phrases make us flatter ourselves that we have fathomed her mysteries and revealed her secret workings, while in point of fact we are as far from the real bottom as our ancestors were. But we have robbed ourselves to a sad extent of the poetry of nature. Well might Barry Cornwall complain: