[Footnote M:  Mithridates (the Great) of Pontus, 131 B.C. to 63 B.C.  Vanquished by Pompey, B.C. 65, he fled to his son-in-law, Tigranes, in Armenia.  Being refused an asylum, he committed suicide.  I cannot trace the legend of Mithridates becoming Odin.  Probably Wordsworth means that he would invent, rather than “relate,” the story.  Gibbon (’Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, chap. x.) says,

“It is supposed that Odin was the chief of a tribe of barbarians, who dwelt on the banks of Lake Maeotis, till the fall of Mithridates, and the arms of Pompey menaced the north with servitude; that Odin, yielding with indignant fury to a power which he was unable to resist, conducted his tribe from the frontiers of Asiatic Sarmatia into Sweden.”

See also Mallet, ‘Northern Antiquities’, and Crichton and Wheaton’s ‘Scandinavia’ (Edinburgh Cabinet Library): 

“Among the fugitive princes of Scythia, who were expelled from their country in the Mithridatic war, tradition has placed the name of Odin, the ruler of a potent tribe in Turkestan, between the Euxine and the Caspian.”

Ed.]

[Footnote N:  Sertorius, one of the Roman generals of the later Republican era (see Plutarch’s biography of him, and Corneille’s tragedy).  On being proscribed by Sylla, he fled from Etruria to Spain; there he became the leader of several bands of exiles, and repulsed the Roman armies sent against him.  Mithridates VI.—­referred to in the previous note—­aided him, both with ships and money, being desirous of establishing a new Roman Republic in Spain.  From Spain he went to Mauritania.  In the Straits of Gibraltar he met some sailors, who had been in the Atlantic Isles, and whose reports made him wish to visit these islands.—­Ed.]

[Footnote O:  Supposed to be the Canaries.—­Ed.]

[Footnote P: 

“In the early part of the fifteenth century there arrived at Lisbon an old bewildered pilot of the seas, who had been driven by tempests he knew not whither, and raved about an island in the far deep upon which he had landed, and which he had found peopled, and adorned with noble cities.  The inhabitants told him that they were descendants of a band of Christians who fled from Spain when that country was conquered by the Moslems.”

(See Washington Irving’s ‘Chronicles of Wolfert’s Roost’, etc.; and
Baring Gould’s ’Curious Myths of the Middle Ages’.)—­Ed.]

[Footnote Q:  Dominique de Gourgues, a French gentleman, who went in 1568 to Florida, to avenge the massacre of the French by the Spaniards there.  (Mr. Carter, in the edition of 1850.)—­Ed.]

[Footnote R:  Gustavus I. of Sweden.  In the course of his war with Denmark he retreated to Dalecarlia, where he was a miner and field labourer.—­Ed.]

[Footnote S:  The name—­both as Christian and surname—­is common in Scotland, and towns (such as Wallacetown, Ayr) are named after him.