Such was the idea in all the faith of the Teutonic race.  The chief virtue of man was courage, his unpardonable sin was cowardice.  “To fight a good fight,” this was the way to Valhalla.  Odin sent his Choosers to every battlefield to select the brave dead to become his companions in the joys of heaven.

Sec. 3.  The Eddas and their Contents.

We have observed that Iceland was settled from Norway in the ninth century.  A remarkable social life grew up there, which preserved the ideas, manners, and religion of the Teutonic people in their purity for many hundred years, and whose Eddas and Sagas are the chief source of our knowledge of the race.  In this ultimate and barren region of the earth, where seas of ice make thousands of square miles desolate and impenetrable, where icy masses, elsewhere glaciers, are here mountains, where volcanoes with terrible eruptions destroy whole regions of inhabited country in a few days with lava, volcanic sand, and boiling water, was developed to its highest degree the purest form of Scandinavian life.

The religion of the Scandinavians is contained in the Eddas, which are two,—­the poetic, or elder Edda, consisting of thirty-seven poems, first collected and published at the end of the eleventh century; and the younger, or prose Edda, ascribed to the celebrated Snorro Sturleson, born of a distinguished Icelandic family in the twelfth century, who, after leading a turbulent and ambitious life, and being twice chosen supreme magistrate, was killed A.D. 1241.  The principal part of the prose Edda is a complete synopsis of Scandinavian mythology.

The elder Edda, which is the fountain of the mythology, consists of old songs and ballads, which had come down from an immemorial past in the mouths of the people, but were first collected and committed to writing by Saemund, a Christian priest of Iceland in the eleventh century.  He was a Bard, or Scald, as well as a priest, and one of his own poems, “The Sun-Song,” is in his Edda.  This word “Edda” means “great-grandmother,” the ancient mother of Scandinavian knowledge.  Or perhaps this name was given to the legends, repeated by grandmothers to their grandchildren by the vast firesides of the old farm-houses in Iceland.

This rhythmical Edda consists of thirty-seven poems[326].  It is in two parts,—­the first containing mythical poems concerning the gods and the creation; the second, the legends of the heroes of Scandinavian history.  This latter portion of the Edda has the original and ancient fragments from which the German Nibelungen-lied was afterward derived.  These songs are to the German poem what the ante-Homeric ballad literature of Greece about Troy and Ulysses was to the Iliad and Odyssey as reduced to unity by Homer.

The first poem in the first part of the poetic Edda is the Voluspa, or Wisdom of Vala.  The Vala was a prophetess, possessing vast supernatural knowledge.  Some antiquarians consider the Vala to be the same as the Nornor, or Fates.  They were dark beings, whose wisdom was fearful even to the gods, resembling in this the Greek Prometheus.  The Voluspa describes the universe before the creation, in the morning of time, before the great Ymir lived, when there was neither sea nor shore nor heaven.  It begins thus, Vala speaking:—­