the giant Ymir.  From him came a race of wicked giants.  Afterward, from these same drops of fluid seeds, children of heat and cold, came the mundane cow, whose milk fed the giants.  Then arose also, in a mysterious manner, Bor, the father of three sons, Odin, Vili, and Ve, who, after several adventures,—­having killed the giant Ymir, and made out of his body Heaven and Earth,—­proceeded to form a man and woman named Ask and Embla.  Chaos having thus disappeared, Odin became the All-Father, creator of gods and men, with Earth for his wife, and the powerful Thor for his oldest son.  So much for the cosmogony of the Edda.

On this cosmogony, we may remark that it belongs to the class of development, or evolution, but combined with a creation.  The Hindoo, Gnostic, and Platonic theories suppose the visible world to have emanated from God, by a succession of fallings, from the most abstract spirit to the most concrete matter.  The Greeks and Romans, on the contrary, suppose all things to have come by a process of evolution, or development from an original formless and chaotic matter.  The resemblance between the Greek account of the origin of gods and men and that of the Scandinavians is striking.  Both systems begin in materialism, and are radically opposed to the spiritualism of the other theory; and in its account of the origin of all things from nebulous vapors and heat the Edda reminds us of the modern scientific theories on the same subject.

After giving this account of the formation of the world, of the gods, and the first pair of mortals, the Edda next speaks of night and day, of the sun and moon, of the rainbow bridge from earth to heaven, and of the great Ash-tree where the gods sit in council.  Night was the daughter of a giant, and, like all her race, of a dark complexion.  She married one of the AEsir, or children of Odin, and their son was Day, a child light and beautiful, like its father.  The Sun and Moon were two children, the Moon being the boy, and the Sun the girl; which peculiarity of gender still holds in the German language.  The Edda gives them chariot and horses with which to drive daily round the heavens, and supposes their speed to be occasioned by their fear of two gigantic wolves, from Jotunheim, or the world of darkness, which pursue them.  The rainbow is named Bifrost, woven of three hues, and by this, as a bridge, the gods ride up every day to heaven from the holy fountain below the earth.  Near this fountain dwell three maidens, below the great Ash-tree, who decide every man’s fate.  These Fates, or Norns, are named Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld,—­three words meaning “past,” “present,” and “future.”  From Urd comes our word “weird,” and the weird sisters of Shakespeare.  The red in the rainbow is burning fire, which prevents the frost-giants of Jotunheim from going up to heaven, which they otherwise might do.  This region of the gods is called Asgard, and contains Valhalla, where they feast every day,