And Ovid informs us that this land, “with a mighty trembling, sank down a little” in the ocean, and the Gothic and Briton (Druid) legends tell us of a prolongation of Western Europe which went down at the same time.

In the Hindoo legends the great battle between Rama and Ravana, the sun and the comet, takes place on an island, the Island of Lanka, and Rama builds a stone bridge sixty miles long to reach the island.

In the Norse legends Asgard lies to the west of Europe; communication is maintained with it by the bridge Bifrost.  Gylfe goes to visit Asgard, as Herodotus and Solon went to visit Egypt:  the outside barbarian was curious to behold the great civilized land.  There he asks many questions, as Herodotus and Solon did.  He is told:[2]

“The earth is round, and without it round about lies the deep ocean.”

[1.  “Atlantis,” p. 171.

2.  The Fooling of Gylfe—­The Creation of the World—­The Younger Edda.]

{p. 371}

The earth is Ovid’s earth; it is Asgard.  It is an island, surrounded by the ocean: 

“And along the outer strand of that sea they gave lands for the giant-races to dwell in; and against the attack of restless giants they built a burg within the sea and around the earth.”

This proves that by “the earth” was not meant the whole globe; for here we see that around the outside margin of that ocean which encircled Asgard, the mother-country had given lands for colonies of the giant-races, the white, large, blue-eyed races of Northern and Western Europe, who were as “restless” and as troublesome then to their neighbors as they are now and will be to the end of time.

And as the Elder and Younger Edda claim that the Northmen were the giant races, and that their kings were of the blood of these Asas; and as the bronze-using people advanced, (it has been proved by their remains,[1]) into Scandinavia from the southwest, it is clear that these legends do not refer to some mythical island in the Indian Seas, or to the Pacific Ocean, but to the Atlantic:  the west coasts of Europe were “the outer strand” where these white colonies were established; the island was in the Atlantic; and, as there is no body of submerged land in that ocean with roots or ridges reaching out to the continents east and west, except the mass of which the Azores Islands constitute the mountain-tops, the conclusion is irresistible that here was Atlantis; here was Lanka; here was “the island of the innocent,” here was Asgard.

And the Norse legends describe this “Asgard” as a land of temples and plowed fields, and a mighty civilized race.

And here it is that Ragnarok comes.  It is from the

[1.  Du Chaillu’s “Land of the Midnight Sun,” vol. i, pp. 343, 345, etc.]

{P. 372}

people of Asgard that the wandering Gylfe learns all that he tells about Ragnarok, just as Solon learned from the priests of Sais the story of Atlantis.  And it is here in Asgard that, as we have seen, “during Surt’s fire two persons, called Lif and Lifthraser, a man and a woman, concealed themselves in Hodmimer’s holt,” and afterward repeopled the world.