And then we read of Heimdal, one of the gods who was subsequently killed by the comet: 

“He dwells in a place called Himinbjorg, near Bifrost.  He is the ward,” (warder, guardian,) “of the gods, and sits at the end of heaven, guarding the bridge against the mountain-giants.  He needs less sleep than a bird; sees an hundred miles around him, and as well by night as by day. His teeth are of gold.”

This reads something like a barbarian’s recollection of a race that practiced dentistry and used telescopes.  We know that gold filling has been found in the teeth of ancient Egyptians and Peruvians, and that telescopic lenses were found in the ruins of Babylon.

But here we have Bifrost, a bridge, but not a continuous structure, interrupted in places by water, reaching from Europe to some Atlantic island.  And the island-people regarded it very much as some of the English look

{p. 382}

upon the proposition to dig a tunnel from Dover to Calais, as a source of danger, a means of invasion, a threat; and at the end of the island, where the ridge is united to it, they did what England will probably do at the end of the Dover tunnel:  they erected fortifications and built a castle, and in it they put a ruler, possibly a sub-king, Heimdal, who constantly, from a high lookout, possibly with a field-glass, watches the coming of the turbulent Goths, or Gauls, or Gael, from afar off.  Doubtless the white-headed and red-headed, hungry, breekless savages had the same propensity to invade the civilized, wealthy land, that their posterity had to descend on degenerate Rome.

The word Asas is not, as some have supposed, derived from Asia.  Asia is derived from the Asas.  The word Asas comes from a Norse word, still in use in Norway, Aas, meaning a ridge of high land.[1] Anderson thinks there is some connection between Aas, the high ridge, the mountain elevation, and Atlas, who held the world on his shoulders.

The Asas, then, were the civilized race who inhabited a high, precipitous country, the meeting-point of a number of ridges.  Atlas was the king, or god, of Atlantis.  In the old time all kings were gods.  They are something more than men, to the multitude, even yet.

And when we reach “Ragnarok” in these Gothic legends, when the jaw of the wolf Fenris reached from the earth to the sun, and he vomits fire and poison, and when Surt, and all the forces of Muspel, “ride over Bifrost, it breaks to pieces.”  That is to say, in this last great catastrophe of the earth, the ridge of land that led from the British Islands to Atlantis goes down for ever.

[1.  The Younger Edda,” Anderson, note, p. 226.]

{p. 383}

And in Plato’s description of Atlantis, as received by Solon from the Egyptian priests, we read: 

“There was an island” (Atlantis) “situated in front of the straits which you call the Columns of Hercules; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from the islands you might pass through the whole of the opposite continent,” (America,) “which surrounds the true ocean.”