le; and if natural death seemed to be coming on, they would cut
wounds in their flesh, that Odin might receive them as warriors slain.
Old kings, about to die, had their body laid into a ship; the ship
sent forth, with sails set and slow fire burning it; that, once out at
sea, it might blaze-up in flame, and in such manner bury worthily the
old hero, at once in the sky and in the ocean! Wild bloody valour; yet
valour of its kind; better, I say, than none. In the old Sea-kings
too, what an indomitable rugged energy! Silent, with closed lips, as I
fancy them, unconscious that they were specially brave; defying the
wild ocean with its monsters, and all men and things;--progenitors of
our own Blakes and Nelsons! No Homer sang these Norse Sea-kings; but
Agamemnon's was a small audacity, and of small fruit in the world, to
some of them;--to Hrolf's of Normandy, for instance! Hrolf, or Rollo
Duke of Normandy, the wild Sea-king, has a share in governing England
at this hour.

Nor was it altogether nothing, even that wild sea-roving and battling,
through so many generations. It needed to be ascertained which was the
_strongest_ kind of men; who were to be ruler over whom. Among the
Northland Sovereigns, too, I find some who got the title
_Wood-cutter_; Forest-felling Kings. Much lies in that. I suppose at
bottom many of them were forest-fellers as well as fighters, though
the Skalds talk mainly of the latter,--misleading certain critics not
a little; for no nation of men could ever live by fighting alone;
there could not produce enough come out of that! I suppose the right
good fighter was oftenest also the right good forest-feller,--the
right good improver, discerner, doer and worker in every kind; for
true valour, different enough from ferocity, is the basis of all. A
more legitimate kind of valour that; showing itself against the
untamed Forests and dark brute Powers of Nature, to conquer Nature for
us. In the same direction have not we their descendants since carried
it far? May such valour last forever with us!

That the man Odin, speaking with a Hero's voice and heart, as with an
impressiveness out of Heaven, told his People the infinite importance
of Valour, how man thereby became a god; and that his People, feeling
a response to it in their own hearts, believed this message of his,
and thought it a message out of Heaven, and him a Divinity for telling
it them: this seems to me the primary seed-grain of the Norse
Religi