."

To judge from Tacitus and from other writers of the first Christian
centuries, there was little system in the religion of Germany in
those days; the gods were not organised in a divine family, the
priests were not a caste like the Druids of France and Britain, and
religious practice was loose and variable. It must also be remembered
that what foreign writers reported on the subject was connected
rather with national and official cults than with popular local
observances. Of the latter there was an abundant growth; a
distinguished foreign writer might not know about it, but the
evidence of it survives in various forms which are only now being
seriously studied. To know the practical religion of early Germany we
have to consult the village festival and legend (as has been done by
Mannhardt in his _Wald- und Feld-kulte_ and Mr. Frazer in _The Golden
Bough_, and many a student of folklore), which, though now apparently
meaningless, were once the serious religious observance and doctrine
of the peasantry. The peasant carried his wishes and prayers to the
familiar wishing-well, and presented offerings to the spirit of the
well by throwing them into the water or hanging them on the
surrounding trees. The fairy rather than far-off Wodan was looked to
for good fortune; the rite of the fabulous village hero, with its
quaint immemorial usages, roused more enthusiasm than the stately
public ceremonial. Another side of the mind of early Germany is to be
gathered from the heroic legends and the fairy tales, many of the
elements of which, we are assured, were even then in existence. Were
these legends formed by a process of degradation; did they begin with
telling about the gods, and were they afterwards applied to heroes
and princes and common men? Or was the process in the opposite
direction from this; were the stories, first of all, those of human
warriors, their wars and loves, and did they then become mixed up
with solar and celestial ideas? Were the fairy tales originally
stories of the gods, and did they by popular and familiar treatment
fall below the dignity of their original themes till they came to be
a debased and broken-down mythology? or were they at first stories
about beasts and about clever tricks, such as savages love to tell,
and did they rise to something more dignified, till in some of them
we may trace the stories of the gods? It is not necessary that we
should answer these questions, which carry us back to