tting slew"
him. Vali, a younger brother of Baldur, avenged him by killing
Hodur. Hodur is darkness and Baldur light; they are brothers; the
light falls a victim to blind darkness, who reigns until a younger
brother, the sun of the next day, rises to slay him in turn.

Below these gods, all nature was peopled with divinities. There
were elves of two kinds: black elves, called trolls, who were
frost-spirits, and guarded treasure (seeds) in the ground; and
white elves, who lived in mid-heaven, and danced on the earth in
fairy rings, where a mortal entering died. Will-o'-the-wisps
hovered over swamps to mislead travellers, and jack-o'-lanterns,
the spirits of murderers, walked the earth near the places of their
crimes.

The Otherworlds of the Teutons were Valhalla, the abode of the
heroes whom death had found on the battlefield, and Niflheim, "the
misty realm," secure from the cold outside, ruled over by Queen
Hel. Valkyries, warlike women who rode through the air on swift
horses, seized the heroes from the field of slaughter, and took
them to the halls of Valhalla, where they enjoyed daily combats,
long feasts, and drinking-bouts, music and story-telling.

The sacred tree of the Druids was the oak; that of the Teutonic
priests the ash. The flat disk of the earth was believed to be
supported by a great ash-tree, Yggdrasil,

"An ash know I standing,
Named Yggdrasil,
A stately tree sprinkled
With water the purest;
Thence come the dewdrops
That fall in the dales;
Ever-blooming, it stands
O'er the Urdar-fountain."

_Voeluspa saga._ (Blackwell _trans._)

guarded by three fates, Was, Will, and Shall Be. The name of Was
means the past, of Will, the power, howbeit small, which men have
over present circumstances, and Shall Be, the future over which man
has no control. Vurdh, the name of the latter, gives us the word
"weird," which means fate or fateful. The three Weird Sisters in
_Macbeth_ are seeresses.

Besides the ash, other trees and shrubs were believed to have
peculiar powers, which they have kept, with some changes of
meaning, to this day. The elder (elves' grave), the hawthorn, and
the juniper, were sacred to supernatural powers.

The priests of the Teutons sacrificed prisoners of war in
consecrated groves, to Tyr, god of the sword. The victims were not
burned alive, as by the Druids, but cut and torn terribly, and
their dead bodies burned. From these sacrifices