is
peculiar to Christian Europe, and has produced such remarkable effect
on the national spirit of the noblest inhabitants of the world. Nor has
this oral poetry entirely died out. In the present day Mr. Stephen
Gwynne has astonished the world by telling of how he heard aged
peasants in Kerry reciting the classics of Irish-Gaelic literature,
legendary poems and histories that had descended from father to son by
oral tradition; and the same phenomena was found by Mr. Alexander
Carmichael among the Gaelic peasants in the Scottish Highlands and
surrounding islands. It has been said that heroic poetry is of the
people, and that dramatic poetry is the production of city and society;
and cannot exist unless it has a great metropolis to be the central
point of its development, and it is only by the study of the literature
of all nations that we see how essentially these heroic poems were the
foundation of all that followed them in later ages.

SCANDINAVIAN.

The Scandinavian Nation held, during the Middle Ages, the first and
strongest influence over the poetry and thought of Western Europe. The
oldest and purest remains of the poets of German Nations are contained
in the Scandinavian Edda. Its mythology is founded on Polytheism; but
through it, as through the religion of all nations of the world, there
is a faint gleam of the one Supreme God, of infinite power, knowledge
and wisdom, whose greatness and justice could not be represented in the
form of ordinary man. Such was the God of the Pagan Germans, and such
was the earliest belief of mankind.

Perhaps the poet priests of primitive times, who shaped the imaginative
mythology of the North, were conscious of the one true God; but
considered Him above the comprehension of the rude men of the times, so
they invented the deities who were more nearly akin to the material
forces that these people alone understood. The second part of the first
Edda contains the great Icelandic poems, the first of which is the song
of Voland, the famous northern smith.

Voland, or Wayland, the Vulcan of the North, is of unknown antiquity;
and his fame, which spread all over Europe, still lives in the
traditions of all the nations of the North. These poems, although
fragmentary, still far surpass the Nibelungen-lied, and in their
powerful pathos and tragic passion they surpass any ancient poetry
except that of Greece.

The Scandinavians in general, and Icelanders in particular, traveled
ove