nce. Ymir, the huge ice giant, and his
descendants, are comparable to the Titans, who were also elemental
forces of Nature, personifications of subterranean fire; and both,
having held full sway for a time, were obliged to yield to greater
perfection. After a fierce struggle for supremacy, they all found
themselves defeated and banished to the respective remote regions of
Tartarus and Joetun-heim.

The triad, Odin, Vili, and Ve, of the Northern myth is the exact
counterpart of Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, who, superior to the
Titan forces, rule supreme over the world in their turn. In the Greek
mythology, the gods, who are also all related to one another, betake
themselves to Olympus, where they build golden palaces for their use;
and in the Northern mythology the divine conquerors repair to Asgard,
and there construct similar dwellings.

Cosmogony

Northern cosmogony was not unlike the Greek, for the people imagined
that the earth, Mana-heim, was entirely surrounded by the sea, at
the bottom of which lay coiled the huge Midgard snake, biting its
own tail; and it was perfectly natural that, viewing the storm-lashed
waves which beat against their shores, they should imagine these to
be caused by his convulsive writhing. The Greeks, who also fancied
the earth was round and compassed by a mighty river called Oceanus,
described it as flowing with "a steady, equable current," for they
generally gazed out upon calm and sunlit seas. Nifl-heim, the Northern
region of perpetual cold and mist, had its exact counterpart in the
land north of the Hyperboreans, where feathers (snow) continually
hovered in the air, and where Hercules drove the Ceryneian stag into
a snowdrift ere he could seize and bind it fast.

The Phenomena of the Sky

Like the Greeks, the Northern races believed that the earth was
created first, and that the vaulted heavens were made afterwards to
overshadow it entirely. They also imagined that the sun and moon were
daily driven across the sky in chariots drawn by fiery steeds. Sol,
the sun maiden, therefore corresponded to Helios, Hyperion, Phoebus,
or Apollo, while Mani, the Moon (owing to a peculiarity of Northern
grammar, which makes the sun feminine and the moon masculine), was
the exact counterpart of Phoebe, Diana, or Cynthia.

The Northern scalds, who thought that they descried the prancing
forms of white-maned steeds in the flying clouds, and the glitter
of spears in the flashing light of t