had come from Asia, and made their way along the eastern limits of our continent, till they turned aside to follow the line of route that each tribe chose for itself.

The special German nation to whom the natives of Scandinavia belong, was early known as that of the Goths. These people, in very remote times-before they had any written history to fix the date, had pushed their way northward and westward from their older homes in the East, till they reached the shores of the Baltic and the German Ocean, where they settled themselves upon the islands and coast lands of those seas, driving out the inhabitants. Whenever they found themselves strong enough to subdue the natives of the country, they made slaves of them, but if they could not do that, they generally ended by forming friendly compacts with them.

It seems to be certain that, when the Goths came to the Baltic, they found the lands peopled by older tribes of Kelts, Kimri and others, who, in their turn-but long before-had also come from beyond the shores of the Black Sea. These people were now for the most part driven by the new-comers into the more barren and colder districts, where we still find their descendants under the names of Finns and Lapps.

Some of the old Finnish tribes were much braver than their neighbours, the Lapps, and could not be so easily pushed aside by the Goths, who, therefore, were forced to try to make friends of them, and to pay respect to their gods and goddesses. In the course of time the most dreaded of these imaginary beings were placed among their deities, and worshipped as much as their chief god Odin himself. Other Finnish or Lapp tribes were held in fear by the Goths, more perhaps on account of their craft and cunning than their bravery, for we find that in the Scandinavian myths or sagas, these people are made to appear, sometimes as giants of evil repute, and sometimes as artful, hideous dwarfs.

As we have already seen, the religion of Scandinavia was, in ancient times, a form of the worship of Baal, in which the sun and fire were objects of great veneration as the sources of light and heat. But, after the Goths had settled in northern Germany and Scandinavia, this older religion only lingered in the form of superstitions, for the new-comers established their

own faith, which was that of Woden, or, as he is called by the Northmen, Odin.

We English retain in the days of the week the remembrance of this religion, which was brought to our shores more than 1400 years ago by the Angles and Saxons, who came from northern Germany and western Denmark to give us a new name and a new fate in the world. The Angles and Jutes and Saxons who landed in Kent and Sussex, first taught the people of Britain to divide the week into their Sun-day, Moon-day, Tys-day (Ty being their god of War answering to the Mars of the Romans), Woden's-day, Thor's-day and Freia's-day.

Thor, to whom they dedicated the fifth day of the week, was the strong and brave son of Odin, or Woden, and a special favourite among the northern gods, while Freia is believed, by some, to have been a Finnish goddess adopted by the Northmen as their goddess of Beauty.1

Here we may see, therefore, that we not only retain the memory of the Teutonic, or German gods of our Saxon forefathers in the names of some of the days of the week, but that we have still amongst us, in the word "Friday," something to remind us of that earlier form of Finnish worship, which the common ancestors of the Saxons and Angles had found in northern Europe when they first settled there, and which we know to have been a Phoenician form of religion. Some persons believe that Thor, from whom we have taken our Thursday, was as much an early northern divinity as Freia, and that he had been worshipped as the god of thunder, strength, and all the powers of nature, before the Gothic settlers taught the faith of Odin to Scandinavia. Thor was the favourite god of the people of Norway, and even in Sweden, in the temple of Odin at Uppsala, his statue was honoured with as high a place as that of Odin himself, but in Denmark he was never so much regarded.

The Northern Gods.-Nothing certain is known in regard

1 The name of Saturday the Britons owed to the Roman god Saturn, but the last day of the week was known among the early Northmen as washing-day, It is possible that our Anglo-Saxon forefathers may have wished to change this name when, in later times, they had ceased to have only one washing-day out of the seven like their northern ancestors.

to the precise time when the Goths first came to the north of Europe, or when they began to follow the religion of Odin. Some persons have thought that under the name of Odin, or Woden, men worshipped the powers of nature; others, that the fables invented in regard to him and the other northern gods, who were called Æsir, and were said to have dwelt in a home known as Asgaard, were all founded upon events that had happened to the people before they left their distant homes in the far East. Perhaps both these sources, and others besides, helped to make up the mythology of the Northmen. On the whole, the true worshippers of Odin held a moral faith. They believed that the first duty of mortals was to fear and love the All-father, or Creator, and that the next was to love and cherish their kindred and the friends to whom they had sworn to be faithful. But they did not see any virtue in forgiving the guilty or sparing the innocent, if they had any wrongs to avenge. When a man was slain in combat with a private foe, his kindred felt bound to take vengeance on the slayer, and to kill him and as many of his relations as they could; and if they were unable to do it in any other way, they thought it quite fair to attack them by night, and either slay them or burn them alive in their houses. This act, which they called nema hús á einn: “to take a house from one," was not to be performed, however, until all the women, children, old people and slaves had been allowed to make their escape. So, even in their worst deeds, they showed some mercy to the feeble, and proved that they were not without a natural sense of justice.

Odin-Al-fadir.-In Odin, the Northmen worshipped the Alfadir, or Father of all men and all things-the Creator. They believed that he knew all things, and, in his character of All-father, would survive, when this earth and all the lesser gods, or Æsir, had been swallowed up by time, to be regenerated according to the good or the evil that was in their nature; for the religion of Odin taught that the good would dwell in Gimli, or the golden, and the evil be doomed with cowards, liars, and deceivers, to remain in Nastroend, the low strand, in a dwelling made of serpents' bones. Before this final judgment, Odin was believed to look down on earth from his seat in Valaskjálf, learning all that happens there and in heaven from his ravens,

who sit one on either side of his head and whisper into his ear. In the hall, Valhal, with its five hundred and forty gates, each wide enough to admit eight hundred men abreast, he received all brave and good men after their death, and there the slain warriors pursued the life they had loved best on earth, fought their battles over again, listened to the songs of past victories, and feasted together without sorrow or pain to disturb them. Odin was supposed to award his special favours to those warriors who brought gold, or other precious substances, with them to Valhal, and who had led an active life and wandered far and wide; hence the Northmen very early showed the greatest eagerness to gather together riches on their distant voyages. This was not so much for the sake of spending their wealth, as in the hope of securing a welcome from the god whenever they might have to appear in his presence. They often ordered their children, or followers, on pain of severe punishment after death if they disobeyed them, to bury their riches with them; or they hid them away in places, known only to themselves, under the idea that Odin, who saw everything that passed on earth, would approve of their deed and reward them accordingly.

PART IV.

THE ARYAN RACES.

Northern Tongue.-The Gothic tribes who settled in Scandinavia brought their own language, as well as their own religion, with them. In the course of time this came to be known-first, as Norræna Mál, or Northern speech, and next as Dönsk tunga, or Danish tongue-which shows that at one period the Danes were the chief people among the Scandinavian nations, or they would hardly have given their name to the common language of all the Northmen.

But before the Germans and Goths parted from the many other tribes who, like themselves, had come into Europe from one common home in Asia, they had also had one common

language, for they were all of one race, which we call Aryan, from Arya or Iran, the old name of Persia, and sometimes Indo-European, to distinguish it from the other great branch of nations, known as the Semitic, to which the Hebrews, Egyptians, and many other ancient peoples belong. Our own and nearly all the present nations of Europe and some of the people of Asia are descended from the Aryan stock, and, in times so long past that there is no certain record of their date, our common forefathers lived together in their Asiatic valleyhomes beyond the Black Sea, and spoke a language which was perhaps more like the present Indian written language, Sanskrit, than any other that we know of. But when these Aryan races began to wander westward in search of new homes and came into Europe, they separated into different nations, and by degrees came to speak different dialects, until at last distinct languages were formed among them, which varied so much from one another, that it requires great learning to be able to trace them back to one common tongue.

Perhaps climate had something to do with the changes which crept into the speech of the Aryan nations as they advanced into different parts of Europe; for, as we know, all southern nations speak much more softly than do people in northern countries. We cannot now decide whether our Aryan forefathers brought with them from the East the guttural sounds of the northern tongue, or caught them up after they had reached Scandinavia, and become affected by its climate. All that we can now say decidedly in regard to the Norræna Mál is, that we know how it was spoken by the Northmen, one thousand years ago, for then a number of Norwegians went to Iceland, where they made new homes for themselves, keeping, however, to their old religion and their mother-tongue. Since that time the Scandinavians at home have altered their modes of speech so much, that a Swede, a Norwegian, or a Dane, can no longer understand the language still spoken by the Icelanders, which has remained unchanged for a thousand years.

Runes.-The letters used by the Northmen were called runes, from rún, a secret. There were sixteen of these runes, of which each was the sign for several sounds as well as words. They were either carved on wooden staves, or cut into stone, and