Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

152 THE LEGENDS.

What history, what poetry, what beauty, what inestimable pictures of an infinite past have lain hidden away in these Sagas—the despised heritage of all the blue-eyed, light-haired races of the world!

Rome and Greece can not parallel this marvelous story :

“The gods convene On Ida’s plains, And talk of the powerful Midgard-serpent ; They call to mind The Fenris-wolf And the ancient runes Of the mighty Odin.”

What else can mankind think of, or dream of, or talk of for the next thousand years but this awful, this unparalleled calamity through which the race has passed ?

A long-subsequent but most ancient and cultivated people, whose memory has, for us, almost faded from the earth, will thereafter embalm the great drama in legends, myths, prayers, poems, and sagas; fragments of which are found to-day dispersed through all literatures in all lands ; some of them, as we shall see, having found their way even into the very Bible revered alike of Jew and Christian :

The Edda continues,

“Then again The wonderful Golden tablets Are found in the grass : In time’s morning, The leader of the gods And Odin’s race Possessed them.”

And what a find was that! This poor remnant of humanity discovers “the golden tablets” of the former