Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

378 CONCLUSIONS.

The abbé adds:

“But it is not clear how they crossed the sea; they passed as though there had been no sea, for they passed over scattered rocks, and these rocks were rolled on the sands. ‘This is why they called the place ‘ranged stones and torn-up sands,’ the name which they gave it in their passage within the sea, the water being divided when they passed.”

They probably migrated along that one of the connecting ridges which, the sea-soundings show us, stretched from Atlantis to the coast of South America.

We have seen in the Hindoo legends that when Rama went to the Island of Lanka to fight the demon Rayana, he built a bridge of stone, sixty miles long, with the help of the monkey-god, in order to reach the island.

In Ovid we read of the “settling down a little” of the island on which the drama of Phaéton was enacted.

In the Norse legends the bridge Bifrost cuts an important figure. One would be at first disposed to regard it as meaning, (as is stated in what are probably later interpolations,) the rainbow; but we see, upon looking closely, that it represents a material fact, an actual structure of some kind.

Gylfe, who was, we are told, a king of Sweden in the ancient days, visited Asgard. He assumed the name of Ganglere, (the walker or wanderer). I quote from the “Younger Hdda, The Creation” :

“Then asked Ganglere, ‘ What is the path from earth to heaven ?’”

The earth here means, I take it, the European colonies which surround the ocean, which in turn surrounds ‘Asgard ; heaven is the land of the godlike race, Asgard. Ganglere therefore asks what is, or was, in the mythological past, the pathway from Europe to the Atlantic island.