PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION (1844). Now that I am able to put my germinated sprout of German Mythology into its second leafing, I do it with a firmer confidence in the unimpeded progress of its growth. When the first shyness was once overcome, seeking and finding came more quickly together; and facts, that rebuked any effeminate doubt of the reality of scientific discoveries on a field till then considered barren, started up on every side, till now there is a glut of them. Well, I have got my joists and rafters, drawn some lines, laid some courses, and yet guarded against pretending to finality; for who would do that, so long as in one place the materials are wanting, and in another the hands are still full with fetching? I wish to explain all I can, but I am far from being able to explain all I wish. Criticism, often brilliantly successful on foreign fields, had sinned against our native antiquities, and misused most of the means it had. The immortal work of a Roman writer had shed a light of dawn on the history of Germany, which other nations may well envy us: not content with suspecting the book's genuineness (as though the united Middle Ages had been capable of such a product), its statements, sprung from honest love of truth, were cried down, and the gods it attributes to our ancestors were traced to the intrusion of Roman ideas. Instead of diligently comparing the contents of so precious a testimony with the remnants of our heathenism scattered elsewhere, people made a point of minimizing the value of these few fragments also, and declaring them forged, borrowed, absurd. Such few gods as remained unassailed, it was the fashion to make short work of, by treating them as Gallic or Slavic, just as vagrants are shunted off to the next parish-let our neighbours dispose of the rubbish as they can. The Norse Edda, whose plan, style and substance V breathe the remotest antiquity, whose songs lay hold of the heart in a far different way from the extravagantly admired poems of Ossian, they traced to christian and Anglo-Saxon influence, blindly or wilfully overlooking its connexion with the relics of eld in Germany proper, and thinking to set it all down to nurses and spinning-wives (p. 1230), whose very name seemed, to those unacquainted with the essence of folk-lore, to sound the lowest note of contempt. They have had their revenge now, those norns and spindle-bearers. One may fairly say, that to deny the reality of this mythology is as much as to impugn the high antiquity and the continuity of our language: to every nation a belief in gods was as necessary as language. No one will argue from the absence or poverty of memorials, that our forefathers at any given time did not practise their tongue, did not hand it down; yet the lack or scantiness of information is thoughtlessly alleged as a reason for despoiling our heathenism, antecedent to the conversion, of all its contents, so to speak. History teaches us to recognise in language, the farther we are able to follow it up, a higher perfection of form, which declines as culture advances; as the forms of the thirteenth century are superior to our present ones, and those of the ninth and the fifth stand higher still, it may be presumed that German populations of the first three centuries of our era, whose very names have never reached us, must have spoken a more perfect language than the Gothic itself. Now if such inferences as to what is non-extant are valid in language, if its present condition carries us far back to an older and oldest; a like proceeding must be justifiable in mythology too, and from its dry watercourses we may guess the copious spring, from its stagnant swamps the ancient river. Nations hold fast by prescription: we shall never comprehend their tradition, their superstition, unless we spread under it a bed on still heathen soil. And these views are confirmed by what we know to be true of poetry and legend. If the heathens already possessed a finely articulated language, and if we concede to them an abundant stock of religious myths, then song and story could not fail to |