TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY BY JACOB GRIMM. TRANSLATED FROM THE FOURTH EDITION. WITH NOTES AND APPENDIX BY JAMES STEVEN STALLYBRASS. VOL. III. LONDON: GEORGE BELL & SONS, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN. 1883. 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 |