Vile and Ye over Asgard, and he himself, with all the gods and a great many other people, wandered out, first westward to Gardarike (Eussia), and then south to Saxland (Germany). He had many sons, and
who conquered Britain in the fifth century, counted Odin in the number of their ancestors. The traditions go on to tell how he conquered Denmark, founded Odinse (Odinsve—Odin's Sanctuary; comp. ve with the German Wei in Weinacht), and gave the kingdom to his son Skjold (shield); how he conquered Sweden, founded the Sigtuna temple, and gave the country to his son Yngve; how finally Norway had to submit to him, and be ruled by a third son of Odin, Saming.
It has been seriously contended,—and it would form an important element in an epic based on the historical Odin,—that a desire of being revenged on the Romans was one of the ruling principles of Odin's whole conduct. Driven by those foes of universal liberty from his former home in the east, his resentment was the more violent, since the Teutons thought it a sacred duty to revenge all injuries, especially those offered to kinsmen or country. Odin had no other view in traversing so many distant lands, and in establishing with so much zeal his doctrines of valor, than to arouse all Teutonic nations, and unite them against so formidable and odious a race as the Romans. And we, who live in the light of the nineteenth century, and with the records before us, can read the history of the convulsions of Europe during the decline of the Roman empire; we can understand how that leaven, which Odin left in the bosoms of the believers in the asa-faith, first fermented a long time in secret; but we can also see how in the fullness of time, the signal given, the descendants of Odin fell like a swarm of locusts upon this unhappy empire, and, after giving it many terrible shocks, eventually overturned it, thus completely avenging the insult offered so many centuries before by Pompey to their founder Odin. We can understand how it became possible for " those vast multitudes, which the populous north poured from her frozen loins, to pass the Rhine and the Danube, and come like a deluge on the south, and spread beneath Gibraltar and the Libyan sands;" how it were possible, we say, for them so largely to remodel and invigorate a considerable part of Europe, nay, how they could succeed in overrunning and overturning "the rich but rotten, the mighty but marrowless, the disciplined but diseased, Roman empire; that gigantic and heartless and merciless usurpation of soulless materialism and abject superstition of universal despotism, of systemized and relentless plunder, and of depravity deep as hell." In connection with this subject we would refer our readers to Mallet's Northern Antiquities, pp. 79-83, where substantially the same account is given; to Norse Mythology, pp. 232-236; to George Stephen's Runic Monuments, Vol. I; and to Charles Kingsley's The Roman and the Teuton.
