Hauk Erlendsson, an Icelander of distinction in the fourteenth century, made a collection of treatises in one volume for his own amusement and behoof. It contains the _Volospá_, the most famous of all the Northern mythical poems, the Sibyl's song of the doom of the gods; it contains also the _Landnámabók_, the history of the colonisation of Iceland; _Kristni Saga_, the history of the conversion to Christianity; the history of _Eric the Red_, and _Fóstbræðra Saga_, the story of the two sworn brethren, Thorgeir and Thormod the poet. Besides these records of the history and the family traditions of Iceland and Greenland, there are some mythical stories of later date, dealing with old mythical themes, such as the life of Ragnar Lodbrok. In one of them, the _Heidreks Saga_, are embedded some of the most memorable verses, after _Volospá_, in the old style of Northern poetry--the poem of the _Waking of Angantyr_. The other contents of the book are as follows: geographical, physical, and theological pieces; extracts from St. Augustine; the _History of the Cross_; the _Description of Jerusalem_; the _Debate of Body and Soul_; _Algorismus_ (by Hauk himself, who was an arithmetician); a version of the _Brut_ and of _Merlin's Prophecy_; _Lucidarium_, the most popular medieval handbook of popular science. This is the collection, to which all the ends of the earth have contributed, and it is in strange and far-fetched company like this that the Northern documents are found. In Greece, whatever early transactions there may have been with the wisdom of Egypt or Phoenicia, there is no such medley as this. Another illustration of the literary chaos is presented, even more vividly than in the contents of Hauk's book, by the whalebone casket in the British Museum. Weland the smith (whom Alfred introduced into his _Boethius_) is here put side by side with the Adoration of the Magi; on another side are Romulus and Remus; on another, Titus at Jerusalem; on the lid of the casket is the defence of a house by one who is shooting arrows at his assailants; his name is written over him, and his name is _Ægili_,--Egil the master-bowman, as Weland is the master-smith, of the Northern mythology. Round the two companion pictures, Weland on the left and the Three Kings on the right, side by side, there go wandering runes, with some old English verses about the "whale," or walrus, from which the ivory for these engravings was obtained. The artist plainly had no more suspicion than the author of _Lycidas_ that there was anything incorrect or unnatural in his combinations. It is under these conditions that the heroic poetry of Germania has been preserved; never as anything more than an accident among an infinity of miscellaneous notions, the ruins of ancient empires, out of which the commonplaces of European literature and popular philosophy have been gradually collected.