No reader will be at a loss to perceive that this fourth race of men is a mythologic creation. These rulers of the elements, fire, water, wind,—_Snaer_, or snow; _Jokul_, or frost; _Faunn_, or frozen snow; _Snifa_, or sleet,—with many others, sufficiently attest this curious fact. Whether the Norwegians invented these elemental gods first, and called their mortal heroes after them; or whether they elevated those heroes after death to the dignity of local gods, we shall not attempt to discuss. The probability is, that in this country, the march of the human mind was the same as in other countries, viz., that men celebrated for their great qualities were believed to have originally sprung from a divine source, and after this life to return to that source; to be invested in another state with a superiority akin to that which they enjoyed in this. As to a northern inhabitant, the sea and the winds were the most important elements, so the deities that they obeyed were the most powerful, the most dreaded, the most worshipped. Every page of the earliest Norwegian history (or fable, if the reader pleases) bears evidence to this inference, that long prior to the arrival of the Goths in that region there was a religion quite distinct from that which followed it; one of truly primitive character, which admitted of no refinement, which dealt with sensible objects, which appealed to the fears and hopes of mankind. The honour in which Thor, the father of Nor, and the common ancestor of all the Norwegian princes, was held, sufficiently accounts for his superiority over Odin himself, in the religious creed of that people. The Danes and Swedes held the former, the Norwegians the latter, to be the supreme god,—supreme, at least, as far as the government of this world is concerned. Hence there must, at some period subsequent to Odin’s arrival, have been an amalgamation of the two religions. If the successors of Odin in Denmark and Sweden forced the Norwegians to acknowledge him as a divinity, and to place his statue with that of Thor, it is manifest that they only paid him a secondary veneration; Thor sitting in state, surrounded by all the attributes of majesty, while the warrior god—the foreign Asiatic god—was made to stand beside him. On this subject, however, more in the proper place.[4]