The myths and legends of the Teutonic races supply many illustrations of primitive attempts to account for some of the more striking external phenomena of nature. In comparing these interpretations with those of the Greeks, we cannot fail to perceive the influence of the different scenery and climate amid which they took their birth. The dwellers in the west of Scandinavia spent their lives under the shadow of lofty, rugged fjelds, surmounted by vast plains of snow. They were familiar with the gleam of glaciers, the crash of ice-falls, the tumult of avalanches. Cloud and mist enshrouded them for weeks together. Heavy rains from the broad Atlantic swelled their torrents and waterfalls. Out of the dark forests, the naked rock rose in endless fantastic and suggestive shapes. The valleys were strewn with blocks of every size detached from the cliffs above. Mounds of earth and stones, like huge graves, mottled the lower grounds over which they had been dropped by old glaciers and ice-sheets. It was a region difficult of access and hard to traverse, stern and forbidding in aspect, abounding in gigantic, fantastic, and uncouth features, while the harshness of its topography was but little tempered by that atmospheric softness which sometimes veils the rocky nakedness of sunnier climes. Away from the great mountain-tracts of Norway, though the topography was on a diminished scale, there were many features similar in kind, and fitted to awaken like fancies in the minds of those who dwelt among them. The hill groups that rise out of the great Germanic plain, such as the Hartz and the detached heights of central Scotland, though far less imposing than the Scandinavian fjelds abound nevertheless in picturesque details. Along the sides of their cliffs, especially in the narrow valleys by which they are traversed, crags and pinnacles of odd and often imitative shapes rise one above another. Solitary boulders, unlike any of the rocks around, are strewn over the hills and scattered far across the plains. Green, grassy mounds, like gigantic earthworks, or groups of sepulchral tumuli, stand conspicuously on the bare heathy moors. And when to these singular natural features there is added the strangely impressive influence of the clouds, mists, and other meteorological conditions that mark the changeful climate of western Europe, we are presented with such a combination of effective causes as might well stimulate the fancy of an imaginative people, and might, among the members of the great Teutonic family, evoke feelings and superstitions not less characteristic than those of ancient Greece.