reality but three kinds of people in the world: some that work energetically for noble and eternal purposes, and their root is in Asaheim; some that work equally energetically, but for evil and temporal ends, and their root is in Jotunheim; and many who distinguished themselves only by sloth and impotence, and their root is in Niflheim with the goddess Hel or death, in Hvergelmer, where the serpent Nidhug, with all his reptile brood, gnaws at their lives. Thus the Gothic race is reflected in Ygdrasil, and if our poets will study it they will find that this grand myth is itself in fact a root in the Urdar-fountain, and from it may spring an Ygdrasil of poetry, extending long branches throughout the poetical world and delighting the nations of the earth. Beneath that root of Ygdrasil, which shoots down to Jotunheim, there is a fountain called after its watcher _Mimer’s Fountain_, in which wisdom and knowledge are concealed. The name Mimer means the _knowing_. The giants, being older than the asas, looked deeper than the latter into the darkness of the past. They had witnessed the birth of the gods and the beginning of the world, and they foresaw their downfall. Concerning both these events, the gods had to go to them for knowledge, an idea which is most forcibly expressed in the Völuspá, the first song in the Elder Edda, where a vala, or prophetess, from Jotunheim is represented as rising up from the deep and unveiling the past and future to gods and men. It is this wisdom that Mimer keeps in his fountain. Odin himself must have it. In the night, when the sun has set behind the borders of the earth, he goes to Jotunheim. Odin penetrates the mysteries of the deep, but he must leave his eye in pawn for the drink which he receives from the fountain of knowledge. But in the glory of morning dawn, when the sun rises again from Jotunheim, Mimer drinks from his golden horn the clear mead which flows over Odin’s pawn. Heaven and this lower world mutually impart their wisdom to each other.