Considerable has been said on this subject in the preceding pages, and the interpretation which will be adhered to in this volume has been clearly indicated. We propose now to give a general synopsis of the more prominent methods of interpreting Norse mythology. In one thing all undoubtedly agree, namely, that all mythologies embody religious faith. As we, to this day, each in his own way, seek to find God by philosophical speculation (natural theology), by our emotions, by good deeds, or by all these at one time; and as we, when we have found him, rest upon his breast, although we do not fully agree as to our conception of him, each one of us having his own God as each has his own rainbow; thus our forefathers sought God everywhere—in the rocks, in the babbling stream, in the heavy ear of grain, in the star-strewn sky of night, and in the splendor of the sun. It was revelations of divinity that they looked for. The fundamental element in their mythology was a religious one, and this fact must never be lost sight of. To interpret a myth, then, is not only to give its source, but also its aim and object, together with the thoughts and feelings that it awakens in the human breast. Some writers (William and Mary Howitt and others) maintain that the Norse mythology is a degradation of, or aberration from, the _true religion_, which was revealed to man in the earliest period of the history of the human race and is found pure and undefiled in the Bible; that it presents sparkling waters from the original fountain of tradition. They point with seriousness to it as something that bears us on toward the primal period of one tongue and one religion. In reference to the Elder Edda, they say that it descended through vast ages, growing, like all traditions, continually darker, and accumulating lower matter and more divergent and more pagan doctrines, as the walls of old castles become covered with mosses and lichens, till it finally assumed the form it which it was collected from the mouths of the people, and put in a permanent written form. These interpreters claim that through all mythologies there run certain great lines, which converge toward one common center and point to an original source of a religious faith, which has grown dimmer and more disfigured, the further it has gone. The geographical center, they say, from which all these systems of heathen belief have proceeded is the same—Central Asia; they point to the eastern origin of the Norseman; they assert, with full confidence, that the religious creed of the Norseman is the faith of Persia, India, Greece, and every other country, transferred to the snow-capped mountains of Norway and jokuls of Iceland, having only been modified there, so as to give it an air of originality without destroying its primeval features. They argue that Loke of the Norsemen, Pluto of the Greeks, Ahriman of the Persians, Siva of the Hindoos, etc., are all