is an electric condenser, his gloves an electric conductor. Hrungner, with whom he contends, is petrifaction; the Mokkerkalfe, whom Thjalfe slew, is the magnetic needle. Gunlad is oxygen, Kvaser is sugar, etc. But this will do. Are not these golden keys, with which to unlock the secret chambers of the Eddas! All the deities do not represent phenomena and forces of nature, and this fact gives if possible still more importance to the anthropomorphic interpretation. Some myths are mere creations of the imagination, to give symmetry and poetical finish to the system, or we might say to the drama—to complete the delineations of the characters that appear on the stage of action. Hermod, for instance, is no phenomenon in physical nature: he is the servant of Odin in the character of the latter as the god of war. Odin is the god of the heavens, but it is not in this capacity he sends out the valkyries to pick up the fallen heroes on the field of battle. In rejecting the _historical_ interpretation, we do by no means mean to deny the influence of the mythology upon the social, religious, political and literary life of the Norsemen. But this is not an explanation of the mythology itself, but of its influence upon the minds of the people. If we mean it in a prophetic sense, the Norse mythology has also an historical interpretation. In it was mirrored the grand future of the Norse spirit; by it the Norsemen were taught to make those daring expeditions to every part of the civilized world, making conquests and planting colonies; to cross the briny deep and open the way to Iceland, Greenland and America; to take possession of Normandy in France, subdue England and make inroads into Spain and Italy; to pass between the pillars of Hercules, devastate the classic fields of Greece, and carve their mysterious runes on the marble lion in Athens; to lay the foundations of the Russian Empire, penetrate the walls of Constantinople and swing their two-edged battle-axes in its streets; to sail up the rivers Rhine, the Scheldt, the Seine, and the Loire, conquering Cologne and Aachen and besieging Paris; to lead the van of the chivalry of Europe in rescuing the holy sepulchre and rule over Antioch and Tiberias under Harald; to sever the fetters forged by the Roman emperors, break the crosiers in the hands of the Roman popes and infuse a nobler and freer spirit into the nations of the earth; and by their mythology they were taught to give to the world that germ of liberty that struck root in the earliest literature of France, budded in the Magna Charta of England, and developed its full-blown flowers in the American Declaration of Independence.