He had also something to say concerning the future of the world. "What hast thou to tell me about it?" said Gangler; and Har replied,--"In the first place there will come a winter;" and then he described the destruction of the world--flood and storm, and ice and fire, and warfare, a supreme conflict; all the powers of evil, the chaotic powers--primeval chaos surging again out of Niflheim and Muspellheim--on one side, the gods, the forming orderly principle of the course of the universe, on the other--all rage within, and through the mighty ash, which itself trembles, "Groans that aged tree." Monsters and gods alike fall, killing each other, and one cannot say with whom the victory lies; for though the sun, moon, and stars are made away with, and the earth sinks into the flood, it soon emerges again, "beauteously green," destined, as it would seem, to run a second course. Brighter, purer? The account is so mixed that one cannot say, and why should we puzzle over it; perhaps they knew as little what they thought and hoped as we know about them--those old song-singers and myth-spinners of days gone by, as one of them says,-- "Few may see Further forth Than when Odin Meets the wolf." Notwithstanding, we cannot help feeling, as we contemplate this myth, that there was something noble, very grimly courageous in its fatalism. Simrock says, "the course of Northern mythology is like a drama." The world's beginning, the golden years, the first shadow of evil, evil that came with times, evil fated to come, the troubles of various kinds, all death shadows which fell upon the gods (we shall trace them in the following tales); and above all, hanging over all, crowning all, the twilight, the struggle, the end, the renewing; for it is not, be it observed, the end of the world, of time, of succession of events that is recorded in this myth (called the Ragnarök Myth), but rather of the struggling powers that had been brought by these, that had formed these. Looking through this drama two things chiefly strike us, fatalism and combat. The two do not contradict one another. The gods fight the giants from the earliest times; they go on fighting them in a thousand ways, even though they know that their own final defeat and destruction are fixed--they ward off the evil day as far as possible, hoping through its shadow again and again, dauntless to the end. It is impossible to help admiring the impulses which led to the building up, and dictated the worship of this idea,--the worship of the gods who were to die, who were, in spite of most courageous defiance of it, after all but the servants of the inevitable. Of course it was perfectly simple and natural that this conception of unceasing strife, of the alternate victory and defeat of light and darkness, cold and heat, should arise in the minds of any worshippers of the natural world, but it must, one would think, have acquired some moral significance to these heathen