The business of this chapter is with the heathendom of the Saxons; not that portion of it which yet subsists among us in many of our most cherished superstitions, some of which long lurked in the ritual of the unreformed church, and may yet lurk in the habits and belief of many Protestants; but that which was the acknowledged creed of the Saxon, as it was of other Germanic populations; which once had priests and altars, a ritual and ceremonies, temples and sacrifices, and all the pomp and power of a church-establishment. The proper subjects of mythological inquiry are the gods and godlike heroes: it is through the latter—for the most part, forms of the gods themselves—that a race connects itself with the former. Among the nations of our race royalty is indeed _iure divino_, for the ruling families are in direct genealogical descent from divinity, and the possession of Wóden’s blood was the indispensable condition of kingship. In our peculiar system, the vague records of Tuisco, the earth-born god[608], and Man, the origin and founders of the race, have vanished; the mystical cosmogony of Scandinavia has left no traces among us[609]; but we have nevertheless a mythological scheme which probably yielded neither in completeness nor imaginative power to those of the German or the Norwegian. ----- Footnote 608: “Celebrant carminibus antiquis.... Tuisconem deum terrâ editum et filium Mannum, originem gentis conditoresque.” Germ. ii. So sung the earliest Greeks: ἀντίθεον δὲ Πέλασγον ἐν ὑψικομοῖσιν ὅρεσσι γαῖα μέλαιν’ ἀνέηκεν ἵνα θνήτων γένος εἴη. Footnote 609: There is no better account of this than Geijer gives in his History of Sweden, vol. i. _passim_. ----- In the following pages I propose to take into consideration, first the Gods and Goddesses, properly so called: secondly, the Monsters or Titanic powers of our old creed: thirdly, the intermediate and as it were ministerial beings: and lastly the god-born and heroic personages of the epopoea. The prudence or the contempt of the earliest Saxon Christians has left but sparing record of what Augustine and his brother missionaries overthrew. Incidental notices indeed are all that remain in any part of Teutonic Europe; and on the continent, as well as in England, it is only by the collation of minute and isolated facts,—often preserved to us in popular superstitions, legends and even nursery tales,—that we can render probable the prevalence of a religious belief identical in its most characteristic features with that which we know to have been entertained in Scandinavia. Yet whatsoever we can thus recover, proves that, in all main points, the faith of the island Saxons was that of their continental brethren.