Beów. l. 1698: and perhaps similarly l. 357, “Helle gemundon.” they worshipped Hel. ----- However as a death in battle did not consign the warrior to Hel, it is usually Hild or Wig who is represented as ravishing away the doomed hero. Hel was no desired object, to be introduced into the epic as the portion of chieftains and kings. FATES.—The Northern creed, and, as it now seems established, the German also, admitted the intervention between man and the gods, of subordinate deities or Fates. I call them subordinate from their peculiar position in the fragmentary portions of mythology that survive; in their nature we must believe them to be of a higher order than the gods, who themselves are doomed one day to perish, and who can probably as little avoid their doom as men, the frailer creatures of their power. It may be that in this, different views prevailed among different classes of men; the warlike princes and their followers, who exulted in tales of battle and feasting, may have been willing to see in Oþinn the supreme disposer of events, while a deeper wisdom lurked in the sacerdotal songs that told how Urðr, Werðandi and Skuld (the Norns of the Past, the Present and the Future) bore inevitable sway over the inhabitants of heaven and earth, and slowly waited for the period which was to confound gods, man and nature in one vast destruction[731]. The Norse view admits however of more than three Norns, though it names those only who have been mentioned; and from the extraordinary relation of those three, it can hardly be doubted that the others are of a different order; moreover it attributes human passions to them which are hardly consistent with the functions of the venerable Fates; in this case it is possible that the Valkyriur, a race of beings whose functions might in some respects be confounded with those of the Nornir, have been so mixed up with them. Man, dealing with the daily affairs of troubled life, thinks more of the past than of the future: to him the present is the child of the past, the past the excuse for or cause of all he does and suffers; his intellect comprehends the events that are completed or in course of completion, but not the indefinite, illimitable probabilities of the undiscovered _to be_; hence perhaps Urðr is considered the oldest and most powerful of the Fates; her work is done, the others are doing or yet to do. Through this progress of opinion it became possible for the conception of the older Fate to include and finally supersede those of the others, as soon as the living belief in their personal agency became weakened. I do not know that any certain trace of these Fates can be found in the High-german countries[732], but in the Low-german the eldest Norn still survives long after the introduction of Christianity, in a sense little removed at times from that of Necessity itself. That this should still have been coupled with a lively feeling of personality