In looking over this list we are immediately struck with a remarkable repetition of various names, some of which are found at once in several counties; and most striking are those which, like the examples already alluded to, give a habitation upon our own shores to the races celebrated in the poetical or historical records of other ages and other lands. There are indeed hardly any enquiries of deeper interest, than those whose tendency is to link the present with the past in the bonds of a mythical tradition; or which presents results of greater importance to him who has studied the modes of thought and action of populations at an early stage of their career. The intimate relations of mythology, law and social institutions, which later ages are too apt scornfully to despise, or superstitiously to imitate, are for them, living springs of action: they are believed in, not played with, as in the majority of _revivals_, from the days of Anytus and Melitus to our own; and they form the broad foundation upon which the whole social polity is established. The people who believe in heroes, originally gods and always god-born, preserve a remembrance of their ancient deities in the gentile names by which themselves are distinguished, long after the rites they once paid to their divinities have fallen into disuse; and it is this record of beings once hallowed, and a cult once offered, which they have bequeathed to us in many of the now unintelligible names of the Marks. Taking these facts into account, I have no hesitation in affirming that the names of places found in the Anglosaxon charters, and yet extant in England, supply no trifling links in the chain of evidence by which we demonstrate the existence among ourselves of a heathendom nearly allied to that of Scandinavia. The Wælsings, the Völsungar of the Edda, and Volsungen of the German Heldensage, have already been noticed in a cursory manner: they are the family whose hero is Siegfried or Sigurdr[103], the centre round which the Nibelungen epos circles. Another of their princes, Fitela, the Norse Sinfiötli, is recorded in the poem of Beówulf[104], and from him appear to have been derived the Fitelingas, whose name survives in Fitling. ----- Footnote 103: In Beówulf (l. 1743), Siegfried is replaced by Sígmund, his father. Here occurs his patronymical appellation of Wælsing (l. 1747), and Wælses eafora (l. 1787). Footnote 104: Lines 1752, 1772. -----