party of Norwegians declared that they narrowly escaped being utilised for that purpose on an expedition to Sweden; and the Saga of the island of Gotland remembers the custom. On the Continent, too, human sacrifice seems to have continued as long as heathenism, and we even hear of an outburst of it among the converted Franks. In Friesland human beings seem frequently to have been sacrificed by drowning. Except perhaps in the last-named country, the victims were almost invariably prisoners taken in war, slaves, or outlaws. it was

If the sacrifice was a public one and probably in any case followed by a feast, which lasted till the ale gave out, and no longer. A Norwegian archbishop reveals the importance of the ale even at Christian festivals when he finds it necessary to ordain that a wedding can yet be held, even though there be nothing but whey to celebrate it with, and other Norwegian ecclesiastical ordinances enact that every farmer shall brew so much ale in preparation for the various Church festivals. The drinking itself began with sacrifice in the form of toasts drunk to the gods, and this seems also to have been the case in Germany, for we hear of "drinking wine for the love of the devil." Jonas of Bobbio relates how he found a party of men sitting round an immense vessel of ale, who described themselves as worshipping Wodan. We also hear of an individual in a temple "opima libamina exhibens usque ad vomitum cibo potuque replebatur." Centuries earlier, Tactius tells us that when the Romans surprised the Germans at a religious festival they cut down an intoxicated foe. It seems that songs and dances were common at such times, and we hear of the wearing of animal masks at Yule and at funeral and memorial feasts. Several other Scandinavian festivals are worthy of notice, such as the "greeting ale" and the "ale of departure." Even when a Norwegian chief is about to flee from the swift vengeance of Harold Fairhair, the "departure ale" has yet to be brewed. Still clearer traces of sacrifice are discernible in the feast, for which the Norwegian laws stipulate, on the occasion of granting rights in the family to an illegitimate son, and also in that made by a slave on his liberation.

During the course of the great Scandinavian festivals, as well as at other times, it appears to have been the custom for private individuals to offer sacrifice for the purpose of propitiation or of learning their future. The means employed in this latter case seem sometimes to have been the sanctified twigs mentioned above. Tacitus knows of divination by twigs and also mentions various other forms of augury. In Friesland the casting of lots seems to have played a particularly important part, and was employed to select men for sacrifices.

We have already had occasion to refer to officiating priests. The

1 Even after the Reformation a Danish bishop finds it necessary to combat the deep-rooted popular belief, that the more the guests drank at a funeral, the better the dead man fared in the other world; and a French traveller says that at such feasts the Danes drink to the souls of the dead, ce qui leur fait grand bien.

Priests. Kings.

Kings. Priestesses

491

term, though permissible, is somewhat misleading, as the existence of a special class of caste of priests in Scandinavia is much disputed, and there seems to be considerable divergence on this point among the various Germanic races at different times. In Iceland any leading settler who built or came into possession of a temple officiated in it himself, and was called a gooi (pl. goðar), the connexion of which with goð (god) suggests that the priestly function was older than the temporal authority. In Norway the balance of probability seems to lie with the theory that the earls and local chiefs (hersar), and probably also the petty kings, each administered the chief temple of his district, perhaps with a goði or gyðja, priestess (probably of his own family), to help him. In Sweden, where worship was more centralised and systematised, there is some slight evidence for the existence of goðar, but it is clear that the king was the high-priest of the people. It is recorded from prehistoric times that when one of their kings failed to sacrifice the people attributed to him a famine which ensued, and sacrificed him "for plenty." As late as the eleventh century they expelled their Christian king for refusal to sacrifice, and the idea of the king's responsibility for bad weather, for instance, can be traced as late as the reign of Gustavus Vasa.

This idea of royal responsibility for national misfortunes is paralleled among the Burgundians in the fourth century. For Denmark the only evidence is the occurrence of the word gooi on two Runic stones of about the ninth and tenth centuries. In England there must have been a more specialised priestly caste, with disabilities unknown to the Norwegians, for Bede tells us that heathen priests might not bear arms. For the Continent we have extremely little evidence. An Old German glossary translates cotinc (formed from cot, god), not by presbyter but by tribunus, and on the other hand the Old German êwart," guardian of law," and the Frisian and Low German asega, eosega, "law-sayer," are used to denote "priest"; so we may perhaps assume that the functions of priest were not very highly specialised at the close of heathendom. Tacitus knows of a regular priesthood, whose only administrative function consists in opening public assemblies (probably with a sacrifice, as in Iceland) and in playing some part in their procedure. We hear occasionally of a chief-priest, as among the Northumbrians, and among the Burgundians. Among the latter he was called sinistus, and it is worth noting that sinistans is the word chosen by Ulfilas for "elders."

Priestesses are rarely mentioned in the North, though they seem to have been common among the Germans of Tacitus' time.

The well-known statement of Tacitus, that the Germani do not confine their gods within walls, but dedicate groves and trees to them, does not seem to have been of universal application even in his own day. But it is quite certain that he is right in the main with regard to the prevalence of grove- and tree-sanctuaries. The frequent occurrence of such place-names as the German Heiligenloh, Heiligenforst, and the

Scandinavian Lund (the latter often compounded with the names of Odin, Thor and Frey) would alone suffice to prove the earlier existence of groves, "grim with ancient religious rites," as Claudian describes them. Of sacred trees, perhaps the most famous was the robor Jovis in Hesse. An interesting old Scandinavian proverb, recorded in Iceland, may be quoted here: "One must worship an oak, if one is to live under it." After the erection of a temple the sacred tree may have lived on beside it, and indeed probably conditioned the form of the temple itself. The Icelandic temple, as we know from recent excavations, consisted of a hall, like the hall of the ordinary dwelling-house, and at its further end a smaller building, with slightly rounded corners, which was the real sanctuary, with the altar in the middle and the images of the gods, generally three in number, standing round it. The outer hall, with its sacred pillars and its row of fires down the middle, is thought to have been a later addition for the convenience of worshippers, but the form of the inner building is considered to shew descent from the tree-sanctuary. It has been suggested that the round churches, only found on Germanic territory, are the lineal descendants of the heathen temple, and hence of the tree-sanctuary.

Besides the images, the inner temple contained the sacrificial bowl and twigs, and the sacred ring which the priest wore on his arm at all assemblies, and on which oaths were sworn. Both temple and images appear to have been very highly decorated, sometimes even with gold and silver.

Two other types of sanctuary deserve mention. On the Continent we hear of pillars, apparently called Irminsul (translated universalis columna), which may well have been a side-development from the treesanctuary. Charles the Great destroyed the most famous of these, in Westphalia. The northern hörg is frequently assumed to have been a stone altar or "high place." But the Norwegian laws speak of "making a house and calling it a hörg." It is only mentioned in connexion with female deities, or with Njörd, but the occurrence of "Thorsharg" and "Odinsharg" as place-names in Sweden renders it doubtful whether it could have been limited to the use of female (or originally female) deities, at any rate in Sweden. The cognate Old German haruc is sometimes translated lucus or nemus, sometimes only by the vague fanum; while the Anglo-Saxon hearg seems to be a comprehensive term for any kind of sanctuary, almost corresponding to the Scandinavian vé, though this includes Things.

In Scandinavia the violater of any sanctuary is called "wolf in holy places," and becomes an outlaw in his own land, though we note that he may be well received in other Scandinavian countries. In Friesland those who broke into a temple to rob it were sacrificed to the god whom they had offended. It is difficult to say how far, on the other hand, the sanctuaries offered a refuge to accused persons and criminals. The abuse

Funeral Customs. Life after Death

493

of the right of asylum in medieval churches- many of them only transformed temples - suggests that this was a prominent characteristic of heathen temples. On the other hand we learn from an Icelandic Saga that the god Frey would not tolerate the presence of an outlaw even in the neighbourhood of his temple.

It will now be convenient to consider the funeral customs of the Teutonic races. Excavations in Scandinavia as well as literary records shew that towards the close of heathen times the great majority of the dead were interred in barrows, often in their ships, with some of their valuables, and occasionally with horses, dogs and other animals. Slaves sometimes accompany their master or mistress. Leo Diaconus informs us that in the tenth century the Swedes in the Byzantine Empire used to kill their captives and burn their bodies with those of their own slain, apparently with the idea of providing their friends with servants in the next world. The practice of suttee was not unknown, though very rare. In some cases everything found in the barrow has been burnt, but inhumation is the commoner practice. It is noteworthy that weapons are rarely found in the period preceding about A.D. 500, while after that time, in the Viking Age, weapons form the most important part of the goods placed in the grave. It is sometimes shewn in our sources that all these objects, including the ship, or occasionally a chariot, are provided with the intention of supplying the dead with what they will need in the next world, or with the means of getting there.

Besides a few indications of a belief in rebirth, there are no less than three forms of life after death in Scandinavian belief alone. We will begin with the most famous, Valhöll (the hall of the slain), where those who fell in battle feasted and fought into eternity. But when we come

to apply the commonly accepted theory that all those slain in fight passed into Valhöll, we find it impossible to make it fit the facts as reported to us. A number of the Edda poems seem to know nothing about Valhöll, and despatch their mightiest warriors to the dreary abode of Hel, and the same treatment is frequently meted out in the sagas. The likeliest explanation seems to be that Valhöll was intimately bound up with the cult of Odin, which, as we have seen, probably entered into the lives of a comparatively small class, and was very recent in the North. The influence of the cult may perhaps be traced in the sudden appearance of weapons in graves about the fifth century. The great historical importance of the Valhöll idea lies in the stimulus it gave to desperate courage in battle. The influence of a similar belief1 among the Japanese of our own day was evident in their war with Russia. It was no doubt belief in some such palace of the dead, only to be reached by those who died of wounds, which induced the aged among the Heruli to accept a voluntary death inflicted by stabbing, and it has been shewn that the formal "marking" of a dying man, mentioned two or three times in 1 Lafcadio Hearn, Japan, an Interpretation, p. 507.

494

The continued Presence of the Dead

the North, is probably a substitute for the older custom of the Heruli in the fifth or sixth century.

Hel answers to the Greek Hades, a shadowy region of which we hear very little in the Sagas, where the word hel does indeed frequently occur, but usually merely with the signification of "death."

66

We have already seen that the conception of a future life spent by the ghost in or near its burial-place was by far the commonest, not only in Scandinavia, but all over Germanic territory. It would not be surprising to find that this, evidently the oldest belief about the dead, was connected with the faith of Thor, and some testimony to that effect is afforded by the inscriptions on a Runic grave-monument in Denmark : "May Thor consecrate these mounds," or in two other cases "these runes." In Sweden we find an inscription which has been translated "Thor give peace." The sign of the hammer occurs on several other monuments, no doubt with a similar force. With regard to the variant of this belief, the "dying into mountains," all the evidence seems to connect it with Thor. In two cases out of the four on record we are explicitly informed that the persons "believed in Thor." In the third case, that of the kinsmen of one Aud, we know no further detail of their religion except in the case of Aud's brother, of whom it is stated that "he believed in Christ, but invoked Thor in voyages and difficulties, and whenever he thought it mattered most."

It is clearly this belief in the continued presence of the dead which caused the widespread worship of them already discussed, and it is this belief, too, which has peopled all Germanic territory with ghosts, whether malignant trolls, slayers of the living, or friendly spirits.

Like all other religions, that of the Germanic peoples was a mass of mixed elements, a jumble of many different stages of culture. Primitive magical rites were no doubt freely practised, and in view of the agelong survival of such rites in rustic festivals and rustic faith, it would be the greatest mistake to belittle their importance in earlier Germanic life. But our sources refer to them so little that we are justified in suspecting the mass of these practices to be already declining into the observances of popular superstition, with possibly nearly as little conscious religious significance as to-day.

There were still traces of an early grim idea of placation by sacrifice : the god of the dead, or the daemonic being who inhabits the sea, demands a human life, and one must be offered that others may be safe. But except for a few legendary instances, we see that the Germanic peoples have progressed so far in corporate sense that the community only offers the lives of those outside its paleoutlaws or captives to whom it knows no obligations. Only in Friesland is there any definite evidence that members of the community were immolated.

But the prevalent idea of sacrifice is a more comfortable one. Gifts are made to the gods, who requite them with favours, an idea which