Episode 10

Nay Grimm, the German Antiquary, goes so far as to deny that any man Odin ever existed. He proves it by etymology. The word _Wuotan_, which is the original form of _Odin_, a word spread, as name of their chief Divinity, over all the Teutonic Nations everywhere; this word, which connects itself, according to Grimm, with the Latin _vadere_, with the English _wade_ and such like,--means primarily Movement, Source of Movement, Power; and is the fit name of the highest god, not of any man. The word signifies Divinity, he says, among the old Saxon, German and all Teutonic Nations; the adjectives formed from it all signify divine, supreme, or something pertaining to the chief god. Like enough! We must bow to Grimm in matters etymological. Let us consider it fixed that _Wuotan_ means _Wading_, force of _Movement_. And now still, what hinders it from being the name of a Heroic Man and _Mover_, as well as of a god? As for the adjectives, and words formed from it,--did not the Spaniards in their universal admiration for Lope, get into the habit of saying "a Lope flower," "a Lope _dama_," if the flower or woman were of surpassing beauty? Had this lasted, _Lope_would have grown, in Spain, to be an adjective signifying _godlike_ also.

Indeed, Adam Smith, in his Essay on Language, surmises that all adjectives whatsoever were formed precisely in that way: some very green thing, chiefly notable for its greenness, got the appellative name _Green_, and then the next thing remarkable for that quality, a tree for instance, was named the _green_ tree,--as we still say "the _steam_ coach," "four-horse coach," or the like. All primary adjectives, according to Smith, were formed in this way; were at first substantives and things. We cannot annihilate a man for etymologies like that! Surely there was a First Teacher and Captain; surely there must have been an Odin, palpable to the sense at one time; no adjective, but a real Hero of flesh and blood! The voice of all tradition, history or echo of history, agrees with all that thought will teach one about it, to assure us of this.

How the man Odin came to be considered a _god_, the chief god?--that surely is a question which nobody would wish to dogmatize upon. I have said, his people knew no _limits_ to their admiration of him; they had as yet no scale to measure admiration by. Fancy your own generous heart's-love of some greatest man expanding till it _transcended_ all bounds, till it filled and overflowed the whole field of your thought! Or what if this man Odin,--since a great deep soul, with the afflatus and mysterious tide of vision and impulse rushing on him he knows not whence, is ever an enigma, a kind of terror and wonder to himself,--should have felt that perhaps _he_was divine; that _he_ was some effluence of the "Wuotan," "_Movement_", Supreme Power and Divinity, of whom to his rapt vision all Nature was the awful Flame-image; that some effluence of Wuotan dwelt here in him! He was not necessarily false; he was but mistaken, speaking the truest he knew. Agreat soul, any sincere soul, knows not what he is,--alternates between the highest height and the lowest depth; can, of all things, the least measure--Himself! What others take him for, and what he guesses that he may be; these two items strangely act on one another, help to determine one another. With all men reverently admiring him; with his own wild soul full of noble ardors and affections, of whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious new light; a divine Universe bursting all into godlike beauty round him, and no man to whom the like ever had befallen, what could he think himself to be? "Wuotan?" All men answered, "Wuotan!"--And then consider what mere Time will do in such cases; how if a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead. What an enormous _camera-obscura_ magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in the human Memory, in the human Imagination, when love, worship and all that lies in the human Heart, is there to encourage it. And in the darkness, in the entire ignorance; without date or document, no book, no Arundel-marble;only here and there some dumb monumental cairn. Why, in thirty or forty years, were there no books, any great man would grow _mythic_, the contemporaries who had seen him, being once all dead. And in three hundred years, and in three thousand years--! To attempt _theorizing_ on such matters would profit little: they are matters which refuse to be _theoremed_ and diagramed; which Logic ought to know that she _cannot_speak of. Enough for us to discern, far in the uttermost distance, some gleam as of a small real light shining in the centre of that enormous camera-obscure image; to discern that the centre of it all was not a madness and nothing, but a sanity and something.