All the Aryan nationalities practised cremation in some form or other, or had practised it; most only gave it up upon the introduction of Christianity. The time is too remote, therefore, to say when this form of interment was in truth a novelty; and the fact that the bronze age in Europe is, as distinguished from that of stone, a corpse-burning age, is one of the reasons which urge us to the conclusion that the bronze-using invaders were of the Aryan family.[106] The Indians, owing to their excessive reverence for Agni the fire-god, adhered to the practice most faithfully; though the very same reason (namely, their regard for the purity of fire) made the reformed Iranian religion utterly repudiate it--a fact which might seem strange did we not know how Zoroastrianism was sometimes governed by a spirit of opposition to the older faith.[107] Among the Norsemen about the time of the introduction of Christianity into Scandinavia, Burn? or Bury? became a test-question, and a constant cause of dispute between the rival creeds.
In the Northern religion, too, therefore, we have the same leading ideas which we have signalized in the Indian or Grecian systems. Especially does that notion of the breath of the body, or the smoke of the funeral pyre representing the soul of the hero and carried upward under care of the wind, come prominently forward. This might be expected because, it will be remembered, the wind in the Northern mythology is not, as with the Indians, a servant of Yama only, or as with the Greeks a lesser divinity, but is the first of all the gods. To Odin is assigned the task of collecting the souls of heroes who had fallen in battle; and there are few myths more poetical than that which pictures him riding to battle-fields to execute his mission. He is accompanied by his Valkyriur, ‘the choosers,’ a sort of Amazonian houris, half human, half-godlike, who ride through the air in the form of swans; wherefore they--who are originally, perhaps, the clouds--are often called in the Eddas, Odin’s swan-maidens. It has been said that this myth lived on in after-ages in the form of the _Phantom Army_ and _Herne the Hunter_: and the essential part of it, the myth of the soul carried away by the wind, lived on more obscurely in a hundred other tales, some of which we may glance at in our next chapter upon _Mythology_. But while this idea of the mounting soul is often clearly expressed--as, for instance, where in Beowulf,[108] in the last scene, the hero is burnt by the seashore, it is said of him that he _wand to wolcum_, ‘curled to the clouds,’ imaging well the curling smoke of the pyre--there still lingered on other ideas of the death-home, a subterraneous land (Helheim, Hel’s home) ruled over by the goddess Hel,[109] and an infernal Styx-like stream, with the bridge of Indian mythology transferred to the lower world. And so much were the three distinct ideas interwoven, that in the myth of Balder each one may be traced. For here the sun-god, who is the very origin and prototype of the two more exalted elements of the creed of the heavenward journey,[110] has himself to stoop downward to the gates of Hel. If this legend sanctified for the heathens the practice of fire-burial, they had certainly so much excuse for their obstinate adherence to the older custom, as one of the most beautiful myths ever told might plead for them. We may look upon the story of the death and burning of Balder in two aspects--first as an image of the setting sun, next as an expression of men’s thoughts concerning death, and the course of the soul to its future home. If in this latter respect the story seems to mix up two different myths concerning the other world, we need not be surprised at that.