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A verse, the 22nd, on the Rune Ing is much more clearly ancient. Ing" is the divine ancestor of the Ingaevones, one of the names of the many-named hero from whom the Northern tribes of Scandia and Angeln sprang. The verse is the only one in the whole poem that seems to belong purely to the original document

Ing was the first

Of heroes beheld,
Went over the wave;

amid the East Danes,
till Eastward he then

Thus by the Heardings

his wain followed him!
this hero was named,1

In the explanation of this given by Grimm, Ing and the Wain (a distinctive mark, he says, of ancient gods, heroes, and kings) are mixed up with the Norse gods. Ten Brink says the chariot was the emblem of the god Ing, or Frea, as well as of the goddess Nerthus. But the passage puzzles them, and their explanation is vague. V. Rydberg, in his Teutonic Mythology (English translation, p. 180), claims to have solved the difficulty, and he makes the waen of the third line not a waggon, but the proper name of the hero Vagn, Hadding's giant foster-father, who is also called Vagnhofde. He is so called by the Haddings, the Heardings of the Anglo-Saxon text. The lines will now read, and the difference is great

Ing was first seen among the East Danemen;
Then he betook himself eastward over the sea.
Vagn hastened to follow;

Thus the Heardings called this hero.

This strophe then is said to enshrine an episode in the first Northern Epic, broken fragments of which only remain scattered here and there in Sagas, the epic of the "first great war in the world," as it is called by the seeress in Volospa.

That mythic war began between the Asas and the Vans, the two great god-clans, and had its counterpart in a war between the three great Teutonic races, but the main contest is between Ing (Yngwe or Swiþdaeg) and Hearding (Hadding). In this contest, as in the Trojan war, the gods join. All the Vans who had now driven the Asas into exile favour Ing, but Odin, Thor, and Heimdal are on the side of Hadding. In his early youth Hadding has been carried to Jötunheim by Thor, and brought up there by Vagnhofde, one of the giants; and during his stay is saved again from great danger by Odin himself, who rides away with him over sea and land on Sleipnir. When he grows up he becomes the chief of the tribes of Eastern Teutondom, and makes war on the tribes of Northern and Western Teutondom. Ing comes forth from Asgard on the Scandian peninsula, and calls on all the dwellers and on the Danes to follow him against the Eastern Teutons over the sea. "Ing was first seen among

1 I insert the Anglo-Saxon

X (Ing) waes aerest

gesewen secgun,
ofer waeg gewat,
Jus Heardingas

mid East denum op he sidðan est

waen aefter ran! Cone haele nemdun.

Rune Song, 11. 67-70.

the East Danemen, and then went eastward over the wave." The Danes and Swedes thus go across the Baltic with Ing to the seat of war. A great battle takes place with Hadding, and Hadding is on the point of perishing, when Odin suddenly brings Vagnhofde to Hadding's help, and places him in the battle beside his foster-son. This is expressed in the Rune strophe by the phrase "Vagn made haste to follow. So the Heardings (the followers of Hadding) called the hero." Hadding, all the same, is utterly defeated.

This is V. Rydberg's explanation, and, if we may accept his upbuilding of the myth out of Saxo and the Northern Sagas, it sounds well, and is a literary curiosity. It is as strange to find this single verse lost as it were in an Anglo-Saxon poem, and referring to a mythic epic which concerns the Teutons, as it is to find the equally ancient piece about Scyld in the beginning of Beowulf.

THE WANDERER

"Oft must I, lonely, at each early dawn

Bewail my care. There's not one living man
10. To whom I now dare tell my hidden heart
With open freedom-O full well I know,
It is a noble habit in an earl,

To lock the cupboard of his soul, and safe

Keep his thought-hoard, while, as he will, he thinks.
A wearied mind may not withstand the Wyrd,

Nor any troubled spirit plan its aid;

Wherefore those eager for their Honour bind,
Close-locked within the coffer of their breast,
Their dreary thought and so must I tie up
20. My soul in fetters; I, so poor, careworn,

Cut off from home, from all my kinsman far,
Since, long, long years ago, the dark of earth
Wrapt my Gold-friend; and I have ever since
Gone winter-woeful o'er the woven seas!
Sad then, I sought a treasure-giver's hall,
Where I might find, or far or near, some Lord,
Who in the mead-hall would my memory know,
Or will to comfort me a friendless man,

Or pleasure me with joys!

Who tries it, knows 30. How cruel sorrow for a comrade is

To him who few of loved fore-standers has!

He holds the exile's path, not plaited gold; A frozen bosom, not the fruits of earth! He minds him of the hall, of heroes there, Of taking gifts, and how his golden friend Feasted his youth. Fallen, fallen is all that joy! O well he knows this, who must long forego The wise redes of his loved, his friendly Lord, But most when sleep and sorrow, both at one, 40. Bind up the poor, the lonely wanderer's soul! Him dreameth then that he doth clip and kiss His Man-lord, and together head and hands Lay on his knee, as once, when at his will, In days gone by the Gift-stool he enjoyed. Then doth the friendless man awake again, And sees before him heave the fallow waves, The foam-birds bathe, and broaden out their wings, And falling sleet and snow, shot through with hail : Then all the heavier is his wound of heart,

50. Sore for its own, and sorrow is renewed.

In dreams, his kinsmen flit across his mind,

With songs he greets them, glad, he watches them;
But these heroic comrades swim away!

The ghost of these air-floaters brings to him

Few well-known words! Once more his grief is new,
Who now must send, again and yet again,

His weary spirit o'er the binding seas!

So in this world I may not understand

Wherefore my mind does not grow black as night,

60. Whene'er I think all on the life of men,

How suddenly they gave their house-floor up,

These mighty-mooded Thegns! Thus doth Mid-Garth,
Day after day, droop down and fall to nought.
Wherefore no man is wise, till he has owned
His share of years on earth! The wise must be
Patient, not too hot-hearted, nor of words
Too quick, nor heedless, nor too weak in war,
Too fearful, or too fain, nor yet of goods

Too greedy, nor too keen to boast, until
70. He know his way! A man must wait, whene'er
He make a vow, till, bold, he surely know
Whither will turn the thought within his heart.
Grave men should feel how phantom-like it is,
When all this world's weal stands awaste; as now,
Unnumbered, o'er this land, are ruined towns,
Swept by the storm, thick covered by white frost,
Dismantled all their courtyards, and the Hall
Where wine was drunk, in dust! Low lies its Lord,
Bereft of joy; and all the peers have fallen,

80. Haughty, before the rampart. War seized some
And bore them on death-paths; and one a ship
Took o'er the towering wave! The hoary wolf
Another tore when dead; and one an earl
Hid in the hollowed earth with dreary face.

So hath men's Maker wasted this Earth's home,
Until the work of elder giants stood

Void of its Burghers, all bereft of joys!

Who wisely has thought o'er this ruined Stead,
And this dark life doth deeply muse upon ;·
90. Gray-haired in soul—in exile oft recalls

Uncounted slaughters, and this Word cries out

'Where went the horse, where went the Man? Where went the Treasure-giver?

Where have the seats of feasting gone? and where the joys in hall?
Alas, the beaker bright! alas, the byrnied warrior!

Alas, the people's pride! O how is fled that time,

Beneath the Night-helm gloomed, as if it ne'er had been.
Alone is left, to tell of those loved peers,

This wall huge-high, spotted with carven snakes!
The strength of ashen spears took off the earls,
100. Blood-thirsty weapons, and the far-famed Wyrd!
Lo! these hewn cliffs are beaten by the storms,
The snow-drift driving down binds up the earth,
Winter's wild terror, when it cometh wan!
Night's shadow blackens, sending from the North
Fierce slants of hail for harmfulness to men!
Wyrd's dooming changes all beneath the heaven;
Here fleets our wealth, and here is fleeting friend,
Here fleets the kinsman, here is fleeting man ;
110. The roots of all this earth are idle made.'"

Sooth is the song that I shall sing, and tell
Of sailing on the sea! O, oft have I
Endured in woeful days the painful hours,
And bitter care of heart have borne, and known
Unnumbered seats of sorrow in my ship!

Fearful the weltering waves, when 'twas my part
Strait watch to keep at night upon the prow,
When onward drove my bark beside the cliffs.
Frost pinched my feet fettered with clamps of ice;