Vischer has shewn in his Aesthetik, that German feeling was early influenced by the different forms of plant life around it.  Rigid pine, delicate birch, stalwart oak, each had its effect; and the wildness and roughness of land, sea, and animal life in the North combined with the cold of the climate to create the taste for domestic comfort, for fireside dreams, and thought-weaving by the hearth.

Nature schooled the race to hard work and scanty pleasure, and yet its relationship to her was deep and heartfelt from the first.  Devoutly religious, it gazed at her with mingled love and fear; and the deposit of its ideas about her was its mythology.

Its gods dwelt in mountain tops, holes in the rocks, and rivers, and especially in dark forests and in the leafy boughs of sacred trees; and the howling of wind, the rustle of leaves, the soughing in the tree tops, were sounds of their presence.  The worship of woods lasted far into Christian times, especially among the Saxons and Frisians.[1]

Wodan was the all-powerful father of gods and men—­the highest god, who, as among all the Aryan nations, represented Heaven.  Light was his shining helmet, clouds were the dark cap he put on when he spread rain over the earth, or crashed through the air as a wild hunter with his raging pack.  His son Donar shewed himself in thunder and lightning, as he rode with swinging axe on his goat-spanned car.  Mountains were sacred to both, as plants to Ziu.  Freyr and Freya were goddesses of fertility, love, and spring; a ram was sacred to them, whose golden fleece illuminated night as well as day, and who drew their car with a horse’s speed.[2] As with Freya, an image of the goddess Nerthus was drawn through the land in spring, to announce peace and fertility to mortals.

The suggestive myth of Baldur, god of light and spring, killed by blind Hoedur, was the expression of general grief at the passing of beauty.

The Edda has a touching picture of the sorrow of Nature, of her trees and plants, when the one beloved of all living things fell, pierced by an arrow.  Holda was first the mild and gracious goddess, then a divine being, encompassing the earth.  She might be seen in morning hours by her favourite haunts of lake and spring, a beautiful white woman, who bathed and vanished.  When snow fell, she was making her bed, and the feathers flew.  Agriculture and domestic order were under her care.

Ostara was goddess of bright dawn, of rising light, and awakening spring, as Hel of subterranean night, the darkness of the underworld.  Frigg, wife of the highest god, knew the story of existence, and protected marriage.  She was the Northern Juno or Hera.

Ravines and hollows in the mountains were the dwelling-places of the dwarfs (Erdmaennlein), sometimes friendly, sometimes unfriendly to man; now peaceful and helpful, now impish spirits of mischief in cloud caps and grey coats, thievish and jolly.