It is not a little odd that the book which first aroused, in modern Europe, an interest in Norse mythology should have been written by a Frenchman.  This was the “Introduction a l’Histoire de Dannemarc,” published in 1755 by Paul Henri Mallet, a native of Geneva and sometime professor of Belles Lettres in the Royal University at Copenhagen.  The work included also a translation of the first part of the Younger Edda, with an abstract of the second part and of the Elder Edda, and versions of several Runic poems.  It was translated into English, in 1770, by Thomas Percy, the editor of the “Reliques,” under the title, “Northern Antiquities; or a Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion, and Laws of the ancient Danes.”  A German translation had appeared a few years earlier and had inspired the Schleswig-Holsteiner, Heinrich Wilhem von Gerstenberg, to compose his “Gedicht eines Skalden,” which introduced the old Icelandic mythology into German poetry in 1766.  Percy had published independently in 1763 “Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, translated from the Icelandic Language.”

Gray did not wait for the English translation of Mallet’s book.  In a letter to Mason, dated in 1758, and inclosing some criticisims on the latter’s “Caractacus” (then in MS.), he wrote, “I am pleased with the Gothic Elysium.  Do you think I am ignorant about either that, or the hell before, or the twilight.[3] I have been there and have seen it all in Mallet’s ‘Introduction to the History of Denmark’ (it is in French), and many other places.”  It is a far cry from Mallet’s “System of Runic Mythology” to William Morris’ “Sigurd the Volsung” (1877), but to Mallet belongs the credit of first exciting that interest in Scandinavian antiquity which has enriched the prose and poetry not only of England but of Europe in general.  Gray refers to him in his notes on “The Descent of Odin,” and his work continued to be popular authority on its subject for at least half a century.  Scott cites it in his annotations on “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805).

Gray’s studies in Runic literature took shape in “The Fatal Sisters” and “The Descent of Odin,” written in 1761, published in 1768.  These were paraphrases of two poems which Gray found in the “De Causis Contemnendae Mortis” (Copenhagen, 1689) of Thomas Bartholin, a Danish physician of the seventeenth century.  The first of them describes the Valkyrie weaving the fates of the Danish and Irish warriors in the battle of Clontarf, fought in the eleventh century between Sigurd, Earl of Orkney, and Brian, King of Dublin; the second narrates the descent of Odin to Niflheimer, to inquire of Hela concerning the doom of Balder.[4] Gray had designed these for the introductory chapter of his projected history of English poetry.  He calls them imitations, which in fact they are, rather than literal renderings.  In spite of a tinge of eighteenth-century diction, and of one or two Shaksperian and Miltonic phrases, the translator succeeded fairly