perhaps the most striking thought in these lines. Like the future blessedness of the Egyptian,[1] Lodbrok's paradise is merely the best of his earthly good things, which in the cold regions of the North are scant and coarse enough. But though there is no thought of future life as a moral sanction, though personality has not yet passed beyond a sense of animal pains and pleasures, Lodbrok's song sets the person of the chief in the front and thrusts the kinsmen well into the background; and we could readily imagine the Heroes' Hall developed into the privileged paradise of the chiefs, while the body of the kinsmen, like the common herd in Mexico, remained in some dreary realm of Mictlan. Whether it was that clanship lost much of its communal spirit during the expeditions of the sea-robbers, devotion to the chief taking theplace of kinship ties, or that Northern conditions of soil and climate never permitted the same closeness of clan co-operation and sentiments as the sunny lands of the South, Lodbrok's song is pitched in a more personal key than most early Arab poems. Ideas of fate and revenge, common enough in Arab poetry, are thus personalised. Moreover, in the Arab death-song the idea of future
- ↑ "The blessed is represented as enjoying an existence similar to that which he had led upon earth. He has the use of all his limbs, he eats and drinks and satisfies every one of his physical wants exactly as in his former life. His bread is made of the corn of Pe, a famous town of Egypt, and the beer he drinks is made from the red corn of the Nile. The flesh of cattle and fowl is given to him, and refreshing waters are poured out to him under the boughs of sycamores which shade him from the heat. The cool breezes of the north wind breathe upon him. … Fields also are allotted to him in the lands of Aarru and Hotep, and he cultivates them" (Hibbert Lectures for 1879, p. 180). If, as M. le Page Renouf here adds, "it is characteristic of an industrious and agricultural population that part of the bliss of a future state should consist in such operations as ploughing and hoeing, sowing and reaping, rowing on the canals and collecting the harvests," the Hebrew Sheól, or gathering-place of the clans, and the Scandinavian Warriors' Hall, or paradise of the chiefs, are no less interesting reflections of social conditions in ideas of a future life.
