many reflections, which the picture I have here copied from thence, naturally presents to the mind. Many in particular would arise on the surprizing conformity that there is between several of the foregoing strokes, and those employed in the gospel to describe the same thing. A conformity so remarkable that one should be tempted to attribute it to the indiscreet zeal of the Christian writer who compiled this mythology, if the Edda alone had transmitted to us this prophecy concerning the last ages of the world, and if we did not find it with the same circumstances in the Voluspa, a poem of greater antiquity, and in which nothing can be discovered that has an air of interpolation, or forgery.
One remark however ought not to be omitted, which is, that this mythology expresly distinguishes two different abodes for the happy, and as many for the culpable: Which is what several authors who have writ of the ancient religion of Europe, have not sufficiently attended to. The first of these abodes was the palace of Odin named Valhalla, where that God received all such as died in a violent manner, from the beginning to the end of the world, that is, to the time of that universal desolation of nature which was to be followed by a new creation, and what they called
