Scent Odin at www.japanese-home-gardens.com

The old Norse gods had their great stronghold in Old (Gamla) Uppsala and there they made their last stand, but before they realized their danger they must have looked upon the new god from the East with utter contempt. Odin was proud and glittering and he liked a good show. The new god was humble and mild. Odin was omniscient. He was the god of war as well as the fountain of all wisdom. He had several wives and plenty of concubines. When he sallied forth he rode an eight-footed horse.

In 1761, stimulated by research in the newly ened British Museum, Gray wrote some trans-ions and imitations of Old Norse poems that irk the early stage of a developing widespread terest in the nonclassical past. The passion at Gray found in his models he rendered con-acingly, creating in The Fatal Sisters and The ?scent Odin of Odin a sense of the reality of mysteri-s forces. His Welsh odes, also written in 1761, oke the vitality of a battle-oriented culture and ease Gray's own creative energy.

Uppsala, only an hour from Stockholm by express, is one of the world's little giants of history and culture. Here, as I have said, Odin held court, and in Gamla (Old) Uppsala, two or three miles from the present city, are three interesting hillocks, or barrows, traditionally called memorials to Odin, Thor and Freya. Tourists come here to drink mead, a concoction of malt and honey, in a mead house named Odinsborg.