Saturday may commemorate an obscure god Saetere; Tuesday the dark god, Tiw, to meet whom was death.

Eostre, the goddess of the dawn or of the spring, lends her name to the Christian festival of the Resurrection.

Behind these floated the dim shapes of an older mythology; "Wyrd," the death-goddess, whose memory lingered long in the "Weird" of northern superstition; or the Shield-maidens, the "mighty women" who, an old rime tells us, "wrought on the battle-field their toil and hurled the thrilling javelins." Nearer to the popular fancy lay deities of wood and fell, or hero-gods of legend and song; Nicor, the water-sprite who survives in our nixies and "Old Nick"; Weland, the forger of weighty shields and sharp-biting swords, who found a later home in the "Weyland's smithy" of Berkshire; AEgil, the hero-archer, whose legend is one with that of Cloudesly or Tell.

A nature-worship of this sort lent itself ill to the purposes of a priesthood; and though a priestly class existed it seems at no time to have had much weight among Englishmen.

As each freeman was his own judge and his own lawmaker, so he was his own house-priest; and English worship lay commonly in the sacrifice which the house-father offered to the gods of his hearth.
[Sidenote: The English Temper] It is not indeed in Woden-worship or in the worship of the older gods of flood and fell that we must look for the real religion of our fathers.
The song of Beowulf, though the earliest of English poems, is as we have it now a poem of the eighth century, the work it may be of some English missionary of the days of Baeda and Boniface who gathered in the very homeland of his race the legends of its earlier prime.