The proof furnished by the sameness of language is of itself sufficient and decisive. When the several divisions of a nation speak one and the same language, then, so long as they are left to their own nature and are not exposed to violent influences from without, they always have the same kind of belief and worship. The Teutonic race lies midway between Celts, Slavs, Lithuanians, Finns, all of them populations that acknowledge gods, and practise a settled worship. As for demanding proofs of the genuineness of Norse mythology, we have really got past that now. All criticism cripples and annihilates itself, that sets out with denying or doubting what is treasured up in song and story born alive and propagated amongst an entire people, and which lies before our eyes.
Criticism can but collect and arrange it, and unfold the materials in their historical sequence.
To say yea to the question as a whole, seems, from the foregoing results of our inquiry, altogether reasonable and almost necessary. A negative answer, if it knew what it was about, would try to maintain, that the circle of Norse gods, in substance, were formerly common to all Germany, but by the earlier conversion were extinguished and annihilated here. But a multitude of exceptions and surviving vestiges would greatly limit the assertion, and materially alter what might be made out of the remainder. In the meanwhile a denial has been attempted of quite another kind, and the opinion upheld, that those divinities have never existed at all in Germany proper, and that its earliest inhabitants knew nothing better than a gross worship of nature without gods. This view, drawing a fundamental distinction between German and Scandinavian heathenism, and misapprehending all the clues which discover themselves to unprejudiced inquiry as infallible evidence of the unity of two branches of a nation, lays special stress upon a few statements on the nature of the heathen faith, dating from about the sixth century and onwards.