Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 Part 4

Appulus et Calaber, Siculus mihi servit et Afer.'

Every island, says Sir Edmund Head, and truly-for the name of almost every island on the coast of England, Scotland, and Eastern Ireland, ends in either _ey_ or _ay_ or _oe_, a Norse appellative, as is the word island itself-is a mark of its having been, at some time or other, visited by the Vikings of Scandinavia.

Norway, meanwhile, was convulsed by war; and what perhaps was of more immediate consequence, Svend Fork-beard, whom we Englishmen call Sweyn-the renegade from that Christian Faith which had been forced on him by his German conqueror, the Emperor Otto II.-with his ill.u.s.trious son c.n.u.t, whom we call Canute, were just calling together all the most daring spirits of the Baltic coasts for the subjugation of England; and when that great feat was performed, the Scandinavian emigration was paralysed, probably, for a time by the fearful wars at home. While the King of Sweden, and St. Olaf Tryggvason, king of Norway, were setting on Denmark during c.n.u.t's pilgrimage to Rome, and c.n.u.t, sailing with a mighty fleet to Norway, was driving St. Olaf into Russia, to return and fall in the fratricidal battle of Stiklestead-during, strangely enough, a total eclipse of the sun-Vinland was like enough to remain still uncolonised.

After c.n.u.t's short-lived triumph-king as he was of Denmark, Norway, England, and half Scotland, and what not of Wendish Folk inside the Baltic-the force of the Nors.e.m.e.n seems to have been exhausted in their native lands. Once more only, if I remember right, did 'Lochlin,' really and hopefully send forth her 'mailed swarm' to conquer a foreign land; and with a result unexpected alike by them and by their enemies. Had it been otherwise, we might not have been here this day.

Let me sketch for you once more-though you have heard it, doubtless, many a time-the tale of that tremendous fortnight which settled the fate of Britain, and therefore of North America; which decided-just in those great times when the decision was to be made-whether we should be on a par with the other civilised nations of Europe, like them the 'heirs of all the ages,' with our share not only of Roman Christianity and Roman centralisation-a member of the great comity of European nations, held together in one Christian bond by the Pope-but heirs also of Roman civilisation, Roman literature, Roman law; and therefore, in due time, of Greek philosophy and art. No less a question than this, it seems to me, hung in the balance during that fortnight of autumn, 1066.

Poor old Edward the Confessor, holy, weak, and sad, lay in his new choir of Westminster-where the wicked ceased from troubling, and the weary were at rest. The crowned ascetic had left no heir behind. England seemed as a corpse, to which all the eagles might gather together; and the South-English, in their utter need, had chosen for their king the ablest, and it may be the justest, man in Britain-Earl Harold G.o.dwinsson: himself, like half the upper cla.s.ses of England then, of the all-dominant Norse blood; for his mother was a Danish princess. Then out of Norway, with a mighty host, came Harold Hardraade, taller than all men, the ideal Viking of his time. Half-brother of the now dead St. Olaf, severely wounded when he was but fifteen, at Stiklestead, when Olaf fell, he had warred and plundered on many a coast. He had been away to Russia to King Jaroslaf; he had been in the Emperor's Varanger guard at Constantinople-and, it was whispered, had slain a lion there with his bare hands; he had carved his name and his comrades' in Runic characters-if you go to Venice you may see them at this day-on the loins of the great marble lion, which stood in his time not in Venice but in Athens. And now, king of Norway and conqueror, for the time, of Denmark, why should he not take England, as Sweyn and Canute took it sixty years before, when the flower of the English gentry perished at the fatal battle of a.s.singdune? If he and his half-barbarous host had conquered, the civilisation of Britain would have been thrown back, perhaps, for centuries. But it was not to be.

England _was_ to be conquered by the Norman; but by the civilised, not the barbaric; by the Norse who had settled, but four generations before, in the North East of France under Rou, Rollo, Rolf the Ganger-so-called, they say, because his legs were so long that, when on horseback, he touched the ground and seemed to gang, or walk. He and his Nors.e.m.e.n had taken their share of France, and called it Normandy to this day; and meanwhile, with that docility and adaptability which marks so often truly great spirits, they had changed their creed, their language, their habits, and had become, from heathen and murderous Berserkers, the most truly civilised people of Europe, and-as was most natural then-the most faithful allies and servants of the Pope of Rome. So greatly had they changed, and so fast, that William Duke of Normandy, the great-great-grandson of Rolf the wild Viking, was perhaps the finest gentleman, as well as the most cultivated sovereign, and the greatest statesman and warrior, in all Europe.

So Harold of Norway came with all his Vikings to Stamford Bridge by York; and took, by coming, only that which Harold of England promised him, namely, 'forasmuch as he was taller than any other man, seven feet of English ground.'

The story of that great battle, told with a few inaccuracies, but told as only great poets tell, you should read, if you have not read it already, in the _Heimskringla_ of Snorri Sturluson, the Homer of the North-

High feast that day held the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, White-tailed erne and sallow glede, Dusky raven, with h.o.r.n.y neb, And the grey deer, the wolf of the wood.

The bones of the slain, men say, whitened the place for fifty years to come.

And remember, that on the same day on which that fight befell-Sept. 27, 1066-William, Duke of Normandy, with all his French-speaking Nors.e.m.e.n, was sailing across the British Channel, under the protection of a banner consecrated by the Pope, to conquer that England which the Norse-speaking Normans could not conquer.

And now King Harold showed himself a man. He turned at once from the North of England to the South. He raised the folk of the Southern, as he had raised those of the Central and Northern s.h.i.+res; and in sixteen days-after a march which in those times was a prodigious feat-he was entrenched upon the fatal down which men called Heathfield then, and Senlac, but Battle to this day-with William and his French Normans opposite him on Telham hill.

Then came the battle of Hastings. You all know what befell upon that day; and how the old weapon was matched against the new-the English axe against the Norman lance-and beaten only because the English broke their ranks. If you wish to refresh your memories, read the tale once more in Mr. Freeman's _History of England_, or Prof. Creasy's _Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World_, or even, best of all, the late Lord Lytton's splendid romance of _Harold_. And when you go to England, go, as some of you may have gone already, to Battle; and there from off the Abbey grounds, or from Mountjoy behind, look down off what was then 'The Heathy Field,' over the long slopes of green pasture and the rich hop-gardens, where were no hop-gardens then, and the flat tide-marshes winding between the wooded heights, towards the southern sea; and imagine for yourselves the feelings of an Englishman as he contemplates that broad green sloping lawn, on which was decided the destiny of his native land. Here, right beneath, rode Taillefer up the slope before them all, singing the song of Roland, tossing his lance in air and catching it as it fell, with all the Norse berserker spirit of his ancestors flas.h.i.+ng out in him, at the thought of one fair fight, and then purgatory, or Valhalla-Taillefer perhaps preferred the latter. Yonder on the left, in that copse where the red-ochre gully runs, is Sanguelac, the drain of blood, into which (as the Bayeux tapestry, woven by Matilda's maids, still shows) the Norman knights fell, horse and man, till the gully was bridged with writhing bodies for those who rode after. Here, where you stand-the crest of the hill marks where it must have been-was the stockade on which depended the fate of England. Yonder, perhaps, stalked out one English squire or house-carle after another: tall men with long-handled battle-axes-one specially terrible, with a wooden helmet which no sword could pierce-who hewed and hewed down knight on knight, till they themselves were borne to earth at last. And here, among the trees and ruins of the garden, kept trim by those who know the treasure which they own, stood Harold's two standards of the fighting man and the dragon of Wess.e.x. And here, close by (for here, for many a century, stood the high altar of Battle Abbey, where monks sang ma.s.ses for Harold's soul), upon this very spot the Swan-neck found her hero lover's corpse. 'Ah,' says many an Englishman-and who will blame him for it-'how grand to have died beneath that standard on that day!' Yes, and how right. And yet how right, likewise, that the Norman's cry of Dexaie, 'G.o.d Help,' and not the English hurrah, should have won that day, till William rode up Mountjoye in the afternoon to see the English army, terrible even in defeat, struggling through copse and marsh away toward Brede, and, like retreating lions driven into their native woods, slaying more in the pursuit than they slew even in the fight.

But so it was to be; for so it ought to have been. You, my American friends, delight, as I have said already, in seeing the old places of the old country. Go, I beg you, and look at that old place, and if you be wise, you will carry back from it one lesson: that G.o.d's thoughts are not as our thoughts; nor His ways as our ways.

It was a fearful time which followed. I cannot but believe that our forefathers had been, in some way or other, great sinners, or two such conquests as Canute's and William's would not have fallen on them within the short s.p.a.ce of sixty years. They did not want for courage, as Stanford Brigg and Hastings showed full well. English swine, their Norman conquerors called them often enough; but never English cowards.

Their ruinous vice, if we are to trust the records of the time, was what the old monks called accidia-???d?a-and ranked it as one of the seven deadly sins: a general careless, sleepy, comfortable habit of mind, which lets all go its way for good or evil-a habit of mind too often accompanied, as in the case of the Anglo-Danes, with self-indulgence, often coa.r.s.e enough. Huge eaters and huger drinkers, fuddled with ale, were the men who went down at Hastings-though they went down like heroes-before the staid and sober Norman out of France.

But those were fearful times. As long as William lived, ruthless as he was to all rebels, he kept order and did justice with a strong and steady hand; for he brought with him from Normandy the instincts of a truly great statesman. And in his sons' time matters grew worse and worse.

After that, in the troubles of Stephen's reign, anarchy let loose tyranny in its most fearful form, and things were done which recall the cruelties of the old Spanish conquistadores in America. Scott's charming romance of _Ivanhoe_ must be taken, I fear, as a too true picture of English society in the time of Richard I.

And what came of it all? What was the result of all this misery and wrong?

This, paradoxical as it may seem-that the Norman conquest was the making of the English people; of the Free Commons of England.

Paradoxical, but true. First, you must dismiss from your minds the too common notion that there is now, in England a governing Norman aristocracy, or that there has been one, at least since the year 1215, when Magna Charta was won from the Norman John by Normans and by English alike. For the first victors at Hastings, like the first conquistadores in America, perished, as the monk chronicles point out, rapidly by their own crimes; and very few of our n.o.bility can trace their names back to the authentic Battle Abbey roll. The great majority of the peers have sprung from, and all have intermarried with, the Commons; and the peerage has been from the first, and has become more and more as centuries have rolled on, the prize of success in life.

The cause is plain. The conquest of England by the Normans was not one of those conquests of a savage by a civilised race, or of a cowardly race by a brave race, which results in the slavery of the conquered, and leaves the gulf of caste between two races, master and slave. That was the case in France, and resulted, after centuries of oppression, in the great and dreadful revolution of 1793, which convulsed not only France but the whole civilised world. But caste, thank G.o.d, has never existed in England, since at least the first generation after the Norman conquest.

The vast majority, all but the whole population of England, have been always free; and free, as they are not where caste exists, to change their occupations. They could intermarry, if they were able men, into the ranks above them; as they did sink, if they were unable men, into the ranks below them. Any man acquainted with the origin of our English surnames may verify this fact for himself, by looking at the names of a single parish or a single street of shops. There, jumbled together, he will find names marking the n.o.blest Saxon or Angle blood-Kenward or Kenric, Osgood or Osborne, side by side with Cordery or Banister-now names of farmers in my own parish-or other Norman-French names which may be, like those two last, in Battle Abbey roll-and side by side the almost ubiquitous Brown, whose ancestor was probably some Danish or Norwegian housecarle, proud of his name Biorn the bear, and the ubiquitous Smith or Smythe, the smiter, whose forefather, whether he now be peasant or peer, a.s.suredly handled the tongs and hammer at his own forge. This holds true equally in New England and in Old. When I search through (as I delight to do) your New England surnames, I find the same jumble of names-West Saxon, Angle, Danish, Norman, and French-Norman likewise, many of primaeval and heathen antiquity, many of high n.o.bility, all worked together, as at home, to form the Free Commoners of England.

If any should wish to know more on this curious and important subject, let me recommend them to study Ferguson's _Teutonic Name System_, a book from which you will discover that some of our quaintest, and seemingly most plebeian surnames-many surnames, too, which are extinct in England, but remain in America-are really corruptions of good old Teutonic names, which our ancestors may have carried in the German Forest, before an Englishman set foot on British soil; from which he will rise with the comfortable feeling that we English-speaking men, from the highest to the lowest, are literally kinsmen. Nay, so utterly made up now is the old blood-feud between Norseman and Englishman, between the descendants of those who conquered and those who were conquered, that in the children of our Prince of Wales, after 800 years, the blood of William of Normandy is mingled with the blood of the very Harold who fell at Hastings. And so, by the bitter woes which followed the Norman conquest was the whole population, Dane, Angle, and Saxon, earl and churl, freeman and slave, crushed and welded together into one h.o.m.ogeneous ma.s.s, made just and merciful towards each other by the most wholesome of all teachings, a community of suffering; and if they had been, as I fear they were, a lazy and a sensual people, were taught

That life is not as idle ore, But heated hot with burning fears, And bathed in baths of hissing tears, And battered with the strokes of doom To shape and use.

But how did these wild Vikings become Christian men? It is a long story.

So staunch a race was sure to be converted only very slowly. n.o.ble missionaries as Ansgar, Rembert, and Poppo, had worked for 150 years and more among the heathens of Denmark. But the patriotism of the Norseman always recoiled, even though in secret, from the fact that they were German monks, backed by the authority of the German emperor; and many a man, like Svend Fork-beard, father of the great Canute, though he had the Kaiser himself for G.o.dfather, turned heathen once more, the moment he was free, because his baptism was the badge of foreign conquest, and neither pope nor Kaiser should lord it over him, body or soul. St. Olaf, indeed, forced Christianity on the Norse at the sword's point, often by horrid cruelties, and perished in the attempt. But who forced it on the Nors.e.m.e.n of Scotland, England, Ireland, Neustria, Russia, and all the Eastern Baltic? It was absorbed and in most cases, I believe, gradually and willingly, as a gospel and good news to hearts worn out with the storm of their own pa.s.sions. And whence came their Christianity? Much of it, as in the case of the Danes, and still more of the French Normans, came direct from Rome, the city which, let them defy its influence as they would, was still the fount of all theology, as well as of all civilisation. But I must believe that much of it came from that mysterious ancient Western Church, the Church of St. Patric, St. Bridget, St. Columba, which had covered with rude cells and chapels the rocky islets of the North Atlantic, even to Iceland itself. Even to Iceland; for when that island was first discovered, about A.D. 840, the Nors.e.m.e.n found in an isle, on the east and west and elsewhere, Irish books and bells and wooden crosses, and named that island Papey, the isle of the popes-some little colony of monks, who lived by fis.h.i.+ng, and who are said to have left the land when the Nors.e.m.e.n settled in it. Let us believe, for it is consonant with reason and experience, that the sight of those poor monks, plundered and ma.s.sacred again and again by the 'mailed swarms of Lochlin,' yet never exterminated, but springing up again in the same place, ready for fresh ma.s.sacre, a sacred plant which G.o.d had planted, and which no rage of man could trample out-let us believe, I say, that that sight taught at last to the buccaneers of the old world that there was a purer manliness, a loftier heroism, than the ferocious self-a.s.sertion of the Berserker, even the heroism of humility, gentleness, self-restraint, self-sacrifice. That there was a strength which was made perfect in weakness; a glory, not of the sword but of the cross. We will believe that that was the lesson which the Nors.e.m.e.n learnt, after many a wild and bloodstained voyage, from the monks of Iona or of Derry, which caused the building of such churches as that which Sightrys, king of Dublin, raised about the year 1030, not in the Norse but in the Irish quarter of Dublin: a sacred token of amity between the new settlers and the natives on the ground of a common faith. Let us believe, too, that the influence of woman was not wanting in the good work-that the story of St. Margaret and Malcolm Canmore was repeated, though inversely, in the case of many a heathen Scandinavian jarl, who, marrying the princely daughter of some Scottish chieftain, found in her creed at last something more precious than herself; while his brother or his cousin became, at Dublin or Wexford or Waterford, the husband of some saffron-robed Irish princess, 'fair as an elf,' as the old saying was; 'some maiden of the three transcendent hues,' of whom the old book of Linane says-

Red as the blood which flowed from stricken deer, White as the snow on which that blood ran down, Black as the raven who drank up that blood.

-and possibly, as in the case of Brian Boru's mother, had given his fair-haired sister in marriage to some Irish prince, and could not resist the spell of their new creed, and the spell too, it may be, of some sister of theirs who had long given up all thought of earthly marriage to tend the undying fire of St. Bridget among the consecrated virgins of Kildare.

I am not drawing from mere imagination. That such things must have happened, and happened again and again, is certain to anyone who knows, even superficially, the doc.u.ments of that time. And I doubt not that, in manners as well as in religion, the Norse were humanised and civilised by their contact with the Celts, both in Scotland and in Ireland, Both peoples had valour, intellect, imagination: but the Celt had that which the burly angular Norse character, however deep and stately, and however humorous, wanted; namely, music of nature, tenderness, grace, rapidity, playfulness; just the qualities, combining with the Scandinavian (and in Scotland with the Angle) elements of character which have produced, in Ireland and in Scotland, two schools of lyric poetry second to none in the world.

And so they were converted to what was then a dark and awful creed; a creed of ascetic self-torture and purgatorial fires for those who escaped the still more dreadful, because endless, doom of the rest of the human race. But, because it was a sad creed, it suited better men, who had, when conscience reawakened in them, but too good reason to be sad; and the minsters and cloisters which sprang up over the whole of Northern Europe, and even beyond it, along the dreary western sh.o.r.es of Greenland itself, are the symbols of a splendid repentance for their own sins and for the sins of their forefathers.

Gudruna herself, of whom I spoke just now, one of those old Norse heroines who helped to discover America, though a historic personage, is a symbolic one likewise, and the pattern of a whole cla.s.s. She, too, after many journeys to Iceland, Greenland, and Winland, goes on a pilgrimage to Rome, to get, I presume, absolution from the Pope himself for all the sins of her strange, rich, stormy, wayward life.

Have you not read-many of you surely have-La Motte Fouque's _Romance of Sintram_? It embodies all that I would say. It is the spiritual drama of that early middle age; very sad, morbid if you will, but true to fact.

The Lady Verena ought not, perhaps, to desert her husband, and shut herself up in a cloister. But so she would have done in those old days.

And who shall judge her harshly for so doing? When the brutality of the man seems past all cure, who shall blame the woman if she glides away into some atmosphere of peace and purity, to pray for him whom neither warnings nor caresses will amend? It is a sad book, _Sintram_. And yet not too sad. For they were a sad people, those old Norse forefathers of ours. Their Christianity was sad; their minsters sad; there are few sadder, though few grander, buildings than a Norman church.

And yet, perhaps, their Christianity did not make them sad. It was but the other and the healthier side of that sadness which they had as heathens. Read which you will of the old sagas-heathen or half-Christian-the Eyrbiggia, Viga Glum, Burnt Niall, Grettir the Strong, and, above all, Snorri Sturluson's _Heimskringla_ itself-and you will see at once how sad they are. There is, in the old sagas, none of that enjoyment of life which s.h.i.+nes out everywhere in Greek poetry, even through its deepest tragedies. Not in complacency with Nature's beauty, but in the fierce struggle with her wrath, does the Norseman feel pleasure. Nature to him was not, as in Mr. Longfellow's exquisite poem, {91} the kind old nurse, to take him on her knee and whisper to him, ever anew, the story without an end. She was a weird witch-wife, mother of storm demons and frost giants, who must be fought with steadily, warily, wearily, over dreary heaths and snow-capped fells, and rugged nesses and tossing sounds, and away into the boundless sea-or who could live?-till he got hardened in the fight into ruthlessness of need and greed. The poor strip of flat strath, ploughed and re-ploughed again in the short summer days, would yield no more; or wet harvests spoiled the crops, or heavy snows starved the cattle. And so the Norseman launched his s.h.i.+ps when the lands were sown in spring, and went forth to pillage or to trade, as luck would have, to summerted, as he himself called it; and came back, if he ever came, in autumn to the women to help at harvest-time, with blood upon his hand. But had he staid at home, blood would have been there still. Three out of four of them had been mixed up in some man-slaying, or had some blood-feud to avenge among their own kin.

The whole of Scandinavia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Orkney, and the rest, remind me ever of that terrible picture of the great Norse painter, Tiddeman, in which two splendid youths, lashed together, in true Norse duel fas.h.i.+on by the waist, are hewing each other to death with the short axe, about some hot words over their ale. The loss of life, and that of the most gallant of the young, in those days must have been enormous. If the vitality of the race had not been even more enormous, they must have destroyed each other, as the Red Indians have done, off the face of the earth. They lived these Nors.e.m.e.n, not to live-they lived to die. For what cared they? Death-what was death to them! what it was to the Jomsburger Viking, who, when led out to execution, said to the headsman, 'Die! with all pleasure. We used to question in Jomsburg whether a man felt when his head was off? Now I shall know; but if I do, take care, for I shall smite thee with my knife. And meanwhile, spoil not this long hair of mine; it is so beautiful.'

But, oh! what waste. What might not these men have done if they had sought peace, not war; if they had learned a few centuries sooner to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with their G.o.d?

And yet one loves them, blood-stained as they are. Your own poets, men brought up under circ.u.mstances, under ideas the most opposite to theirs, love them, and cannot help it. And why? It is not merely for their bold daring, it is not merely for their stern endurance; nor again that they had in them that s.h.i.+ft and thrift, those steady and common-sense business habits, which made their n.o.blest men not ashamed to go on voyages of merchandise. Nor is it, again, that grim humour-humour as of the modern Scotch-which so often flashes out into an actual jest, but more usually underlies unspoken all their deeds. Is it not rather that these men are our forefathers? that their blood runs in the veins of perhaps three men out of four in any general a.s.sembly, whether in America or in Britain?

Startling as the a.s.sertion may be, I believe it to be strictly true.

Be that as it may, I cannot read the stories of your western men, the writings of Bret Harte, or Colonel John Hay, for instance, without feeling at every turn that there are the old Norse alive again, beyond the very ocean which they first crossed, 850 years ago.

Let me try to prove my point, and end with a story, as I began with one.

It is just 30 years before the Norman conquest of England, the evening of the battle of Sticklestead. St. Olaf's corpse is still lying unburied on the hillside. The reforming and Christian king has fallen in the attempt to force Christianity and despotism on the Conservative and half-heathen party-the free bonders or yeoman-farmers of Norway. Thormod, his poet,-the man, as his name means, of thunder mood-who has been standing in the ranks, at last has an arrow in his left side. He breaks off the shaft, and thus sore wounded goes up, when all is lost, to a farm where is a great barn full of wounded. One Kimbe comes, a man out of the opposite or bonder part. 'There is great howling and screaming in there,' he says. 'King Olaf's men fought bravely enough: but it is a shame brisk young lads cannot bear their wounds. On what side wert thou in the fight?' 'On the best side,' says the beaten Thormod. Kimbe sees that Thormod has a gold bracelet on his arm. 'Thou art surely a king's man. Give me thy gold ring and I will hide thee, ere the bonders kill thee.'

Thormod said, 'Take it, if thou canst get it. I have lost that which is worth more;' and he stretched out his left hand, and Kimbe tried to take it. But Thormod, swinging his sword, cut off his hand; and it is said Kimbe behaved no better over his wound than those he had been blaming.

Then Thormod went into the barn; and after he had sung his song there in praise of his dead king, he went into an inner room, where was a fire, and water warming, and a handsome girl binding up men's wounds. And he sat down by the door; and one said to him 'Why art thou so dead pale?

Why dost thou not call for the leech?' Then sung Thormod-

I am not blooming; and the fair And slender maiden loves to care For blooming youths. Few care for me, With Fenri's gold meal I can't fee;

and so forth, improvising after the old Norse fas.h.i.+on.

Then Thormod got up and went to the fire, and stood and warmed himself.

And the nurse-girl said to him, 'Go out man, and bring some of the split-firewood which lies outside the door.' He went out and brought an armful of wood and threw it down. Then the nurse-girl looked him in the face and said, 'Dreadful pale is this man. Why art thou so?' Then sang Thormod-

Thou wonderest, sweet bloom, at me, A man so hideous to see.

The arrow-drift o'ertook me, girl, A fine-ground arrow in the whirl Went through me, and I feel the dart Sits, lovely la.s.s, too near my heart.

The girl said, 'Let me see thy wound.' Then Thormod sat down, and the girl saw his wounds, and that which was in his side, and saw that there was a piece of iron in it; but could not tell where it had gone. In a stone pot she had leeks and other herbs, and boiled them, and gave the wounded men of it to eat. But Thormod said, 'Take it away; I have no appet.i.te now for my broth.' Then she took a great pair of tongs and tried to pull out the iron; but the wound was swelled, and there was too little to lay hold of. Now said Thormod, 'Cut in so deep that thou canst get at the iron, and give me the tongs.' She did as he said. Then took Thormod the gold bracelet off his hand and gave it the nurse-girl, and bade her do with it what she liked.

'It is a good man's gift,' said he. 'King Olaf gave me the ring this morning.'