Historical Lectures and Essays | Page 9

wet harvests
spoiled the crops, or heavy snows starved the cattle. And so the
Norseman launched his ships 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
stayed 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 fashion 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 Norsemen, 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 God?
And yet one loves them, blood-stained as they are. Your own poets,
men brought up under circumstances, 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 shift and thrift, those steady and
common-sense business habits, which made their noblest 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 assembly,
whether in America or in Britain? Startling as the assertion 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 thirty 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 good 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