em to a
single wife. His natural son Magnus then sat on the Danish throne). The
Jarl died as he had wished to die, the last man on board his ship, with
the soothing conviction that the Valkyrs would bear him to Valhalla.

Hilda was left with an only daughter, whom Canute bestowed on Ethelwolf,
a Saxon Earl of large domains, and tracing his descent from Penda, that
old King of Mercia who refused to be converted, but said so discreetly,
that he had no objection to his neighbours being Christians, if they
would practise that peace and forgiveness which the monks told him were
the elements of the faith.

Ethelwolf fell under the displeasure of Hardicanute, perhaps because he
was more Saxon than Danish; and though that savage king did not dare
openly to arraign him before the Witan, he gave secret orders by which he
was butchered on his own hearthstone, in the arms of his wife, who died
shortly afterwards of grief and terror. The only orphan of this unhappy
pair, Edith, was thus consigned to the charge of Hilda.

It was a necessary and invaluable characteristic of that "adaptability"
which distinguished the Danes, that they transferred to the land in which
they settled all the love they had borne to that of their ancestors; and
so far as attachment to soil was concerned, Hilda had grown no less in
heart an Englishwoman than if she had been born and reared amidst the
glades and knolls from which the smoke of her hearth rose through the old
Roman compluvium.

But in all else she was a Dane. Dane in her creed and her habits--Dane
in her intense and brooding imagination--in the poetry that filled her
soul, peopled the air with spectres, and covered the leaves of the trees
with charms. Living in austere seclusion after the death of her lord, to
whom she had borne a Scandinavian woman's devoted but heroic
love,--sorrowing, indeed, for his death, but rejoicing that he fell
amidst the feast of ravens,--her mind settled more and more year by year,
and day by day, upon those visions of the unknown world, which in every
faith conjure up the companions of solitude and grief.

Witchcraft in the Scandinavian North assumed many forms, and was
connected by many degrees. There was the old and withered hag, on whom,
in our later mediaeval ages the character was mainly bestowed; there was
the terrific witch-wife, or wolf-witch, who seems wholly apart from human
birth and attributes, like the weird sisters of Macbeth--creatures who
e