g the hammer and appendages, and such a collar (supposed of
solid gold, which it was not quite, as we shall hear in time) round the
neck of him as was never seen in all the North. How he did his own
Yule festivals, with what magnificent solemnity, the horse-eatings,
blood-sprinklings, and other sacred rites, need not be told. Something
of a "Ritualist," one may perceive; perhaps had Scandinavian Puseyisms
in him, and other desperate heathen notions. He was universally believed
to have gone into magic, for one thing, and to have dangerous potencies
derived from the Devil himself. The dark heathen mind of him struggling
vehemently in that strange element, not altogether so unlike our own in
some points.

For the rest, he was evidently, in practical matters, a man of sharp,
clear insight, of steadfast resolution, diligence, promptitude; and
managed his secular matters uncommonly well. Had sixteen Jarls under
him, though himself only Hakon Jarl by title; and got obedience from
them stricter than any king since Haarfagr had done. Add to which
that the country had years excellent for grass and crop, and that the
herrings came in exuberance; tokens, to the thinking mind, that Hakon
Jarl was a favorite of Heaven.

His fight with the far-famed Jomsvikings was his grandest exploit in
public rumor. Jomsburg, a locality not now known, except that it was
near the mouth of the River Oder, denoted in those ages the impregnable
castle of a certain hotly corporate, or "Sea Robbery Association
(limited)," which, for some generations, held the Baltic in terror, and
plundered far beyond the Belt,--in the ocean itself, in Flanders and the
opulent trading havens there,--above all, in opulent anarchic England,
which, for forty years from about this time, was the pirates' Goshen;
and yielded, regularly every summer, slaves, Danegelt, and miscellaneous
plunder, like no other country Jomsburg or the viking-world had
ever known. Palnatoke, Bue, and the other quasi-heroic heads of this
establishment are still remembered in the northern parts. _Palnatoke_
is the title of a tragedy by Oehlenschlager, which had its run of
immortality in Copenhagen some sixty or seventy years ago.

I judge the institution to have been in its floweriest state, probably
now in Hakon Jarl's time. Hakon Jarl and these pirates, robbing Hakon's
subjects and merchants that frequented him, were naturally in quarrel;
and frequent fightings had fallen out, not generally to th