nobles,
when he had been disembowelled, had his body kept embalmed for three
years, for they feared the provinces would rise if the king's end
were published. They wished his death to be concealed above all from
foreigners, so that by the pretence that he was alive they might
preserve the boundaries of the empire, which had been extended for
so long; and that, on the strength of the ancient authority of their
general, they might exact the usual tribute from their subjects. So, the
lifeless corpse was carried away by them in such a way that it seemed to
be taken, not in a funeral bier, but in a royal carriage, as if it were
a due and proper tribute from the soldiers to an infirm old man not in
full possession of his forces. Such splendour did his friends bestow
on him even in death. But when his limbs rotted, and were seized with
extreme decay, and when the corruption could not be arrested, they
buried his body with a royal funeral in a barrow near Waere, a bridge of
Zealand; declaring that Frode had desired to die and be buried in what
was thought the chief province of his kingdom.

BOOK SIX.

After the death of Frode, the Danes wrongly supposed that Fridleif,
who was being reared in Russia, had perished; and, thinking that the
sovereignty halted for lack of an heir, and that it could no longer be
kept on in the hands of the royal line, they considered that the sceptre
would be best deserved by the man who should affix to the yet fresh
grave of Frode a song of praise in his glorification, and commit the
renown of the dead king to after ages by a splendid memorial. Then one
HIARN, very skilled in writing Danish poetry, wishing to give the fame
of the hero some notable record of words, and tempted by the enormous
prize, composed, after his own fashion, a barbarous stave. Its purport,
expressed in four lines, I have transcribed as follows:

"Frode, whom the Danes would have wished to live long, they bore long
through their lands when he was dead. The great chief's body, with this
turf heaped above it, bare earth covers under the lucid sky."

When the composer of this song had uttered it, the Danes rewarded him
with the crown. Thus they gave a kingdom for an epitaph, and the weight
of a whole empire was presented to a little string of letters. Slender
expense for so vast a guerdon! This huge payment for a little poem
exceeded the glory of Caesar's recompense; for it was enough for the
divine Julius to pension with a