es of
marriage, and he wooed Thyra, the daughter of Ethelred, the king of
the English, for his wife. She surpassed other women in seriousness
and shrewdness, and laid the condition on her suitor that she would not
marry him till she had received Denmark as a dowry. This compact was
made between them, and she was betrothed to Gorm. But on the first night
that she went up on to the marriage-bed, she prayed her husband most
earnestly that she should be allowed to go for three days free from
intercourse with man. For she resolved to have no pleasure of love till
she had learned by some omen in a vision that her marriage would
be fruitful. Thus, under pretence of self-control, she deferred her
experience of marriage, and veiled under a show of modesty her wish to
learn about her issue. She put off lustful intercourse, inquiring, under
the feint of chastity, into the fortune she would have in continuing
her line. Some conjecture that she refused the pleasures of the nuptial
couch in order to win her mate over to Christianity by her abstinence.
But the youth, though he was most ardently bent on her love, yet chose
to regard the continence of another more than his own desires, and
thought it nobler to control the impulses of the night than to
rebuff the prayers of his weeping mistress; for he thought that her
beseechings, really coming from calculation, had to do with modesty.
Thus it befell that he who should have done a husband's part made
himself the guardian of her chastity so that the reproach of an infamous
mind should not be his at the very beginning of his marriage; as
though he had yielded more to the might of passion than to his own
self-respect. Moreover that he might not seem to forestall by his
lustful embraces the love which the maiden would not grant, he not only
forbore to let their sides that were next one another touch, but even
severed them by his drawn sword, and turned the bed into a divided
shelter for his bride and himself. But he soon tasted in the joyous form
of a dream the pleasure which he postponed from free loving kindness.
For, when his spirit was steeped in slumber, he thought that two birds
glided down from the privy parts of his wife, one larger than the other;
that they poised their bodies aloft and soared swiftly to heaven, and,
when a little time had elapsed, came back and sat on either of his
hands. A second, and again a third time, when they had been refreshed
by a short rest, they ventured