ed, warm, impulsive, quick to quarrel or
to love, faithful, brave; ready with sword or song to battle with all
comers, or to seek adventure wheresoever it might be found. They leave
Iceland young, and wander at their will to different courts of northern
Europe, where they are always held in high honour. Gunnlaug Worm-tongue
(12) in 1004 came to England, after being in Norway, as the saga
says:--"Now sail Gunnlaug and his fellows into the English main, and
come at autumntide south to London Bridge, where they hauled ashore
their ship. Now, at that time King Ethelred, the son of Edgar, ruled
over England, and was a good lord; the winter he sat in London. But
in those days there was the same tongue in England as in Norway and
Denmark; but the tongues changed when William the Bastard won England,
for thenceforward French went current there, for he was of French kin.
Gunnlaug went presently to the king, and greeted him well and worthily.
The king asked him from what land he came, and Gunnlaug told him all as
it was. 'But,' said he, 'I have come to meet thee, lord, for that I have
made a song on thee, and I would that it might please thee to hearken to
that song.' The king said it should be so, and Gunnlaug gave forth the
song well and proudly, and this is the burden thereof--

"'As God are all folk fearing
The fire lord King of England,
Kin of all kings and all folk,
To Ethelred the head bow.'

The king thanked him for the song, and gave him as song-reward a scarlet
cloak lined with the costliest of furs, and golden-broidered down to
the hem; and made him his man; and Gunnlaug was with him all the winter,
and was well accounted of.

The poems in this volume are part of the wonderful fragments which
are all that remain of ancient Scandinavian poetry. Every piece which
survives has been garnered by Vigfusson and Powell in the volumes of
their "Corpus", where those who seek may find. A long and illustrious
line of poets kept the old traditions, down even to within a couple
centuries, but the earlier great harvest of song was never again
equalled. After christianity had entered Iceland, and that, with other
causes, had quieted men's lives, although the poetry which stood to the
folk in lieu of music did not die away, it lost the exclusive hold it
had upon men's minds. In a time not so stirring, when emotion was not so
fervent or so swift, when there was less to quicken the blood, the story
that had before