the ancestor of
the present Lage. He slew his best steed before Asathor's altar, and
promised to give him whatever he should ask, even to his own life, if he
would save him from the vengeance of the king. Asathor heard his prayer.
As the sun set, a storm sprung up with thick darkness and gloom, the
earth shook, Asathor drove his chariot over the heavens with deafening
thunder and swung his hammer right and left, and the crackling lightning
flew through the air like a hail-storm of fire. Then the peasants
trembled, for they knew that Asathor was wroth. Only the king sat calm
and fearless with his bishop and priests, quaffing the nut-brown mead.
The tempest raged until morn. When the sun rose, Saint Olaf called his
hundred swains, sprang into the saddle and rode down toward the river.
Few men who saw the angry fire in his eye, and the frown on his royal
brow, doubted whither he was bound. But having reached the ford, a
wondrous sight met his eye. Where on the day before the highway had
wound itself up the slope toward Lage Kvaerk's mansion, lay now a wild
ravine; the rock was shattered into a thousand pieces, and a deep gorge,
as if made by a single stroke of a huge hammer, separated the king from
his enemy. Then Saint Olaf made the sign of the cross, and mumbled the
name of Christ the White; but his hundred swains made the sign of the
hammer under their cloaks, and thought, Still is Asathor alive.

That same night Lage Ulfson Kvaerk slew a black ram, and thanked Asathor
for his deliverance; and the Saga tells that while he was sprinkling
the blood on the altar, the thundering god himself appeared to him,
and wilder he looked than the fiercest wild Turk. Rams, said he, were
every-day fare; they could redeem no promise. Brynhild, his daughter,
was the reward Asathor demanded. Lage prayed and besought him to ask
for something else. He would gladly give him one of his sons; for he had
three sons, but only one daughter. Asathor was immovable; but so long
Lage continued to beg, that at last he consented to come back in a
year, when Lage perchance would be better reconciled to the thought of
Brynhild's loss.

In the mean time King Olaf built a church to Christ the White on the
headland at the river, where it stands until this day. Every evening,
when the huge bell rumbled between the mountains, the parishioners
thought they heard heavy, half-choked sighs over in the rocks at Kvaerk;
and on Sunday mornings, when the clear-voice