ning tears, maid of the sun-glowing south; but we will
drink the precious mead together, though we have lost gladness and
lands. Now are the brides closed in the cairns, and the princely
maidens laid beside us." Sigrum made a couch in the cairn, and invited
the spirit to rest there from all trouble, saying, "Son of the
Ylfinga, I will sleep in thy arms as formerly, when my hero lived." To
this the ghost replied, "No longer will I say thou art unfaithful,
since thou consentest to sleep in the embrace of the dead. And yet
thou livest, offspring of kings. Let the pale steed tramp the steeps
of the air. In the west must we be, by the bridge Vindhjalen, ere the
cock in Walhalla wakes the sons of victory."

Far back in the history of time, the ghost of a lady that died in
Iceland, whose deathbed commands were disregarded, returned to punish
the living for disregarding her injunctions. The lady's corpse was
conveyed to a distant place of sepulchre. As the interment could not
take place the first day, the bearers, with their dead burden, reposed
in a house over night. At midnight an apparition of the lady glided
through the kitchen, and, on the night when the conductors of the
funeral returned home, a spectral appearance, resembling a half moon,
moved round the mansion in a direction opposite to that of the sun,
and continued its revolution until the domestics retired to rest.
This apparition appeared every night for a week, and was pronounced by
certain wise sages as a presage of pestilence and death. A herdsman at
the mansion was, shortly after the lady's death, persecuted by demons,
and one morning he was found dead in bed. One Thorer, who himself had
predicted that the apparitions were come to give warning of
approaching calamities, was the next victim. One evening he was set
upon by the shepherd's ghost, and so fearfully beaten that he died in
consequence thereof. Evils continued to multiply: Thorer and the
herdman's ghost associated themselves together in persecuting the
inhabitants, several of whom fell victims to their rage. At times
unseen agents upset tables and chairs, flung kitchen utensils about in
all directions, and on other occasions a demon in the shape of a seal
rose from the earth, to the dismay of a whole household. Thorodd, the
master of the family, in crossing a river in a boat, was, along with
two of his servants, drowned. Apparitions of the drowned men walked
about Thorodd's old residence, but the appear