view arose those arbitrary tariffs for wounds or loss of life, which
were gradually developed more or less completely in all the Teutonic and
Scandinavian races, until every injury to life or limb had its
proportionate price, according to the rank which the injured person bore
in the social scale. These tariffs, settled by the heads of houses, are,
in fact, the first elements of the law of nations; but it must be
clearly understood that it always rested with the injured family either
to follow up the quarrel by private war, or to call on the man who had
inflicted the injury to pay a fitting fine. If he refused, the feud
might be followed up on the battlefield, in the earliest times, or in
later days, either by battle or by law. Of the latter mode of
proceeding, we shall have to speak at greater length farther on; for the
present, we content ourselves with indicating these different modes of
settling a quarrel in what we have called the patriarchal state.

A fourth great principle of his nature was the conviction of the
worthlessness and fleeting nature of all worldly goods. One thing alone
was firm and unshaken, the stability of well-earned fame. "Goods
perish, friends perish, a man himself perishes, but fame never dies to
him that hath won it worthily." "One thing I know that never dies, the
judgment passed on every mortal man." Over all man's life hung a blind,
inexorable fate, a lower fold of the same gloomy cloud that brooded over
Odin and the AEsir. Nothing could avert this doom. When his hour came, a
man must meet his death, and until his hour came he was safe. It might
strike in the midst of the highest happiness, and then nothing could
avert the evil, but until it struck he would come safe through the
direst peril. This fatalism showed itself among this vigorous pushing
race in no idle resignation. On the contrary, the Northman went boldly
to meet the doom which he felt sure no effort of his could turn aside,
but which he knew, if he met it like a man, would secure him the only
lasting thing on earth--a name famous in sons and story. Fate must be
met then, but the way in which it was met, that rested with a man
himself, that, at least, was in his own power; there he might show his
free will; and thus this principle, which might seem at first to be
calculated to blunt his energies and weaken his strength of mind, really
sharpened and hardened them in a wonderful way, for it left it still
worth everything to a ma