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"Assuredly," replied the old man; "I have never known him fail me, little though he may have liked the errand." "And what said Ketill? Had they been attacked? What news brought Jomar back?" "Let us wake the knave, and ask him," said Helgi; and suiting the action to the word, he drove one foot sufficiently hard into the sleeper's side to rouse him with a start. "What said friend Ketill?"
"Did you not say yourself that you had known many spells like that, cast on men by maids? It was the magic of love that entangled me." "Men said the hermit was a wizard." "No wizard, Helgi, or he had never let me come there. He was a moody and fitful old man.
He was certainly no earl of the present Sutherland line; neither was Walter. In the time of Sigurd Hlodverson, Ulf the Bad, of Sanday in Orkney, murdered Harald of North Ronaldsay, and seized his lands in the absence of Harald's son Helgi, a gentle Viking, on a cruise. On his return, Helgi, to revenge his father's death, slew Bard, Ulf's next of kin, in fight.
There dwelt on the Vatnsfjord one Vermund the Slender, a brother of Viga-Styr, who had married Thorbjorg the daughter of Olaf Peacock, the son of Hoskuld, called Thorbjorg the Fat. At the time when Grettir was in Langadal Vermund was away at the Thing. He went across the ridge to Laugabol where a man named Helgi was living, one of the principal bondis.
So Sigmund became a mighty King and far-famed, wise and high-minded: he had to wife one named Borghild, and two sons they had between them, one named Helgi and the other Hamund; and when Helgi was born, Norns came to him, and spake over him, and said that he should be in time to come the most renowned of all kings.
Then they began to ask themselves what they were going to do with him. They asked Helgi of Laugabol to take him over and look after him until Vermund returned from the Thing. He said: "I have something better to do than to keep my men guarding him. I have labour enough with my lands, and he shall not come in my way."
"Where is Ketill?" cried Estein, as they reached the boat. The man in charge had seen nothing of him. "May werewolves seize him!" exclaimed Helgi. "He has had time enough to tear the long ships plank from plank." "We have no time to wait for him; it is his fault if he be left," said Grim. "That knowledge would doubtless comfort him," replied Estein; "but nevertheless I shall wait."
The first part, though unlike the Helgi story in circumstance, seems to preserve the tradition of the hero's hostility to his bride's kindred, and his death at their hands. The Helgi story, in all its variants, is as familiar in Danish as in Border ballads.
Thorvald, who, when he saw what seems to be, they say, the bluff head of Alderton at the south-east end of Boston Bay, said, "Here should I like to dwell," and, shot by an Esquimaux arrow, bade bury him on that place, with a cross at his head and a cross at his feet, and call the place Cross Ness for evermore; Gudrida, the magnificent widow, who wins hearts and sees strange deeds from Iceland to Greenland, and Greenland to Vinland and back, and at last, worn out and sad, goes off on a pilgrimage to Rome; Helgi and Finnbogi, the Norwegians, who, like our Arctic voyagers in after times, devise all sorts of sports and games to keep the men in humour during the long winter at Hope; and last, but not least, the terrible Freydisa, who, when the Norse are seized with a sudden panic at the Esquimaux and flee from them, as they had three weeks before fled from Thorfinn's bellowing bull, turns, when so weak that she cannot escape, single-handed on the savages, and catching up a slain man's sword, puts them all to flight with her fierce visage and fierce cries Freydisa the Terrible, who, in another voyage, persuades her husband to fall on Helgi and Finnbogi, when asleep, and murder them and all their men; and then, when he will not murder the five women too, takes up an axe and slays them all herself, and getting back to Greenland, when the dark and unexplained tale comes out, lives unpunished, but abhorred henceforth.
Now one after the other rushed at him, and he struggled hard and long, yet had they might to overcome him at the last, and so bound him. Thereafter they talked over what they should do with him, and they bade Helgi of Bathstead take him and keep him in ward till Vermund came home from the Thing. He answered
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