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So Palnatoki warned the boy urgently when he took his stand to await the coming of the hurtling arrow with calm ears and unbent head, lest, by a slight turn of his body, he should defeat the practised skill of the bowman; and, taking further counsel to prevent his fear, he turned away his face, lest he should be scared at the sight of the weapon.
Nor is there less virtue in the spear of Achilleus, in the swords of Perseus and Sigurd, in Roland's stout blade Durandal, or in the brand Excalibur, with which Sir Bedivere was so loath to part. All these are solar weapons, and so, too, are the arrows of Tell and Palnatoki, Egil and Hemingr, and William of Cloudeslee, whose surname proclaims him an inhabitant of the Phaiakian land.
Palnatoki forbade his Jomsburgers either to fear or so much as to mention the name of fear. Not so the Greek. He felt and feared. He gave utterance to his pain and sorrow. He was ashamed of no human weaknesses, only none of them must hold him back from the path of honor, or impede him in the fulfilment of his duty.
It appears in Saxo Grammaticus, who flourished in the twelfth century, where it is told of Palnatoki, King Harold Gormson's thane and assassin. In the thirteenth century the Wilkina Saga relates it of Egill, Voelundr's our Wayland Smith's younger brother.
It is quite credible that one nation may have borrowed from another a solitary legend of an archer who performs the feats of Tell and Palnatoki; but it is utterly incredible that ten thousand stories, constituting the entire mass of household mythology throughout a dozen separate nations, should have been handed from one to another in this way.
Then, taking three arrows from the quiver, he struck the mark given him with the first he fitted to the string..... But Palnatoki, when asked by the king why he had taken more arrows from the quiver, when it had been settled that he should only try the fortune of the bow ONCE, made answer, 'That I might avenge on thee the swerving of the first by the points of the rest, lest perchance my innocence might have been punished, while your violence escaped scot-free."
"A certain Palnatoki, for some time among King Harold's body-guard, had made his bravery odious to very many of his fellow-soldiers by the zeal with which he surpassed them in the discharge of his duty.
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