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Then it laid its head flat upon the snow and died. Ragnar looked at it and muttered: "Dead!" Then he walked to that top of the fallen tree in which I lay, and again muttered: "Dead! Well, Valhalla holds no braver man than Olaf the Skald." Next he went to Steinar and once again exclaimed, "Dead!" For so he looked, indeed, smothered in the blood of the bear and with his garments half torn off him.
He went in before the King, and spake thus: 'Fleeting hour is short, sire, but meal-time long. Said the King: 'Skald, what news? Hard task, but 'tis thine honour, King, I seek, who here war tidings bring. Arm swiftly, every one!
As soon as the bard had descended the mound the Skald from the northern lands took his place, greeted by cries of welcome from a hundred thousand throats. He touched his harp, and in the perfect silence was heard the strain of the mermaid's song, and through it the pleasant ripple of summer waters on the pebbly beach.
Their sea-fights live in story, though their traders found no skald or bard, and it is thus that we hear less of their trading or of their civic or domestic life. This spirit of theirs, like their blood, is ever with us still. It has gone into our race, and it keeps coming out in unexpected quarters.
When the last strain ended, from the mighty host a great shout went up, loud as the roar of winter billows breaking in the hollows of the shore; and men knew not whom to declare the victor, the chief bard of Erin or the Skald of the northern lands.
As soon as the bard descends the mound the Skald from the northern lands takes his place, amid shouts of welcome. "He touched his harp, and in the perfect silence was heard the strains of the mermaid's song, and through it the pleasant ripple of summer waters on the pebbly beach.
He is of the type of the skald, the bard, the seer, the prophet. The specialization and differentiation of our latter ages of science and culture is less marked in him than in other poets. Poetry, philosophy, religion, are all inseparably blended in his pages. He is in many ways a reversion to an earlier type. Dr.
Hymir the huge Giant enters, his gray beard all full of hoar-frost; splits pillars with the very glance of his eye; Thor, after much rough tumult, snatches the Pot, claps it on his head; the "handles of it reach down to his heels." The Norse Skald has a kind of loving sport with Thor. This is the Hymir whose cattle, the critics have discovered, are Icebergs.
The burly captain frowned and scratched his head, as though deliberating how to do a thing so foreign to his genius as the telling of a narrative. "On a certain day you left us," he began. "Well told indeed," cried Helgi, laughing, "an excellent beginning no skald could do it better." "Nay," replied Ketill, frowning angrily, "if you want matter for a jest, tell a tale yourself.
But in the camp which he had left, and in the vast multitude on the plains of Tara, there was stir and revelry, and babbling speculation as to the contest of to-morrow the contest which was to decide whether the chief bard of Erin was to hold his own against all comers, or yield the palm. For rumour said that a great Skald had come from the northern lands to compete with the Irish bard.
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