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Updated: June 23, 2025
I said, 'Now we are level again, but I will be better than you, for I will have a child which shall live and be strong like me. But you have had yours first, and it is a boy. So you are better than me still." Then her eyes filled with hot tears, which made her eyelids blink. "Oh, Freydis," Gudrid said, "you don't grudge me my boy?" "No, no, it is not that. It is that I am ashamed.
The next time the Skraelings came they were armed with slings, and raised upon a pole a great blue ball and attacked the Norsemen so furiously that they were running away when Erik's sister, Freydis, came out before them with bare arms, and took up a sword, saying, "Why do you run, strong men as you are, from these miserable dwarfs whom I thought you would knock down like cattle?
He rode home in high spirits and showed his birds to his sister Freydis. "Did any king," he asked, "ever make so great a capture in so short a time?" "It is, indeed," she said, "a good morning's hunting to have got five blackcocks, but it was still better when in one morning a king of Norway took five kings and subdued all their kingdoms."
But, as I now perceive too late, I fashioned the legs of this figure unevenly, and the joy I have in its life is less than the shame that I take from its limping." "Such magic is a trifle," Freydis replied, "although it is the only magic I can perform in an enclosure of buttered willow wands. Now, then, you see for yourself that I am not going to take orders from you.
And Niafer and Freydis became the best and most intimate of friends, and their cordiality to each other could not but have appeared to the discerning rather ominous. "She seems to be a very good-hearted sort of a person," Niafer conceded, in matrimonial privacy, "though certainly she is rather queer.
The flooring, of course, was of zinc, as a defence against the unfriendly Alfs, who are at perpetual war with Audela, and, moreover, there was a palisade, enclosing all, of peeled willow wands, not buttered but oiled, and fastened with unknotted ribbons. Everything was very simple and homelike, and here the servitors of Freydis attended them when there was need.
Freydis, being with the company, fought desperately in this battle, and greatly distinguished herself as a terrible combatant, although in that peculiar condition which does not specially qualify a woman for such exploits. Thorfinn afterward explored Massachusetts Bay, spent a third winter in Vinland, and then, with part of the company, returned to Greenland.
"Then is the old man a fool on every count," declared Messire Heleigh, sighing, "for I have heard of his earlier antics in Provence, and no lovelier lady breathes than Dame Alianora." "I consider Queen Freydis to be the handsomer of the two," replied Thibaut, "but certainly there is no comparing either of these inestimable ladies with Dom Manuel's swarthy drab."
Gudrid, standing on the afterdeck, looked at the little town and the green fields about it, at the snow-peaks whose shapes she knew well, whereunder, as she felt, her life had been passed; and then she saw old Eric in his red cloak being helped into his boat, and Freydis, bareheaded, with her yellow hair flying in the wind, and her strong arms folded over her chest and felt the comfort of home growing about her, and the dew of happy tears in her eyes.
For now the figure that I have made in the world, and all else that is in the world, and all that is anywhere without this enclosure of buttered willow wands, mean nothing to me, and there is no meaning in anything save in the loveliness of Freydis."
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