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Updated: June 9, 2025
I prayed to the gods that this might not be so, and when my prayers availed me nothing I sought the counsel of Freydisa. She listened to my story, then said briefly, "Let be. Things will go as they are fated. You are no madder than the rest of men. I can say no more."
For instance, why did not everybody see her with my eyes? I could not hide from myself that Ragnar went near to hating her; more than once she had almost been the cause of a quarrel between us. Freydisa, too, my nurse, who loved me, looked on her sourly, and even my mother, although she tried to like her for my sake, had not yet learned to do so, or thus it appeared to me.
Freydisa lifted a cloth from beneath the chin, revealing a dinted breastplate of rich armour, different from any of our day and land, and, lying on it, such a necklace as we had seen upon the ghost, a beauteous thing of inlaid golden shells and emerald stones shaped like beetles. "Take it for your Iduna," said Freydisa, "since it is for her sake that we break in upon this great man's rest."
Then she seized the necklace and fastened it round her throat. "Stay," I said, awaking. "I think you had best not touch those gems. Iduna, I have dreamed that they will bring no luck to you or to any woman, save one." Here the dark-faced Freydisa looked up at me, then dropped her eyes again, and stood listening. "You have dreamed!" exclaimed Iduna. "I care little what you have dreamed.
"Now, how comes it, Freydisa," I asked, when we had got our breath again, "that this Wanderer, who showed himself so threateningly upon the crest of his grave, lies patient as a dead sheep within it while we rob his bones?" "Because we were meant to take it, as I think, Olaf. Now, help me to fill in the mouth of that hole roughly I will return to finish this to-morrow and let us away to the hall.
"Iduna is lovely, is she not, and Steinar is handsome, is he not, and of an age when man seeks woman, and what is brotherhood when man seeks woman and woman beguiles man?" "Peace to your riddles, Freydisa. You forget that Iduna is my betrothed and that Steinar was fostered with me. Why, I'd trust them for a week at sea alone."
So I told them, and when I came to the images that we had found standing on the coffin, Iduna, who was paying little heed, stopped from her fondling of the necklace and asked where they were. "Freydisa has them," I answered. "Show them the Wanderer's gods, Freydisa." "So Freydisa was with you, was she?" said Iduna.
"Fear is an ill word to use to me," I said sternly. "Know, Iduna, that if it is put to me thus I fear nothing in life or death. You shall have the necklace if it can be found in yonder earth, chance what may to the searcher. Nay, no more words. Steinar will lead you home; I must talk of this matter with Freydisa."
When I had finished looking at myself in the shield, I leaned upon the parapet staring at the sea and wondering how the plains of Aar looked that night beneath this selfsame moon, and whether Freydisa were dead by now, and whom Iduna had married, and if she ever thought of me, or if Steinar came to haunt her sleep.
We were setting about our grim task at dead of night, for fear lest the priests should stay us. Also, I did not wish the people to know that I had done this thing. "Here is work for a month," I said doubtfully, looking up at the great mass of the mound. "Nay," replied Freydisa, "since I can show you the door of the grave, and perchance the passage still stands. Yet, will you really enter there?"
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