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Updated: June 3, 2025
In token of my loyalty I agree, as the old custom of my fathers hath ordained, to deliver once every year at the castle of Dumbarton as I have this day delivered two well-trained gerfalcons, and and " Kenric faltered, for he heard the rustling of a woman's dress very near him. The young queen had entered. "Enough," said the king.
The outside of the palanquin is overlaid with plates of beaten gold and the inside is draped with tiger skins. A dozen of his best gerfalcons are beside him, and near at hand ride several of his attendant lords. Presently one of them will exclaim, "Look, Sire, there are some cranes."
And Lodbrok answered that she was an Iceland gerfalcon from the far northern ocean, and went on to tell us of her powers of flight, and at what game she was best, and how she would take her quarry, and the like. And Beorn sat down and feigned to pay no heed to us. Presently the Dane said that he had known gerfalcons to fly from Iceland to Norway in a day, and at that Beorn laughed as in scorn.
After all, I would not exchange him for another squire, though I were given a city to boot, and therefore I am in doubt whether it will be well to send him to the government your highness has bestowed upon him; though I perceive in him a certain aptitude for the work of governing, so that, with a little trimming of his understanding, he would manage any government as easily as the king does his taxes; and moreover, we know already ample experience that it does not require much cleverness or much learning to be a governor, for there are a hundred round about us that scarcely know how to read, and govern like gerfalcons.
The natives formed themselves in groups around the sailors, without showing the least sign of fear. They were almost naked, and bore upon the wrist a tame parroquet, after the fashion in which the gentlemen of Europe carry their hawks or their gerfalcons.
"Old falcons, gerfalcons, and hawks, when they have long swept the plains, end their lives in a hole in a rock. Sure enough I am fond of the wide expanse of sky and land.
Now the fighting-men of Shadowy Vale were two long hundreds lacking five; of whom two score and ten were women, and three score and ten lads under twenty winters; but the women, though you might scarce see fairer of face and body, were doughty in arms, all good shooters in the bow; and the swains were eager and light-foot, cragsmen of the best, wont to scaling the cliffs of the Vale in search of the nests of gerfalcons and such-like fowl, and swimming the strong streams of the Shivering Flood; tough bodies and wiry, stronger than most grown men, and as fearless as the best.
Seeing a pair of these birds flying near, Sir Oscar turned to his son. "Were we not otherwise employed," said he, "this were a glorious day, Allan, on which to fly our young hawks at these herons. The birds will lose their cunning if they be not better exercised. Know you if poor Alpin had set aside a pair of gerfalcons for his Majesty's tribute?"
If he wished to amuse himself with field sports, he had at his command an establishment far more sumptuous than that which had belonged to him when he was at the head of a great kingdom, an army of huntsmen and fowlers, a vast arsenal of guns, spears, buglehorns and tents, miles of network, staghounds, foxhounds, harriers, packs for the boar and packs for the wolf, gerfalcons for the heron and haggards for the wild duck.
"From all quarters," says an ancient manuscript, "he received offerings of wine, fruit, confections, ortolans, horses, dogs, hawks, and gerfalcons. The letters accompanying these often contained a second paragraph petitioning for pensions or grants from the king, or for places, even down to that of apothecary or of barber to the Dauphin."
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