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A famous old king of Denmark, known as Harald Blaatand or Bluetooth, had many sons, of whom only one, Svend or Sweyn, outlived him. While Harald was a Christian, Sweyn was a pagan, having been brought up in the old faith by a noble warrior Palnatoke, to whom his father had sent the boy to teach him the use of arms.
He smiles and nods as he hears how memory's sprite takes his place here as guide, and tells of and shows, as we see, Tegner's copy and translation of Ochlenschloeger's "Hakon Jarl and Palnatoke." We see Vadstene cloister's library, in thick hog's leather bindings, and think of the fair hands of the nuns that have borne them, the pious, mild eyes that conjured the spirit out of the dead letters.
It possesses power, freshness nay, any expression of mine is poor. It is possessed of grandeur; it is the poet Oehlenschl ger in the bloom of his soul. Hakon, Jarl, and Palnatoke will live in the poetry of Oehlenschl ger as long as mankind endures.
Palnatoke is the title of a tragedy by Oehlenschlager, which had its run of immortality in Copenhagen some sixty or seventy years ago. I judge the institution to have been in its floweriest state, probably now in Hakon Jarl's time.
It is said that Sweyn himself, in a later war, killed his father on the battlefield, while Palnatoke stood by approving, though in after years the two were bitter foes. All we need say further of these personages is that Sweyn invaded England with a powerful force in the time of Ethelred the Unready and drove this weak king from the island, making himself master of great part of the kingdom.
She came up holding out her hand, and saying, "Well, Mr. Alison, if one is to fall, it is a pleasure to have so mighty a victor. "I had no time for the practices," said Harold, puzzled as to who Palnatoke was. "Worse and worse! You don't mean that you shoot like this without practice?" "Lucy taught me a little."
Grasser was the first to remark the resemblance between the adventures of Tell and those of a certain Tocco, or Toke, or Palnatoke, of Denmark, which are related by Saxo Grammaticus, a learned historian who flourished in Denmark in the twelfth century, of which kingdom and its dependencies he compiled an elaborate history, first printed at Paris in 1486; but the Danish Tocco, who is supposed to have existed in the latter half of the tenth century, was wholly unknown to the Swiss, who, if ever, came to the Alps before that time.
Add to which that the country had years excellent for grass and crop, and that the herrings came in exuberance; tokens, to the thinking mind, that Hakon Jarl was a favorite of Heaven. His fight with the far-famed Jomsvikings was his grandest exploit in public rumor. Palnatoke, Bue, and the other quasi-heroic heads of this establishment are still remembered in the northern parts.
And the old classics were almost unrecognisable in English guise, for instance, the anglicised veni, vidi, vici, which was quoted by a student. The contrast between the English and the French mind was presented to me in all its force when I compared Windsor Castle with Versailles. The former was an old Northern Hall, in which the last act of Oehlenschlaeger's Palnatoke would have been well staged.
One day, while Palnatoke was boasting in the king's presence of his skill as an archer, Harald told him that, in spite of his boasts, there was one shot he would not dare to try. He replied that there was no shot he was afraid to attempt, and the king then challenged him to shoot an apple from the head of his son. Palnatoke obeyed, and the apple fell, pierced by the arrow.
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