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Updated: May 13, 2025
"I promised," said the Dane king, "to set thy head higher than other men's, and I keep my word." The trunkless head was set on the gates of London.
And from midst of them peered a trunkless skull, and on the skull was a mitre, and from the yawning jaws a voice came hissing, as a serpent's hiss, 'Harold, the scorner, thou art ours! Then, as from the buzz of an army, came voices multitudinous, 'Thou art ours! I sought to rise, and behold my limbs were bound, and the gyves were fine and frail, as the web of the gossamer, and they weighed on me like chains of iron.
Pilgrimages to all sorts of uncanny places to execution grounds, to graveyards, to houses reputed to be haunted, were favorite pastimes of the young. In the days when decapitation was public, not only were small boys sent to witness the ghastly scene, but they were made to visit alone the place in the darkness of night and there to leave a mark of their visit on the trunkless head.
And with ornaments of diverse kinds fallen off from their places, with bows lying about, with arrows of golden wings scattered around, with many broken cars adorned with rows of bells, with many slain steeds scattered about covered with blood and with their tongues protruding, with bottoms of cars, standards, quivers, and banners, with gigantic conches, belonging to great heroes, of milky whiteness lying about, and with trunkless elephants lying prostrate, the earth looked beautiful like a damsel adorned with diverse kinds of ornaments.
The forests, sombre and dull, stood motionless and silent on each side of the broad stream. At the foot of big, towering trees, trunkless nipa palms rose from the mud of the bank, in bunches of leaves enormous and heavy, that hung unstirring over the brown swirl of eddies.
Nobody was buying there, nobody even looked to buy as Ned watched for a minute; the stream swept past and the grizzled face stared on. It had no body, no hands even, it was as if hung there, a trunkless head. It was the face of a generation grown old, useless and unloved, which lived by the crumbs that fall from Demos' table and waited wearily to be gone.
That trunkless head he now fancied he saw, in the middle of the fog; and his body began to sweat cold, and his hands to shake so that he could hardly told the box. But if he let it fall He came hastily down the ladder and sat down on the dirty ground, with the infernal engine beside him.
Covered with the blood of elephants and horses and car-warriors and combatants of other kinds, it teemed with headless trunks and trunkless heads. And it resounded with the cries of elephants and steeds and men and women and abounded with jackals and cranes and ravens and kankas and crows. And it was the sporting ground of Rakshasas subsisting on human flesh.
The two eldest took different roads, and the youngest remounted his wooden horse, and in a short time arrived at the palace of his beloved white cat, who received him with the greatest joy, while the trunkless hands helped him to dismount, and provided him with immediate refreshments; after which the prince gave the white cat an account of the admiration which had been bestowed on the beautiful little dog, and informed her of his father's farther injunction.
This he did to such good purpose that record of the trunkless member remains unto this day in the inventories of the Lord Admiral's company. Another of these pieces, the character of which can be easily imagined from its title, Apollo and Daphne, ends with a song, which may owe something to the traditions of the mythological pastoral:
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