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Only one neither fled nor was baptized, and that one was Lage Ulfson Kvaerk, the ancestor of the present Lage. He slew his best steed before Asathor's altar, and promised to give him whatever he should ask, even to his own life, if he would save him from the vengeance of the king. Asathor heard his prayer.
Then the god gave a fearful roar, fell on the ground, writhed and foamed and vanished into the mountain. In the next moment Lage heard a hoarse voice crying from within, "I shall return, Lage Ulfson, when thou shalt least expect me!"
Lage Ulfson then set to work clearing a way through the forest; and when that was done, he called all his household together, and told them of the power of Christ the White. Not long after he took his sons and his daughter, and hastened with them southward, until he found King Olaf.
And, so the Saga relates, they all fell down on their knees before him, prayed for his forgiveness, and received baptism from the king's own bishop. So ends the Saga of Lage Ulfson Kvaerk. Aasa Kvaerk loved her father well, but especially in the winter.
That same night Lage Ulfson Kvaerk slew a black ram, and thanked Asathor for his deliverance; and the Saga tells that while he was sprinkling the blood on the altar, the thundering god himself appeared to him, and wilder he looked than the fiercest wild Turk. Rams, said he, were every-day fare; they could redeem no promise. Brynhild, his daughter, was the reward Asathor demanded.
Lage Ulfson was not the man to be afraid; yet the church-bells many a time drove the blood from his cheeks; for he also heard the moan from the mountain. The year went, and Asathor returned. If he had not told his name, however, Lage would not have recognized him. That a year could work so great a change in a god, he would hardly have believed, if his own eyes had not testified to it.
That summer Hjalti Skeggjason was made an outlaw at the Thing for blaspheming the gods. Runolf Ulfson, who lived in Dale, under Isles'-fells, the greatest of chieftains, upheld the lawsuit against him. That summer Gizor left Iceland and Hjalti with him, and they came to Norway, and went forthwith to find King Olaf.
In the fourth century of our era Jerome speaks of having met in Gaul with the Attacotes, descended from a savage Scotch tribe, who fed on human flesh, and that though they possessed great herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, with numbers of pigs, for whom their vast forests afforded excellent grazing grounds ; and though the Scandinavian kitchen-middings have not so far yielded any traces of the practice of cannibalism, Adam of Bremen, who preached Christianity at the court of King Sweyn Ulfson, represents the Danes of his day as barbarians clad in the skins of beasts, chasing the aurochs and the eland, unable to do more than imitate the cries of animals and devouring the flesh of their fellow-men.
Then one of the maids ran out to call Lage Ulfson, who had gone to the stables to harness the horses; and he came and greeted the unknown man, and thanked him for last meeting, as is the wont of Norse peasants, although they had never seen each other until that morning.
One evening Vigfusson and old Lage Ulfson had been walking about the fields to look at the crop, both smoking their evening pipes.
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