Page:The Early Kings of Norway.djvu/110

 100 EARLY KINGS OF NORWAY. is further notable, always on the anti-Svein side. English books do not mention him at all that I can find ; but it is fairly credible that, as the Norse records report, in the end of Ethelred's reign, he was the ally or hired general of Ethelred, and did a great deal of sea-fighting, watching, saiHng and sieging for this miserable king and Edmund Ironside, his son. Snorro says expressly, London, the impregnable city, had to be besieged again for Ethelred's behoof (in the interval between Svein's death and young Knut's getting back from Denmark), and that our Olaf Haraldson was the great engineer and victorious captor of London on that singular occasion, — London captured for the first time. The Bridge, as usual, Snorro says, offered almost insuperable obstacles. But the engineering genius of Olaf contrived huge 'platforms of wainscoting' (old walls of wooden houses, in fact), * bound together by withes ' ; these, carried steadily aloft above the ships, will (thinks Olaf) considerably secure them and us from the destructive missiles, big boulder stones, and other mischief profusely showered down on us, till we get under the Bridge with axes and cables, and do some