Page:The Early Kings of Norway.djvu/98

 88 EARLY KINGS OF NORWAY. not perhaps seen in the terrestrial Planet that day. Olaf, or * Olaus,' or *Anlaf,' as they name him, did 'engage on oath to Ethelred not to invade England any more/ and kept his promise, they farther say. Essentially a truth, as we already know, though the circumstances were all different; and the promise was to a devout High Priest, not to a crowned Blockhead and cowardly Do-nothing. One other * Olaus' I find mentioned in our Books, two or three centuries before, at a time when there existed no such individual ; not to speak of several Anlafs, who sometimes seem to mean Olaf, and still oftener to mean nobody possible. Which occasions not a little obscurity in our early History, says the learned Selden. A thing remediable, too, in which, if any Englishman of due genius (or even capacity for standing labour), who understood the Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon languages, would en- gage in it, he might do a great deal of good, and bring the matter into a comparatively lucid state. Vain aspirations, — or perhaps not altogether vain. At the time of Olaf Tryggveson's death, and indeed long before. King Svein Double-Beard had always for chief enterprise the Conquest of England, and followed