Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/103

 about the year 1085; and set fire to, and the stone walls only left. King Swerker I. restored it about 1139, and had it consecrated, and dedicated to Saint Laurence. This church appears to be the only building from which the extent at least, if not the magnificence of the temples of the pagan religion of the North, may be guessed at. It stands at Gamle Upsal (Old Upsal), about two miles north of the present town of Upsal, at the end of an extensive plain. Around Gamle Upsal—now consisting of this church, the minister's house, and two or three cottages—there are, according to Professor Verelius, in his notes on the Herverar Saga, tumuli to the number of six hundred and sixty-nine, besides many which have been levelled for cultivation. Reckoning the chain of such hillocks between the town of Upsal and Gamle Upsal, that, or even a greater number of those tumuli, may be conceded to the antiquary. Three of them, close to Gamle Upsal, are called Kongs-hogarne (the king's mounds); and one, oblong and flattened at the top, is Tings-hogen (the Thing's mound). The circumference of these mounds at the base is about three hundred and fifty paces, and the ascent on any side takes about seventy-five steps; so that the perpendicular height may be about ninety feet. It may also be conceded to the antiquary that these mounds are works of art, in so far that they have been reduced to regular shape by the hands of man, and have been used as places of interment, and still more as places for addressing a multitude from—the steep slopes close to each other admitting of great numbers sitting or standing within sight and hearing of a person addressing them. But whoever looks over this chain of sand-hills at the end of a plain which has been a lake or mire at no distant geological period, and with a mire or morass, now called Myrby Trask on the other side of it, will doubt whether these mounds be not originally of natural