Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/228

 and also of England; besides accounts of great events which have taken place in this country itself. His narratives are considered by many men of knowledge to be the most remarkable of all; because he was a man of good understanding, and so old that his birth was as far back as the year after Harald Sigurdson's fall. He wrote, as he himself says, the lives and times of the kings of Norway from the report of Odd Kollason, a grandson of Hall of Sidu. Odd again took his information from Thorgeir Afradskoll, who was an intelligent man, and so old that when Earl Hakon the Great was killed he was dwelling at Nidaros— the same place at which King Olaf Tryggvesson afterwards laid the foundation of the merchant town of Drontheim which is now there. The priest Are came, when seven years old, to Haukadal to Hall Thorarinson, and was there fourteen years. Hall was a man of great knowledge and of excellent memory; and he could even remember being baptized, when he was three years old, by the priest Thangbrand, the year before Christianity was established by law in Iceland. Are was twelve years of age when Bishop Isleif died, and at his death eighty years had elapsed since the fall of Olaf Tryggvesson. Hall died nine years later than Bishop Isleif, and had attained nearly the age of ninety-four years. Hall had traded between the two countries, and had been in partnership in trading concerns with King Olaf the Saint, by which his circumstances had been greatly improved, and he had become well acquainted with the kingdom of Norway. He had fixed his residence in Haukadal when he was thirty years of age, and he had dwelt there nearly sixty-four years, as Are tells us. Teit, a son of Bishop Isleif, was fostered in the house of Hall of