Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/55

Rh arrows out of the bow. He brandished the buckler on his arm, the rouser of the play of blades—he is a mighty hero. The fray grew greater everywhere about the king. It was famed east over the sea, Eric's war-faring.

Or listen to the weird sisters as they weave the web of Ireland's fate under Brian Boru:—

Wide-stretched is the warp presaging the slaughter, the hanging cloud of the beam; it is raining blood. The gray web of the hosts is raised up on the spears, the web which we the friends of Woden are filling with red weft.

This web is warped with the guts of men, and heavily weighted with human heads; blood-stained darts are the shafts, iron-bound are the stays; it is shuttled with arrows. Let us strike with our swords this web of victory!

War and Sword-clasher, Sangrid and Swipple, are weaving with drawn swords. The shaft shall sing, the shield shall ring, the helm-hound [axe] shall fall on the target.

And those who met their death in battle had reserved for them a similar existence in the life to come, not doomed like the 'straw-dead' to tread wet and chill and dusky ways to the land of Hel, but—I am quoting Gummere —as weapon-dead faring "straightway to Odin, unwasted by sickness, in the full strength of manhood," to spend their days in glorious battle and their nights in equally glorious feasting in the courts of Valhalla. In his cradle the young Viking was lulled by such songs as this:—