numbers.  He put stakes under some of the dead bodies of his comrades to prop them up, set others on horseback like living men, and tied others to neighbouring stones, not taking off any of their armour, and dressing them in due order of line and wedge, just as if they were about to engage.  The wing composed of the dead was as thick as the troop of the living.  It was an amazing spectacle this, of dead men dragged out to battle, and corpses mustered to fight.  The plan served him well, for the very figures of the dead men showed like a vast array as the sunbeams struck them.  For those dead and senseless shapes restored the original number of the army so well, that the mass might have been unthinned by the slaughter of yesterday.  The Britons, terrified at the spectacle, fled before fighting, conquered by the dead men whom they had overcome in life.  I cannot tell whether to think more of the cunning or of the good fortune of this victory.  The Danes came down on the king as he was tardily making off, and killed him.  Amleth, triumphant, made a great plundering, seized the spoils of Britain, and went back with his wives to his own land.

Meanwhile Rorik had died, and Wiglek, who had come to the throne, had harassed Amleth’s mother with all manner of insolence and stripped her of her royal wealth, complaining that her son had usurped the kingdom of Jutland and defrauded the King of Leire, who had the sole privilege of giving and taking away the rights of high offices.  This treatment Amleth took with such forbearance as apparently to return kindness for slander, for he presented Wiglek with the richest of his spoils.  But afterwards he seized a chance of taking vengeance, attacked him, subdued him, and from a covert became an open foe.  Fialler, the governor of Skaane, he drove into exile; and the tale is that Fialler retired to a spot called Undensakre, which is unknown to our peoples.  After this, Wiglek, recruited with the forces of Skaane and Zealand, sent envoys to challenge Amleth to a war.  Amleth, with his marvellous shrewdness, saw that he was tossed between two difficulties, one of which involved disgrace and the other danger.  For he knew that if he took up the challenge he was threatened with peril of his life, while to shrink from it would disgrace his reputation as a soldier.  Yet in that spirit ever fixed on deeds of prowess the desire to save his honour won the day.  Dread of disaster was blunted by more vehement thirst for glory; he would not tarnish the unblemished lustre of his fame by timidly skulking from his fate.  Also he saw that there is almost as wide a gap between a mean life and a noble death as that which is acknowledged between honour and disgrace themselves.