eagerly round for reinforcements, Erik said:  “Boldness helps the righteous; a valiant dog must attack the bear; we want wolf-hounds, and not little unwarlike birds.”  This said, he advised Frode to muster his fleet.  When it was drawn up they sailed off against the enemy; and so they fought and subdued the islands lying between Denmark and the East; and as they advanced thence, met some ships of the Ruthenian fleet.  Frode thought it shameful to attack such a handful, but Erik said:  “We must seek food from the gaunt and lean.  He who falls shall seldom fatten, nor has that man the power to bite whom the huge sack has devoured.”  By this warning he cured the king of all shame about making an assault, and presently induced him to attack a small number with a throng; for he showed him that advantage must be counted before honour.

After this they went on to meet Olmar, who because of the slowness of his multitude preferred awaiting the enemy to attacking it; for the vessels of the Ruthenians seemed disorganized, and, owing to their size, not so well able to row.  But not even did the force of his multitudes avail him.  For the extraordinary masses of the Ruthenians were stronger in numbers than in bravery, and yielded the victory to the stout handful of the Danes.

When Frode tried to return home, his voyage encountered an unheard-of difficulty.  For the crowds of dead bodies, and likewise the fragments of shields and spears, bestrewed the entire gulf of the sea, and tossed on the tide, so that the harbours were not only straitened, but stank.  The vessels stuck, hampered amid the corpses.  They could neither thrust off with oars, nor drive away with poles, the rotting carcases that floated around, or prevent, when they had put one away, another rolling up and driving against the fleet.  You would have thought that a war had arisen with the dead, and there was a strange combat with the lifeless.

So Frode summoned the nations which he had conquered, and enacted (a) that any father of a family who had fallen in that war should be buried with his horse and all his arms and decorations.  And if any body-snatcher, in his abominable covetousness, made an attempt on him, he was to suffer for it, not only with his life, but also with the loss of burial for his own body; he should have no barrow and no funeral.  For he thought it just that he who despoiled another’s ashes should be granted no burial, but should repeat in his own person the fate he had inflicted on another.  He appointed that the body of a centurion or governor should receive funeral on a pyre built of his own ship.  He ordered that the bodies of every ten pilots should be burnt together with a single ship, but that every earl or king that was killed should be put on his own ship and burnt with it.  He wished this nice attention to be paid in conducting the funerals of the slain, because he wished to prevent indiscriminate obsequies.  By this time all the kings of the