After this he went to Harald, who made him commander of the sea; and at last he was transferred to the service of Ring.  At this time one Brun was the sole partner and confidant of all Harald’s councils.  To this man both Harald and Ring, whenever they needed a secret messenger, used to entrust their commissions.  This degree of intimacy he obtained because he had been reared and fostered with them.  But Brun, amid the toils of his constant journeys to and fro, was drowned in a certain river; and Odin, disguised under his name and looks, shook the close union of the kings by his treacherous embassage; and he sowed strife so guilefully that he engendered in men, who were bound by friendship and blood, a bitter mutual hate, which seemed unappeasable except by war.  Their dissensions first grew up silently; at last both sides betrayed their leanings, and their secret malice burst into the light of day.  So they declared their feuds, and seven years passed in collecting the materials of war.  Some say that Harald secretly sought occasions to destroy himself, not being moved by malice or jealousy for the crown, but by a deliberate and voluntary effort.  His old age and his cruelty made him a burden to his subjects; he preferred the sword to the pangs of disease, and liked better to lay down his life in the battle-field than in his bed, that he might have an end in harmony with the deeds of his past life.  Thus, to make his death more illustrious, and go to the nether world in a larger company, he longed to summon many men to share his end; and he therefore of his own will prepared for war, in order to make food for future slaughter.  For these reasons, being seized with as great a thirst to die himself as to kill others, and wishing the massacre on both sides to be equal, he furnished both sides with equal resources; but let Ring have a somewhat stronger force, preferring he should conquer and survive him.

     Endnotes: 
     (1) A parallel is the Lionel-Lancelot story of children saved by
     being turned into dogs.

BOOK EIGHT.

Starkad was the first to set in order in Danish speech the history of the Swedish war, a conflict whereof he was himself a mighty pillar; the said history being rather an oral than a written tradition.  He set forth and arranged the course of this war in the mother tongue according to the fashion of our country; but I purpose to put it into Latin, and will first recount the most illustrious princes on either side.  For I have felt no desire to include the multitude, which are even past exact numbering.  And my pen shall relate first those on the side of Harald, and presently those who served under Ring.