Ebb was crossing Halland with a very small escort, and went for a night’s lodging to a country farm, where the dwellings of two brothers faced one another on the two sides of a river.  Now these men used to receive folk hospitably and then murder them, but were skilful to hide their brigandage under a show of generosity.  For they had hung on certain hidden chains, in a lofty part of the house, an oblong beam like a press, and furnished it with a steel point; they used to lower this in the night by letting down the fastenings, and cut off the heads of those that lay below.  Many had they beheaded in this way with the hanging mass.  So when Ebb and his men had been feasted abundantly, the servants laid them out a bed near the hearth, so that by the swing of the treacherous beam they might mow off their heads, which faced the fire.  When they departed, Ebb, suspecting the contrivance slung overhead, told his men to feign slumber and shift their bodies, saying that it would be very wholesome for them to change their place.

Now among these were some who despised the orders which the others obeyed, and lay unmoved, each in the spot where he had chanced to lie down.  Then towards the mirk of night the heavy hanging machine was set in motion by the doers of the treachery.  Loosened from the knots of its fastening, it fell violently on the ground, and slew those beneath it.  Thereupon those who had the charge of committing the crime brought in a light, that they might learn clearly what had happened, and saw that Ebb, on whose especial account they had undertaken the affair, had wisely been equal to the danger.  He straightway set on them and punished them with death; and also, after losing his men in the mutual slaughter, he happened to find a vessel, crossed a river full of blocks of ice, and announced to Gotar the result, not so much of his mission as of his mishap.

Gotar judged that this affair had been inspired by Siward, and prepared to avenge his wrongs by arms.  Siward, defeated by him in Halland, retreated into Jutland, the enemy having taken his sister.  Here he conquered the common people of the Sclavs, who ventured to fight without a leader; and he won as much honour from this victory as he had got disgrace by his flight.  But a little afterwards, the men whom he had subdued when they were ungeneraled, found a general and defeated Siward in Funen.  Several times he fought them in Jutland, but with ill-success.  The result was that he lost both Skaane and Jutland, and only retained the middle of his realm without the head, like the fragments of some body that had been consumed away.  His son Jarmerik (Eormunrec), with his child-sisters, fell into the hands of the enemy; one of these was sold to the Germans, the other to the Norwegians; for in old time marriages were matters of purchase.  Thus the kingdom of the Danes, which had been enlarged with such valour, made famous by such ancestral honours, and enriched by so many