and turned their arms against one another.  When the Hellespontines saw this, they brought up a shield-mantlet, and seized the approaches of the gates.  Then they tore up the posts, burst into the building, and hewed down the blinded ranks of the enemy.  In this uproar Odin appeared, and, making for the thick of the ranks of the fighters, restored by his divine power to the Danes that vision which they had lost by sleights; for he ever cherished them with fatherly love.  He instructed them to shower stones to batter the Hellespontines, who used spells to harden their bodies against weapons.  Thus both companies slew one another and perished.  Jarmerik lost both feet and both hands, and his trunk was rolled among the dead.  Broder, little fit for it, followed him as king.

The next king was Siwald.  His son Snio took vigorously to roving in his father’s old age, and not only preserved the fortunes of his country, but even restored them, lessened as they were, to their former estate.  Likewise, when he came to the sovereignty, he crushed the insolence of the champions Eskil and Alkil, and by this conquest reunited to his country Skaane, which had been severed from the general jurisdiction of Denmark.  At last he conceived a passion for the daughter of the King of the Goths; it was returned, and he sent secret messengers to seek a chance of meeting her.  These men were intercepted by the father of the damsel and hanged:  thus paying dearly for their rash mission.  Snio, wishing to avenge their death, invaded Gothland.  Its king met him with his forces, and the aforesaid champions challenged him to send strong men to fight.  Snio laid down as condition of the duel, that each of the two kings should either lose his own empire or gain that of the other, according to the fortune of the champions, and that the kingdom of the conquered should be staked as the prize of the victory.  The result was that the King of the Goths was beaten by reason of the ill-success of his defenders, and had to quit his kingdom for the Danes.  Snio, learning that this king’s daughter had been taken away at the instance of her father to wed the King of the Swedes, sent a man clad in ragged attire, who used to ask alms on the public roads, to try her mind.  And while he lay, as beggars do, by the threshold, he chanced to see the queen, and whined in a weak voice, “Snio loves thee.”  She feigned not to have heard the sound that stole on her ears, and neither looked nor stepped back, but went on to the palace, then returned straightway, and said in a low whisper, which scarcely reached his ears, “I love him who loves me”; and having said this she walked away.

The beggar rejoiced that she had returned a word of love, and, as he sat on the next day at the gate, when the queen came up, he said, briefly as ever, “Wishes should have a tryst.”  Again she shrewdly caught his cunning speech, and passed on, dissembling wholly.  A little later she passed by her questioner, and said that she would shortly go to Bocheror; for this was the spot to which she meant to flee.  And when the beggar heard this, he insisted, with his wonted shrewd questions, upon being told a fitting time for the tryst.  The woman was as cunning as he, and as little clear of speech, and named as quickly as she could the beginning of the winter.