had the heart to save their lives by crime and impiety, and to prosecute their parents and their children by so abominable a decree, did not deserve life; for they would be doing a work of cruelty and not of love.  Finally, all those whose own lives were dearer to them than the love of their parents or their children, deserved but ill of their country.  These words were reported to the assembly, and assented to by the vote of the majority.  So the fortunes of all were staked upon the lot and those upon whom it fell were doomed to be banished.  Thus those who had been loth to obey necessity of their own accord had now to accept the award of chance.  So they sailed first to Bleking, and then, sailing past Moring, they came to anchor at Gothland; where, according to Paulus, they are said to have been prompted by the goddess Frigg to take the name of the Longobardi (Lombards), whose nation they afterwards founded.  In the end they landed at Rugen, and, abandoning their ships, began to march overland.  They crossed and wasted a great portion of the world; and at last, finding an abode in Italy, changed the ancient name of the nation for their own.

Meanwhile, the land of the Danes, where the tillers laboured less and less, and all traces of the furrows were covered with overgrowth, began to look like a forest.  Almost stripped of its pleasant native turf, it bristled with the dense unshapely woods that grew up.  Traces of this are yet seen in the aspect of its fields.  What were once acres fertile in grain are now seen to be dotted with trunks of trees; and where of old the tillers turned the earth up deep and scattered the huge clods there has now sprung up a forest covering the fields, which still bear the tracks of ancient tillage.  Had not these lands remained untilled and desolate with long overgrowth, the tenacious roots of trees could never have shared the soil of one and the same land with the furrows made by the plough.  Moreover, the mounds which men laboriously built up of old on the level ground for the burial of the dead are now covered by a mass of woodland.  Many piles of stones are also to be seen interspersed among the forest glades.  These were once scattered over the whole country, but the peasants carefully gathered the boulders and piled them into a heap that they might not prevent furrows being cut in all directions; for they would sooner sacrifice a little of the land than find the whole of it stubborn.  From this work, done by the toil of the peasants for the easier working of the fields, it is judged that the population in ancient times was greater than the present one, which is satisfied with small fields, and keeps its agriculture within narrower limits than those of the ancient tillage.  Thus the present generation is amazed to behold that it has exchanged a soil which could once produce grain for one only fit to grow acorns, and the plough-handle and the cornstalks for a landscape studded with trees.  Let this account of Snio, which I have put together as truly as I could, suffice.