Nor must we marvel if, tempted by the prodigious miracles of these folk, the barbaric world fell to worshipping a false religion, when others like unto these, who were mere mortals, but were reverenced with divine honours, beguiled even the shrewdness of the Latins.  I have touched on these things lest, when I relate of sleights and marvels, I be checked by the disbelief of the reader.  Now I will leave these matters and return to my theme.

Swipdag, now that he had slain Gram, was enriched with the realms of Denmark and Sweden; and because of the frequent importunities of his wife he brought back from banishment her brother Guthorm, upon his promising tribute, and made him ruler of the Danes.  But Hadding preferred to avenge his father rather than take a boon from his foe.

This man’s nature so waxed and throve that in the early season of his youth he was granted the prime of manhood.  Leaving the pursuit of pleasure, he was constantly zealous in warlike exercises; remembering that he was the son of a fighting father, and was bound to spend his whole span of life in approved deeds of warfare.  Hardgrep, daughter of Wagnhofde, tried to enfeeble his firm spirit with her lures of love, contending and constantly averring that he ought to offer the first dues of the marriage bed in wedlock with her, who had proffered to his childhood most zealous and careful fostering, and had furnished him with his first rattle.

Nor was she content with admonishing in plain words, but began a strain of song as follows: 

“Why doth thy life thus waste and wander?  Why dost thou pass thy years unwed, following arms, thirsting for throats?  Nor does my beauty draw thy vows.  Carried away by excess of frenzy, thou art little prone to love.  Steeped in blood and slaughter, thou judgest wars better than the bed, nor refreshest thy soul with incitements.  Thy fierceness finds no leisure; dalliance is far from thee, and savagery fostered.  Nor is thy hand free from blasphemy while thou loathest the rites of love.  Let this hateful strictness pass away, let that loving warmth approach, and plight the troth of love to me, who gave thee the first breasts of milk in childhood, and helped thee, playing a mother’s part, duteous to thy needs.”

When he answered that the size of her body was unwieldy for the embraces of a mortal, since doubtless her nature was framed in conformity to her giant stock, she said: 

“Be not moved by my unwonted look of size.  For my substance is sometimes thinner, sometimes ampler; now meagre, now abundant; and I alter and change at my pleasure the condition of my body, which is at one time shrivelled up and at another time expanded:  now my tallness rises to the heavens, and now I settle down into a human being, under a more bounded shape.”

As he still faltered, and was slow to believe her words, she added the following song: