Valhalla or Waihalla was the mythical Scandinavian Olympus, the celestial locality where Odin and Edris dwelt with the happy dead who had fallen in battle, and who had been conducted thither by the fair Valkyries.  Here they passed the days in fighting and hunting alternately, being restored sound in body for the banquet each night, where they drank mead from the skulls of the foes they had vanquished in battle.  Such was the heaven which commended itself to those fierce warriors.

xxix The parish priests were commonly called “Mass-Thanes”

xxx “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord.  He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth, and believeth in Me, shall never die.”

It was not the usual English custom, in those days, to bury the dead in coffins, still it was often done, in the case of the great, from the earliest days of Christianity.  For instance, a stone coffin, supposed to contain the dust of the fierce Offa, who died A. D. 796, was dug up, when more than a thousand years had passed away, in the year 1836, at Hemel-Hempstead, with the name Offa rudely carved upon it.  The earliest mention of churchyards in English antiquities is in the canons called the “Excerptions of Ecgbriht,” A.D. 740, when Cuthbert was Archbishop of Canterbury; and here the word “atria” is used, which may refer to the outbuildings or porticoes of a church.

xxxi The Greater and Lesser Excommunications.

The lesser excommunication excluded men from the participation of the Eucharist and the prayers of the faithful, but did not necessarily expel them from the Church.  The greater excommunication was far more dreadful in its operation.  It was not lawful to pray, speak, or eat, with the excommunicate (Canons of Ecgbright).  No meat might be given into their hands even in charity, although it might be laid before them on the ground.  Those who sheltered them incurred a heavy “were gild,” and endangered the loss of their estates; and finally, in case of obstinacy, outlawry and banishment followed.

—­King Canute’s Laws Ecclesiastical.

xxxii Disappearance of Elgiva.

The writer has already in the preface stated his reasons for rejecting the usual sad story about the fate of the hapless Elgiva.  The other story, that she was seized by Archbishop Odo, branded on the face, and sent to Ireland, as Mr. Freeman observes, rests on no good authority; all that is certainly known is that she disappeared.

At the time commonly assigued to these events, Dunstan was still in Flanders; yet he is generally credited with the atrocities by modern writers, even as if he had been proved guilty after a formal trial.  His return probably took place about the time occupied by the action of the last chapter, when the partition of the kingdom had already occurred.

xxxiii The last Anointing.