FOREWORD

The Anglo-Saxon race was in its boyhood in the days when the Vikings lived.  Youth’s fresh fires burned in men’s blood; the unchastened turbulence of youth prompted their crimes, and their good deeds were inspired by the purity and whole-heartedness and divine simplicity of youth.  For every heroic vice, the Vikings laid upon the opposite scale an heroic virtue.  If they plundered and robbed, as most men did in the times when Might made Right, yet the heaven-sent instinct of hospitality was as the marrow of their bones.  No beggar went from their doors without alms; no traveller asked in vain for shelter; no guest but was welcomed with holiday cheer and sped on his way with a gift.  As cunningly false as they were to their foes, just so superbly true were they to their friends.  The man who took his enemy’s last blood-drop with relentless hate, gave his own blood with an equally unsparing hand if in so doing he might aid the cause of some sworn brother.  Above all, they were a race of conquerors, whose knee bent only to its proved superior.  Not to the man who was king-born merely, did their allegiance go, but to the man who showed himself their leader in courage and their master in skill.  And so it was with their choice of a religion, when at last the death-day of Odin dawned.  Not to the God who forgives, nor to the God who suffered, did they give their faith; but they made their vows to the God who makes men strong, the God who is the never-dying and all-powerful Lord of those who follow Him.

The Thrall of Leif the Lucky

CHAPTER I

WHERE WOLVES THRIVE BETTER THAN LAMBS

    Vices and virtues
    The sons of mortals bear
    In their breasts mingled;
    No one is so good That no failing attends him,
    Nor so bad as to be good for nothing. 
        Ha’vama’l (High Song of Odin).

It was back in the tenth century, when the mighty fair-haired warriors of Norway and Sweden and Denmark, whom the people of Southern Europe called the Northmen, were becoming known and dreaded throughout the world.  Iceland and Greenland had been colonized by their dauntless enterprise.  Greece and Africa had not proved distant enough to escape their ravages.  The descendants of the Viking Rollo ruled in France as Dukes of Normandy; and Saxon England, misguided by Ethelred the Unready and harassed by Danish pirates, was slipping swiftly and surely under Northern rule.  It was the time when the priests of France added to their litany this petition:  “From the fury of the Northmen, deliver us, good Lord.”