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King Harold now
ordered a levy, and gathered a great force, with which he proceeded
westward to Orkney; and when Earl Einar heard that King Harold was come,
he fled to Caithness. He made the
following verses on this occasion:
Many a bearded
man must roam,
An exile from
his house and home,
From cow or
horse; but Halfdan's gore
Is red on
Rinansey's wild shore. A nobler deed-
-on Harold's
shield The arm of one who
ne'er will yield Has
left a scar.
Let peasants
dread The vengeance of the
Norseman's head;
I reck not of his wrath,
but sing, "Do
thy worst!-I defy thee, King!"
Men and
messages, however, passed between the king and the earl, and at last, it
came to a conference; and when they met the earl submitted the case altogether
to the king's decision, and the king condemned the earl Einar and the
Orkney people to pay a fine of sixty marks of gold. As the bondes thought
this was too heavy for them to pay, the earl offered to pay the whole if
they would surrender their ucla1 lands to him. This they all agreed to
do; the poor because they had but little pieces of Iand
; the rich because they could redeem their udal rights again when
they liked. Thus the earl paid the whole fine to the king, who returned
in harvest to Norway.
The earls for a long time afterwards possessed all the udal lands in
Orkney, until Sigurd, son of Hlodver gave back the udal rights. [Heimskringla, or the Chronicles of the Kings of Norway
by Snowe Sturlason.]
SECTION
2.
The Yngling
saga, which relates to the royal races of Sweden
and Norway,
was based on real events which in the course of time became intermingled
with fables. We owe our knowledge of them to King Harold Haarfinger or
Fair Hair who boasted of being an Ynglingar through his descent from Olaf
the Tree-Hewer and who, during the course of his long reign over Norway,
between the years 863 and 933, had the sagas relating to his ancestors
collected and recited before his court. [History of Nations, volume 16,
by Edward Samuel Corwin, page 37.] The most important fact in connection
with this genealogy is that it was partly, at least, the work of our
ancestor Rognvald, who ranked next to the king in Norway
and to whom he entrusted the most important functions relating to
government. That the king should be of the race of Odin was the most
decisive and determinate fact tending to the internal peace of his
kingdom. Hence the necessity for the new ruler, who obtained the kingdom
by conquest, proving his inherited right to reign over Norway.
A saga is a
story told by word of mouth in ancient times and which, by being
constantly repeated before many witnesses, who were equally well
informed, was kept in the line of exact and simple truth. There were many
sagas, in fact as many almost as there are varieties of modern books.
Those sagas which related to government and the right of succession to the
throne were preserved by officials appointed for that purpose, whose duty
it was to regularly recite parts of
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