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More "Norse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that I am wearing a bow-tie: but on careful research I find that these were constantly worn by Vikings. A distinct allusion to them is made in that fine fragment, the Tryggvhessa Saga, where the poet says, in the short alliterative lines of Early Norse poetry: ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... very few. The versions domiciled in different countries exhibit little originality, farther than occasional modifications in accordance with local manners and customs. Thus for the stupid Brahman of Indian stories the blundering, silly son is often substituted in European variants; for the brose in Norse and Highland tales we find polenta or macaroni in Italian and Sicilian versions. The identity of incidents in the noodle-stories of Europe with those in what are for us their oldest forms, the Buddhist and Indian books, is very remarkable, particularly so in the case of Norse popular fictions, ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... Cambro Britons on their Harp, was suggested by the digging up of a mail-clad skeleton at Fall River—a circumstance which the poet linked with the traditions about the Round Tower at Newport, thus giving to the whole the spirit of a Norse viking song of war and of the sea. The Wreck of the Hesperus was occasioned by the news of shipwrecks on the coast near Gloucester and by the name of a reef—"Norman's Woe"—where many of them took place. ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... homogeneous mixture of descendants of Norse and Celts 94%, population of foreign ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... rascality, was the famous "option law," or "two-penny act," of 1758: an act firmly opposed, on its first appearance in the legislature, by a noble minority of honorable men; an act clearly indicating among a portion of the people of Virginia a survival of the old robber instincts of our Norse ancestors; an act having there the sort of frantic popularity that all laws are likely to have which give a dishonest advantage to the debtor class,—and in Virginia, unfortunately, on the subject of salaries due to the clergy, nearly all persons ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... but their leader desperately defended the ladder leading to the poop. He was struck by two arrows, and fell on one knee, and Edmund was about to climb the ladder when the door of the cabin in the poop opened, and a Norse maiden some sixteen years old sprang out. Seeing her father wounded at the top of the ladder and the Saxons preparing to ascend it, while others turned their bows against the wounded Northman, she sprang forward and throwing herself upon her knees before Edmund ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... cycle stories Norse cycle stories King Arthur tales Charlemagne and Roland legends Chivalry tales Stories from Chaucer Stories from the Faerie Queene Irish hero tales Stories from Shakespeare Stories from the ...
— Lists of Stories and Programs for Story Hours • Various
... and in the Prussian-Lithuanian both genders occur. (Gothic sunnan and Old High-German sunno). Sol in the Norse Edda is a female deity, and the Anglo-Saxon sol is also feminine. The transition from the male to the female gender was achieved in the Middle-High-German language of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the German language is the only one in which the word sun is ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... the old Norse legends we are sure to find the inevitable three brothers, to the youngest of whom, Grimmel, fall all the adventures, the dealings with the Devil, and the pot of yellow gold at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... is also the only Middle High German Grammar which is based on the present state of German Philology.... I believe that the day is not far distant when English students will take a much more lively interest in the study of their own and the other Germanic languages (especially German and Old Norse) than has hitherto been the case. And if this little book should contribute anything towards furthering the cause, it will ...
— A Middle High German Primer - Third Edition • Joseph Wright
... arrows; whereas in the runic inscription it seems to be implied that it was Christ Himself that was so wounded. The allusion is in any case very obscure; but the latter notion makes the better sense, and is capable of being explained by the Norse legend of Balder, who was frequently shot at by the other gods in sport, as he was supposed to be invulnerable; but he was slain thus one day by a shaft made of mistletoe, which alone had power ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... to study political economy in the winter. They went to Saratoga in July and August to study the analytical processes of chemistry. There was also a course there on the history of the Revolution. They went to Newport alternate years in the same months, to study the Norse literature and swimming. They went to the White Sulphur Springs and to Bath, to study the history of chivalry as illustrated in the annual tournaments. They went to Paris to study French, to Rome to study ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... agreement between them, that, if they slew Olaf Tryggvason, he of them who should be nearest at the time should own the ship and all the share of booty taken in the battle; but of the realm of the Norse king they should each have ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... his first fleet into the charge of "certain Vikings" is well known, though the name of their chief is not given. These Vikings would certainly be Norse, either detached from the following of Rolf Ganger, who wintered in England in 875 A.D. the year before his descent on Normandy; or else independent rovers who, like Rolf, had been driven from Norway by the high-handed methods of Harald Fairhair. Indeed, the time when a Norse contingent was ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... all conscience, have picked out a better day for our regatta had we had the free choice of all the days that ever dawned upon the lonely struggles and solitary agonies of ships since the Norse rovers first steered to the westward against the run of Atlantic waves. It was a very good race. At the finish there was not an oar's length between the first and second boat, with Death coming in a good ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... interest. Figs. 49 and 50 are two sketches of Icelandic carved boxes. Fig. 49 was drawn as an example of the rich effect which that kind of engraved work may have, and of the use which it makes of closely packed letters in the inscription. The pattern is, of course, a traditional Norse one, although the carving is comparatively modern. The points to be noted in the other box were its quaint and simple construction, the use of the letters as decoration, more especially the unpremeditated manner in which they have been grouped, the four letters below making a short line ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... the first negro regiment, "If he accepts it, I shall be as proud as if I had heard that he was shot." [Applause.] These men, thus tender, thus high-bred, thus peaceable, were always in the front, and always employed. They might say with their forefathers, the old Norse Vikings, "We sang the mass of lances from morning until evening;" and in how many cases it chanced, when the hero had fallen, they who came by night to his funeral on the morrow returned to his war-path, to show his slayers the way ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... children to whom the pointed upright area-railings do not appear an unsearchable armoury of spears or as walls of protective flames, temporarily frozen black so that people should be able to enter and leave their house. Every child knows that the old Norse story of a sleeping Brunnhilde encircled by flames is true; to him or her, there is a Brunnhilde in every street, and the child knows that there it always has a chance of being the chosen Siegfried. But because this view of life is so much cosier than that ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... the west wall (now covered with a pane of glass) is an inscription which was discovered in 1853. It is written in Norse runes, and ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Carlisle - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. King Eley
... say that was good of any brother author. Only in the bards of Wales and in the Scalds of the Sagas did he seem to find his kindred spirits, though it has been suggested that his complex nature took this means of informing the world that he could read both Cymric and Norse. But we must not be unkind behind the magic door—and yet to be charitable to the uncharitable is ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... mysteriously linked has been destroyed. Such a being occurs at times in European folk-tales, especially in those of the east and north of Europe. The most familiar instance is that of "The Giant who had no Heart in his body" of the "Tales from the Norse." Some of the best specimens of this kind of monster are to be found in the Russian tales about Koshchei the Deathless. But these remarkably abnormal beings scarcely seem at home in western folk-lore. They are but little in keeping with their ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... was the second; and the Saxon Harold, the son of Earl Godwin, was the third. Never was a nobler prize sought by nobler champions, or striven for more gallantly. The Saxon triumphed over the Norwegian, and the Norman triumphed over the Saxon: but Norse valour was never more conspicuous than when Harald Hardrada and his host fought and fell at Stamford Bridge; nor did Saxons ever face their foes more bravely than our Harold and his men on ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... traces of sun worship are found in almost every country of which we have a record. In Egypt Ra was the supreme sun god where there was very elaborate worship conducted in his honor. In Greece, Apollo was attended with similar festivities. In the Norse mythology, many of the myths deal with the worship of the sun in one form or another. In England, Stonehenge and the entire system of the Druids had to do with solar worship. In Central America and Peru, temples to the sun were of amazing splendor, furnished as they were with wonderful ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... Carlyle effected by his book on Heroes we must put ourselves at the point of view of the time when it was written, the days of Wellington and Melbourne, Brougham and Macaulay, Southey and Coleridge. None of these men understood the heroic in Norse mythology, or the grandeur of Oliver Cromwell, or the supreme importance of the Divina Commedia as the embodiment of Catholic Feudalism. All this Carlyle felt as no Englishman before him had felt, and told us in a voice which has since been accepted as conclusive. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... take us to Norway, as you were saying yesterday. I should think it would be just the same sort of thing as Brittany, only, of course, different sort of scenery, and different language and different people. Madge, you will have to set to and get up Norse ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... explanations as are not found in the original notes we are chiefly indebted to Prof. R. B. Anderson, of the University of Wisconsin, and to his valuable work, NORSE MYTHOLOGY. We are also under obligations to Mrs. E. Hasselqvist, of the Augustana College of ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... into it." For some years the elf's injunction was observed; but one day, in a fit of curiosity, the peasant looked into the bottom of the flask, and there sat a horrid toad! The toad disappeared, and so did the liquor; and the man in a short time fell miserably sick. In a Norse tale, a man whose bride is about to be carried off by Huldre-folk, rescues her by shooting over her head a pistol loaded with a silver bullet. This has the effect of dissolving the witchery; and he is forthwith enabled to seize ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... Cook's theory of Solar Light. Why didn't his parents give him my "Mathematical Exposition of Orthodoxy for Children," or my "The Theology of Euclid," on his birthdays, instead of Hans Andersen's "Fairy Tales" and the "Tales from the Norse?" It was very ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... it is hoped that some in the Red Fairy Book may have the attraction of being less familiar than many of the old friends. The tales have been translated, or, in the case of those from Madame d'Aulnoy's long stories, adapted, by Mrs. Hunt from the Norse, by Miss Minnie Wright from Madame d'Aulnoy, by Mrs. Lang and Miss Bruce from other French sources, by Miss May Sellar, Miss Farquharson, and Miss Blackley from the German, while the story of 'Sigurd' is condensed by the Editor from Mr. William Morris's ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... national theatre. This had been for a long time one of the many dreams which his active imagination had conjured up as a part of his mission. He was one of the earliest of that school of reformers, of whom we have heard so much of late years, that urge the readoption of the old Norse language—or, what is nearest to it now, the Icelandic—as the vehicle of art and literature. In the attempt to dethrone Dansk from its preeminence as the language of the drama, Ole Bull signally failed, and his Norwegian theatre, established at Bergen, ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... Norse legend, Allfader was not allowed to drink from Mirmir's Spring, the fount of wisdom, until he had left his eye as a pledge. Scholars often leave their health, their happiness, their usefulness behind, in their great eagerness ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... linguist than myself must say whether this suggestion is correct. To show, how the word is used, I can refer my questioner to the little story of "Gertrude's Bird," or the woodpecker, that is said to "fly about with a red mutch on her head." The legend is in Dasent's "Popular Tales from the Norse." ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... the blue-eyed Norseman told A Saga of the days of old. "There is," said he, "a wondrous book Of Legends in the old Norse tongue, Of the dead kings of Norroway— Legends that once were told or sung In many a smoky fireside nook Of Iceland, in the ancient day, By wandering Saga-man or Scald; 'Heimskringla' is the volume called; ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... Sun, perhaps of the vernal sun as opposed to the autumnal sun, the Sauvastika, and therefore a natural symbol of light, life, health, and wealth. That in ancient mythology the sun was frequently represented as a wheel is well known. Grimm identifies the Old Norse hjol or hvel, the A.-S. hvehol, English 'wheel,' with {kappa|upsilon with tonos|kappa|lambda|omicron|rho}, Sk. Kakra, wheel; and derives jol, 'yule-tide,' the time of the winter solstice, ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... really fails who does his best. Seneca observes that "no one saith the three hundred Fabii were defeated, but that they were slain," and if you have done your best, you will, in the words of an old Norse ballad, ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... Besides the rich stores of original tales, several foreign ones have been imported and translated into Norse, such as Barlaham and Josaphat, by Rudolph of Ems, one of the German minnesingers. On the other hand, the minnesingers borrowed from the Norse sagas their famous story embodied in the Nibelungen Lied, called the "German Iliad," which ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... only his feelings but his pride; for was he not a lineal descendant of that Fergus McKay who had been a chief in one of the Western Isles of Scotland—he could not tell which, but no matter—at that celebrated period of Scottish history when the great Norse king, Harold Fairhair, had made a descent on the Scottish coast and received one of the few thorough thrashings that ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... charming insolence. "Meryl and I both have Norse blood in us. If you go far enough back we probably are Norse. But where would be the sense in our professing to love our country by talking her tongue, when it served every reasonable purpose in the world better to talk English? You're so one idea'd, you Dutch ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... a text for my whole lecture. Not only does it smack of the sea-breeze and the salt water, like all the finest old Norse sagas, but it gives a glimpse at least of the nobleness which underlay the grim and often cruel nature of the Norseman. It belongs, too, to the culminating epoch, to the beginning of that era when the Scandinavian peoples ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... germs of civilization,—a remark which may in all likelihood be extended to the background of history in general. Nothing surely can be more grotesque than the idea of a set of wolves, like the Norse pirates before their conversion to Christianity, constructing in ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... the other—and a relation founded upon mutual respect, good understanding, sympathy, and friendship; and the way to reach the condition which is thus essential is by personal intercourse and acquaintance between the men of Anglo-Saxon or German or Norse, or whatever race they may be, peopling the United States, and the men of the Latin American race peopling the countries of ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... in one case as in the other. The modern Englishman is descended from a Low-Dutch stock, which, when it went to Britain, received into itself an enormous infusion of Celtic, a much smaller infusion of Norse and Danish, and also a certain infusion of Norman-French blood. When this new English stock came to America it mingled with and absorbed into itself immigrants from many European lands, and the process has gone on ever since. It is to be noted that, of the new blood thus acquired, the greatest ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... man brought the wild-maned horse All wilder that with stags he grazed— Bred from the seed the knightly Norse Rode from Araby. Like remorse The eyes in his gray forehead blazed, As on ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... morning the boys were aroused at seven o'clock by a servant, who brought a tray with the most fragrant coffee and hot rolls. It was in honor of the guest that, in accordance with Norse custom, this early meal was served; and all the boys, carrying pillows and blankets, gathered on Albert's and Ralph's bed and feasted right royally. So it seemed to them, at least; for any break in the ordinary routine, ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... in the Norse mythology, that the gods tied Loki, the impersonation of the evil principle, to three sharp rocks, and hung a snake over him in such a way, that its venom should drip on his face. But, in this dreadful case, there was ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... cave seemed to have dropped out, and the roof to have gone in search of it; and but for the dim glimpse of the rock on the other side one might have suspected that this bridge would launch him into that ungeographical locality called, in the old Norse mythology, "Ginnunga Gap,"—a place where there was neither side, edge, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... in sundry dialects of the north of Europe, the preposition at has been preferred for the governing of the infinitive: "The use of at for to, as the sign of the infinitive mode, is Norse, not Saxon. It is the regular prefix in Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, and Feroic. It is also found in the northern dialects of the Old English, and in the particular dialect of Westmoreland at the present day."—Fowler, on the English ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... a rival, a man from Barra to be more than half a foreigner. Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection joins us on the instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one Celtic, and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have it not among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English, or Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other's ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they did not stay there. Conditions the world over have changed much since the day of the Vikings, but still today he who comes to Nantucket must emulate them, and ride the same white horses of the shoals, for they surround the island and prance for the modern steamer as they did for the long Norse ships with the weird figure-heads and the bulwarks of shields. Blown down from New Bedford by a rough nor'wester we plunged through the green rollers south of Hedge Fence shoals, wallowed among the white surges of Cross Rip, and found level water only ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... in Once a Week, a magazine that then numbered amongst its contributors such writers as Harriet Martineau and S. Baring-Gould, and artists as Leech, Keene, Tenniel, Millais and Du Maurier. Amongst these translations were "The Hailstorm, or the Death of Bui," from the ancient Norse; "The Count of Vendal's Daughter," from the ancient Danish; "Harald Harfagr," from the Norse; "Emelian the Fool," and "The Story of Yashka with the Bear's Ear," from the Russian; and several ballads from the Manx. Other translations ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... hesitation on the part of the director and sub-title editor to use just as many words in a leader as might be necessary to make every point of the story entirely clear and interesting. Paramount's "The Devil Stone," showing the train of tragic events that followed the stealing by a wicked Norse queen of the great emerald belonging to a certain Breton priest, was one example of an intensely interesting detective story in which sub-titles supplied much more than a third of the story—and supplied it, apparently, quite unobtrusively. Here, ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... one of the things that the Ministry of Transport has, so to say, up its sleeve, and is alone a sufficient answer to those who suggest that this Ministry has outlived its hour. There is a grim Norse spirit amongst its officials, inspired perhaps by their chieftain's name, and already the plans for a first-class Pullman galley are under way. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... encloses, like Robinson Crusoe, a small croft or two immediately at his door for such animals as he wishes to protect. Others are happy to imitate his example, and avail themselves of the same privileges: and thus a population, mainly of Danish or Norse origin, as the dialect indicates, crept on towards the more secluded parts of the vallies. Chapels, daughters of some distant mother church, are first erected in the more open and fertile vales, as those of Bowness and Grasmere, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... asks for a girl's pedigree. And as for 'disgrace,' Sophy Traill will never call anything like 'disgrace' to herself. I will allow that Sophy is poor, but as for family, the Traills are of the best Norse strain. They were sea-fighters, hundreds of years before they were sea-fishers; and they had been 'at home' on the North Sea, and in all the lands about it, centuries before the like of the Braelands were thought ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... The important documents from Norse sources that may be classed as "Original Narratives of Early American History" are the Icelandic sagas (prose narratives) that tell of the voyages of Northmen to Vinland. There are two sagas that deal mainly with these voyages, while in other Icelandic sagas and annals there are ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... Thus, in the Norse romance now offered to the reader, the tale of Eric and his deeds would be true; but the dream of Asmund, the witchcraft of Swanhild, the incident of the speaking head, and the visions of Eric and Skallagrim, would owe their origin ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... Brave Sea-captain, Norse Sea-king, Columbus, my hero, royalest Sea-king of all! it is no friendly environment this of thine, in the waste deep waters; around thee, mutinous, discouraged souls; behind thee, disgrace and ruin; before thee, ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... does, Jasper; it means fun, ridicule, jest; it is an ancient Norse word, and is found in ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... incidents of his drama from the old Norse sagas, principally from the two Eddas, but in many minor points his tale varies from that of the original authorities. Nevertheless he grasped the spirit of the myth so fully, that his version of the Nibelung ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... old Norse chant which my mother taught me; she was a Dane, as my father is also by descent. It has come down in her family for many, many generations, and the legend is that the women of her race always sang it or repeated it while the men were fighting, and, if they had the strength, in ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... task is left incomplete: it only hides its records, while fire destroys them. In the Norse Edda, when the gods try their games, they find themselves able to out-drink the ocean, but not to eat like the flame. Logi, or fire, licks up food and trencher and all. This chimney is more voracious than the sea. Give time enough, ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... belonging to the twelfth or thirteenth century. It is evidently compiled from two or more much older lays which are now lost, which are alluded to in the Nibelungenlied. The original poem was probably Norse, and not German like the only existing manuscript, for there is an undoubted parallel to the story of the kidnaping of Hilde in the Edda. In the Edda, Hilde, the daughter of Hoegni, escapes from home with her lover Hedin, and is pursued by her irate father. He overtakes ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... At the early age of ten I had the tales of the ingenious Mr. Edgar Poe and of Charlotte Bronte "put into my hands" by a cousin who had served as a Bashi Bazouk, and knew not the meaning of fear. But I DID, and perhaps even Nelson would have found out "what fear was," or the boy in the Norse tale would have "learned to shiver," if he had been left alone to peruse 'Jane Eyre,' and the 'Black Cat,' and the 'Fall of the House of Usher,' as I was. Every night I expected to wake up in my coffin, having been prematurely ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... town, with its sad gray streets and its moss-grown door-steps, as they must in those earlier bustling centuries of the Conqueror. Even then, when Normandy was only beginning its career of importance among the great French provinces, Bayeux was already old. She was far more Norse then than Norman; she was Scandinavian to the core; even her nobles spoke in harsh Norse syllables; they were as little French as it was possible to be, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... hardy Norseman," and having neither a reading nor speaking acquaintance with the Norse language, I am unable to decide abstruse points on which such learned doctors disagree; but not being altogether without some practical experience of English and French drama, I venture to call in question ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... strawberry in their coat-of-arms); Chisholm is English and means "gravel-holm,"—the Anglo-Saxon ceosol (pebble) is preserved in Chesil Beach and Chiselhurst; MacLeod signifies "son of Ljot"; and ljotr is the Norse word for "ugly." Campbell is probably Norman-French, though Dr. Macbain suggests cam-beul, Gaelic for "crooked mouth." In olden times an external conqueror would sometimes subdue a district, and call the natives ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... thus come to Greenland were of the quaint build peculiar to the Norse vessels of those days—a peculiarity of build, by the way, which has not altogether disappeared, for to this day the great central mast, huge square sail, and high prow may be seen in the fiords ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... History, pp. 34-39. The Northmen extended their expeditions to Spain, Italy, and even into Russia. In England, under the name of Danes, we find them forcing Alfred the Great to recognize them as the masters of northern England (878). The Norse pirates were often called vikings, from their habit of leaving their long boats in the vik, i.e., bay or inlet. A goodly number of the Northmen settled in Iceland, and our knowledge of their civilization and customs comes chiefly from the Icelandic sagas, or tales. Some ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... in their long winter, had a great habit of writing; and were, and still are, excellent in penmanship, says Dahlmann. It is to this fact, that any little history there is of the Norse Kings and their old tragedies, crimes and heroisms, is almost all due. The Icelanders, it seems, not only made beautiful letters on their paper or parchment, but were laudably observant and desirous of accuracy; and have ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... the understanding that he should have the lease renewed, but he was a man of bold, independent northern tongue, and gave great offence to his lordship, who was used to be listened to with a sort of feudal deference. He was of the fierce old Norse blood, and his daughters were tall, fair, magnificent young women, not at all uneducated nor vulgar, and it was the finding that my brothers were becoming intimate at his farm that made Lord Erymanth refuse to renew ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... calls him "the Last of the English," but he is really the first of the literary Vikings. In the essay on the Sagas here I have tried to show, very imperfectly, what the Norsemen were actually like. They caught Kingsley's fancy, and his "Hereward," though born on English soil, is really Norse—not English. But Kingsley did not write about the Vikings, nor about his Elizabethan heroes in "Westward Ho!" in a perfectly simple, straightforward way. He was always thinking of our own times and referring ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... ENTERPRISES.—The crippling of the naval power of Spain left England mistress of the seas. The little island-realm now entered upon the most splendid period of her history. The old Norse blood of her people, stirred by recent events, seemed to burn with a feverish impatience for maritime adventure and glory. Many a story of the daring exploits of English sea-rovers during the reign of Elizabeth seems like a repetition of some tale of the old Vikings. [Footnote: ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... driving, we took to the water, and travelled by steamer along a fjord, or hired a rowboat to cross from point to point. One day we would be in a good little hotel, with polyglot guests, and serving-maids in stagey Norse costumes,—like the famous inn at Stalheim, which commands the amazing panorama of the Naerodal. Another day we would lodge in a plain farmhouse like the station at Nedre Vasenden, where eggs and fish ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... in one part of the field, in another, stout Ole Thorwald, with several of the white settlers and the greater part of the native force, was guarding the principal approach to the church against immensely superior numbers. And nobly did the descendant of the Norse sea-kings maintain the credit of his warlike ancestors that day. With a sword that might have matched that of Goliath of Gath, he swept the way before him wherever he went, and more than once by a furious ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... mine as the shame was hers, In desolate days of departed years She had leisure for shame and sorrow— There was light repentance and brief remorse, When I rode against Saxon foes or Norse, With clang of harness and clatter of horse, And little ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... long interval between devoted himself actively to intellectual culture and literary pursuits. He began his career as an author by translating the "Numancia" of Cervantes, but his admiration of the ancient Norse sagas and the old German legends led him into the composition of exquisitely beautiful and tender, though exceedingly fantastic, romances which speedily gained immense popularity. In these productions fairy and magical elements ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... sung in prose, at other times in verse. Sometimes they were tales which had been handed down from father to son for so many years that it was hard to tell how much of them was history, how much fable. At other times the Sagas were true accounts of the deeds of the Norse kings. For the skalds were ofttimes to be seen on the battle-fields or battleships of the vikings, and then their songs were of the brave deeds which they had themselves seen done, of the victories and defeats at which they themselves had ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... name of honour given to Cort Sivertsen, a famous Norse seaman, who rendered distinguished naval services to Denmark and to Venice against the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... still show a decided trend to Central Germanic cohesion. The whole of Europe is roughly divided into three dominant races—the Teutonic, the Latin and the Slavish. The Teutonic has Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and Norse subdivisions. The Latin, Gallic, has the French, Italian and Spanish nations; and the Slavonic comprises the Slavs and Romanic races with their innumerable subdivisions such as Moscovite, Chech, Pole, Croat, Serb, Bulgar, Bojar, etc. These three groups are distinctly ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... to be found in our vulgar sayings, Jasper; for example—in that particularly vulgar saying of ours, 'Your mother is up,' there's a noble Norse word; mother, there, meaning not the female who bore us, but rage and choler, as I discovered by ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... upon this great occasion. The far-famed pagan battle flag, the Raven Standard, was unfurled, and floated freely over the host. The War-arrow had been industriously sent round to all the neighbouring shores, peopled largely at that time with men of Norse blood. As the fleet swept south it had gathered in contingents from every island along the Scotch coast, upon which Viking settlements had been established. Manx men, too, and men from the Scandinavian settlements of Angelsea, Danes under Carle Canuteson, representatives, in fact, of all the old ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... more subtle, and when making one of his brief visits to Europe he was generally taken for an Englishman, never for a member of the Latin peoples; except possibly in the north of France, where his type, among those Norman descendants of Norse and Danes, was not uncommon. Nevertheless, although his northern inheritance predominated, he was conscious at times of a certain affinity with the race that two thousand years ago had met and mingled ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... views about the agents and the completeness of these periodical destructions. In the Norse mythology and in the doctrine of Buddhism, not one of the gods can survive the fire of the last day. Among the Greeks, great Jove alone will await the appearance of the virgin world after the icy winter and the fiery summer of the Great Year. The Brahmans hold that ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... a man whether he be Norse or Scot. If Ragon went mair to the kirk an' less to the change-house, he wouldna need to differ. Were not our ain folk cattle-lifting Hieland thieves lang after the days o' ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... those who have done most, by untiring, laborious search among old parish registers, etc., and dusty old records, to bring to light interesting social ordinances, details of ancient parish government, and gems of Norse literature and archaeological research, there have been none in the last century who have by patient work attained more knowledge of their country's inner ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... competitions at Holmen Kollen, near Christiania, when the Norsemen have their annual fling for the great "ski-hop." Reading of this had caused me to have a great ambition to be able to shoot hills and precipices upon snowshoes as the Norse fellows do, and I persuaded Billy to be ambitious also, and to practise the things with me near St. Petersburg, where they use the same kind of snowshoes or ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... lands recently sold in Texas. I saw the girl sitting on the front steps, and when she rose and looked at me, her superb physique impressed me powerfully. She is as beautiful and stately as some goddess stepping out of the Norse 'Edda', and altogether a remarkable looking person. It will appear in evidence, that the General harshly refused her pleadings, and made a point of assuring her that his will, already prepared, would forever debar her mother and herself from any inheritance at his death; as he had bequeathed ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... spin, and no spider ever spun so fine a thread as she on her spinning wheel. She worked so faithfully that Woden changed the wheel into shining stars, and when you look up at Orion again remember that the Norse people called that constellation ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... to me while I enumerate the parts of a norse in language so simple any bloomin' fool can understand. This'll be useful to you, for if you ever 'ave a norse to deal with and he loses one of 'is parts you'll know 'ow to indent for a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... when the chief riches of the world lay tossed for daring hands to grasp upon the bosom of the sea, and the sleeping spirit of the old Norse Rover stirred in their veins, and the lilt of a wild sea- song they had never heard kept ringing in their ears; and they built them ships and sailed for the Spanish Main, and won much wealth, as was ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... existence was unknown to the learned editors of the new Oxford Dictionary. This is to be the more regretted as its etymology is very obscure. It may, however, be traced with little doubt to the old Norse 'grein,' a branch or prong, surviving in the word 'grains,' a pronged harpoon or fish spear. From its meaning, 'branch,' it might seem to be akin to 'stem' and to 'bow,' which is only another spelling of'bough.' But this is not likely. The older meaning of 'bows' was 'shoulders,' and this, ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... company of the bride's companions were met, and then occurred the ceremony of washing the bride's feet. This was generally the occasion of much mirth. And this was in all probability a survival of an old Scandinavian custom under which the Norse bride was conducted by her maiden friends to undergo a bath, called the bride's bath, a sort of religious purification. On the marriage day, every trifling circumstance which would have passed without notice ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... indignantly. "The fame of Harold's bravery, wisdom, and courtesy to all men is known in every court in Europe, and that the duke's vassal should have dared to imprison and chain him will excite universal indignation. Why, the rudest of our own Norse ancestors would not have so foully treated one so noble whom fate had cast into his hands. Had we been at war with England it would be shameful, but being at peace there are no words that can fitly describe ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... blocks—the crash and general upheaval delight him. This tale has so many variants that it illustrates well the diffusion of fairy tales. It is Grimm's The Spider and the Flea, which as we have seen, is appealing in its simplicity; the Norse The Cock Who Fell into the Brewing Vat; and the Indian The Death and Burial of Poor Hen. The curious succession of incidents may have been invented once for all at some definite time, and from thence spread to all ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... don't 'most always go in the same hole." Then he went to the telegraph instrument. In a few minutes he could have told a story as wild as a Norse saga, but what he said, when Denver ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... vanish out of the city. Oh, but it's a day o' God! An' yet I'm sair afraid for they puir feckless French. I ha' na faith, ye ken, in the Celtic blude, an' its spirit o' lees. The Saxon spirit o' covetize is a grewsome house-fiend, and sae's our Norse speerit o' shifts an' dodges; but the spirit o' lees is warse. Puir lustful Reubens that they are!—unstable as water, they shall not excel. Well, well—after all, there is a God that judgeth the earth; an' when a man kens that, he's ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... The Ancient Scandinavians; their Influence on the English Race.—2. The Mythology.—3. The Scandinavian Languages.—4. Icelandic, or Old Norse Literature: the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, the Scalds, the Sagas, the "Heimskringla." The Folks-Sagas and Ballads of the Middle Ages.—5. Danish Literature: Saxo Grammaticus and Theodoric; Arreboe, Kingo, Tycho Brahe, Holberg, Evald, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... of the sea," or simply the abode of hostile, supernatural beings. Lochlanners would thus be counterparts of the Fomorians, and the conflicts of the Fians with them would reflect old myths. But with the Norse invasions, the Norsemen became the true Lochlanners, against whom Fionn and his men fight as Charlemagne fought Muhammadans—a sheer impossibility. Professor Zimmer, however, supposes that the Fionn saga took shape during the Norse occupation from the ninth century onwards. ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... but women were so cursedly unaccountable. Supposing she should take it into her head to accept him! No logic could take account of a woman's whimsies. Then what a pretty fix he would have got himself into, just by a foolhardy freak! But there was a strain of Norse blood in Hunt, and in spite of occasional touches of ague, the risk of the scheme had in itself a certain fascination for him. And yet he could n't help wishing he had carried out a dozen desperate devices for disgusting her with him, which at the time had seemed to him too gross ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... brought from Iona about the beginning of the seventeenth century, and erected in Barra at the head of a grave made by a son of McNeil for himself. But it is believed to have been in any case a Norse memorial in the first instance, though certainly ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... infusing their own energy into them. During the long reign of Duke Richard the Fearless, the son of William Longsword, a reign which lasted from 945 to 996, the heathen Norman pirates became French Christians and feudal at heart. The old Norse language lived only at Bayeux and in a few local names. As the old Northern freedom died silently away, the descendants of the pirates became feudal nobles and the "Pirates' land" sank into the most loyal of the fiefs ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... to refer again to these Breton and Norse versions, because of their retention of London Bridge as the locale of the story, in common with all the versions which have been found in Britain. In the meantime it is to be noted that the remaining non-British variants are told of other ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... was not until the twelfth century that the compass found its way into Europe from the East. In the Landnammabok of Ari Frode, the Norse historian, we read that Flocke Vildergersen, a renowned viking, sailed from Norway to discover Iceland in the year 868, and took with him two ravens as guides, for in those days the "seamen had no lodestone (that is, no lidar stein, or leading ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... uniformity of power, never descends into weakness. Triumphant in humour, he is eminently a master of the plaintive; his tender pieces breathe a deep-toned cadence, and his sacred lyrics are replete with devotional fervour. His Norse ballads are resonant with the echoes of his birth-land, and his songs are to be remarked for their ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... "Bose, the great Norse harper, could give on his harp the Gyarslager, or stroke of the sea gods, which produced ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... thin veneer of a mere nine hundred years semi-civilisation? Two thousand years before the Conquest the fierce warrior Northmen lived by the might of the halbert, fighters one and all from the days when the war-inspired mother croned of the battle-axe to her babe. And in the Normans was that Norse spirit dormant; but one night of such hardship as yet undreamt of ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... dramatist, orator, and political leader, was born December 8, 1832, and died in Paris, April 26, 1910. From his strenuous father, a Lutheran priest who preached with tongue and fist, he inherited the physique of a Norse god. He possessed the mind of a poet and the arm of a warrior. At the age of twelve he was sent to the Molde grammar school, where he proved himself a very dull student. In 1852 ho entered the university in Christiana. Here he neglected his ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... remain to this day some traces of the worship paid to Odin in the name given by almost all the people of the north to the fourth day of the week, which was formerly consecrated to him. It is called by a name which signifies "Odin's day;" "Old Norse, Odinsdagr; Swedish and Danish, Onsdag; Anglo-Saxon, Wodenesdaeg, Wodnesdaeg; Dutch, Woensdag; English, Wednesday. As Odin or Wodun was supposed to correspond to the Mercury of the Greeks and Romans, the name of this day was expressed in ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... should find it not dull, it is regaining credit.—3. Aeschylus, the grandest of the three tragedians, who has given us under a thin veil the first plantation of Europe. The "Prometheus" is a poem of the like dignity and scope as the book of Job, or the Norse "Edda."—4. Of Plato I hesitate to speak, lest there should be no end. You find in him that which you have already found in Homer, now ripened to thought,—the poet converted to a philosopher, with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... tongues, veal and ham pies, turkeys and chickens, and geese, with every variety of vegetables, and a succession of fiery cherries and heavy ales were the main staple of the feast. It was the same meal and the same cooking as their Norse or German ancestors might have sat down to fourteen centuries before, and, indeed, as I looked through the steam of the dishes at the lines of fierce and rugged faces, and the mighty shoulders which rounded themselves over the ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... perfectly satisfactory,' said I; 'the three first words are metaphorical, and the fourth, lagg'd, is the old genuine Norse term, lagda, which signifies laid, whether in durance, or in bed has nothing to do with the matter. What you have told me confirms me in an opinion which I have long entertained, that thieves' Latin is a strange mysterious speech, formed of metaphorical terms, and ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... finally been called by his name. Fergunna and Virgunia, two names of mountains in Germany, are relics of the name. The name of the god, if preserved in the Gothic, would have been Fairguneis; and indeed in the Old Norse language Fioergynn is the father of Frigg, the wife of Odin, and Fioergynnior, the Earth-goddess, is mother of Thor. Professor Zimmer takes the same view. Grimm thinks that the Greeks and Romans, by ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... that follows" (Gray). This ode (The Fatal Sisters, translated from the Norse) describes the Valkyriur, "the choosers of the slain," or warlike Fates of the Gothic mythology, as weaving the destinies of those who were doomed to perish ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... A Norse Romance. By Kristofer Janson. Translated from the original by Auber Forestier. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... ordinary girl couldn't be expected to keep up with Dionysus during a revel, could she? A God reveling was more than any ordinary mortal could take for long—as witness the ancient legend concerned the false Norse God, Thor. ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... where the gardens of the Delicias were waiting to welcome us that afternoon to our first sight of the pride and fashion of Seville. I never got enough of the brave color of those tramp steamers; and in thinking of them as English, Norse, French, and Dutch, fetching or carrying their cargoes over those war-worn, storied waters, I had some finer thrills than in dwelling on the Tower of Gold which rose from the midst of them. It was built in the last century of the Moorish dominion to mark the last point to which the gardens ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... were of the Norse race; two men who, banished from their country, fitted out a ship and sailed to Iceland, where in 874 they made a settlement in the south ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... ii., pp 296. 335.).—This noble monument of Old Norse literature was written at the close of the twelfth century by a Norwegian of high rank, but who expresses his resolution to remain unknown, in which he has perfectly succeeded. He probably resided near Trondhjem. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 56, November 23, 1850 • Various
... spirit that fights and overcomes." [1] "Even were some part of the matter of their myths taken from others, yet the Norsemen have given their gods a noble, upright, great spirit, and placed them upon a high level that is all their own." [2] "In fact these old Norse songs have a truth in them, an inward perennial truth and greatness. It is a greatness not of mere body and gigantic bulk, but a rude greatness of ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... by tales such as these that he first won a hearing from all lovers of English literature. The story of Jason is but a Greek setting of a folk-tale known among the Gaels as the Battle of the Birds, and in Norse as the Master Maid. Many of the tales which the travellers told one another in the Earthly Paradise, such as The Man Born to be King (itself derived from the first of our stories), The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and The Ring given to Venus, ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... most curious proofs of the actual British origin of the legend is in the statement that the death of Havelok's father occurred as the result of a British invasion of Denmark for King Arthur, by a force under a leader with the distinctly Norse name of Hodulf. The claim for conquest of the north by Arthur is very old, and is repeated by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and may well have originated in the remembrance of some successful raid on the Danish coasts by the Norse settlers in the Gower district of Pembrokeshire, ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... came to Lenox the peculiar long-drawn note with which the hill villagers call to one another across the valleys. An infectious spirit of jubilation pervaded the air. The sun himself, in these cheerful latitudes, is transformed from an instrument of torture to the golden-locked hero of Norse and Greek legend; and with every step of the ascent Lenox felt the blood course ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... your oath!), under such circumstances. However, as the song says, "Home once more," and many a yarn shall I have to tell when I gather myself round the fireside, pipe all hands for grog, and sing you an old Norse song with real humour in it—though I dare say you'll say you don't see it—and so no more a present from yours seasickly (I am quite well, but I mean ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... sub-title editor to use just as many words in a leader as might be necessary to make every point of the story entirely clear and interesting. Paramount's "The Devil Stone," showing the train of tragic events that followed the stealing by a wicked Norse queen of the great emerald belonging to a certain Breton priest, was one example of an intensely interesting detective story in which sub-titles supplied much more than a third of the story—and supplied it, apparently, quite unobtrusively. Here, again, only common ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... Germanic languages and in the Prussian-Lithuanian both genders occur. (Gothic sunnan and Old High-German sunno). Sol in the Norse Edda is a female deity, and the Anglo-Saxon sol is also feminine. The transition from the male to the female gender was achieved in the Middle-High-German language of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the German language is ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... Faroe I sailed away, When bright the summer burned, And I told in the old Norse kirk one day The lesson my heart had learned. Then the grizzly landvogt said to me: "Of strength we may not boast; But ever in life for you and me There's danger near the coast. Then think of the drifting dunes In the nights of the watery moons, And think of the Maelstrom's tide ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... I read through and through in early childhood to great profit. This was Cottle's "Alfred," an epic of some merit, but chiefly in this, that it sets forth tolerably clearly the old Norse life and religion. George Boker owned and gave me some time after a book entitled "Five Norse Poems," in the original, and translated. This with Grey's poems, which latter I possessed, laid the basis for a deep interest in ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... entire religion to poetry, and then set it to music. And it is one of the greatest of religions,—what Nature engraved on the heart of our own Teutonic ancestors. It is all there,—its thousand phantasmal years, from the first cowering cry of the Norse savage before the chariot of his storm-god to the last gentle hymn that rose to Freya under her new name of Mary,—all. It is interpreted as a purely human expression; and, I repeat, no man has done so vast and worthy an ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... vein I looked upon a dingy skilling species, with its rudely crossed hammers—a rough coin, bold, sturdy, and rigid as the old Norse character itself which formed the initial of my cabinet—a cabinet which has given to me new ideas of the low-browed Roman and elegant Greek; has admitted me to the arcana of their fascinating mythology; has whispered strange tales of a mummy's perfumed sleep in the shadow of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Carlyle in his Heroes, p. 18, draws out the spiritual significance of it and of Norse mythology generally.] ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... following the saintly recommendation to shape the figure of a head and place it on a cross. Fort tells us that "The introduction of Christianity among the Teutonic races offered no hindrance to a perpetuation, under new forms, of those social observances with which Norse temple idolatry was so intimately associated. Offering to proselytes an unlimited number of demoniacal aeons, similar in individuality and prowess to those peopling the invisible universe, Northern mythology readily united with ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... Denmark, has succeeded admirably in reproducing its national spirit in its pavilion. The building is a long story-and-a-half structure, in the ancient Norse style, dominated by a beautiful tower on which is emblazoned the Norwegian coat-of-arms. The lower floor contains three large dioramas of characteristic Norwegian scenery, and an exhibit hall wherein are ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... from a fruit-bearing tree (including, no doubt, tile beech; cp. book, German Buch, and Buchstabe, a letter of the alphabet); the slips were thrown down promiscuously on a white cloth. whence the expert picked them up at random and by them interpreted fate. In these slips we have the origin of the Norse kefli, the Scots kaivel, which were and are still used as lots. The fishermen of north-east Scotland, when they return after a successful haul, divide the spoil into as many shares as there are men in the boat, with one share more for ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... is hoped that some in the Red Fairy Book may have the attraction of being less familiar than many of the old friends. The tales have been translated, or, in the case of those from Madame d'Aulnoy's long stories, adapted, by Mrs. Hunt from the Norse, by Miss Minnie Wright from Madame d'Aulnoy, by Mrs. Lang and Miss Bruce from other French sources, by Miss May Sellar, Miss Farquharson, and Miss Blackley from the German, while the story of 'Sigurd' ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... a charming insolence. "Meryl and I both have Norse blood in us. If you go far enough back we probably are Norse. But where would be the sense in our professing to love our country by talking her tongue, when it served every reasonable purpose in the world better to talk English? You're so one idea'd, ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... the flap of Thora's tent was raised and out into the moonlight strode the old Swede. She was the great Norse type—tall, deep-breasted, moulded on the old Viking lines. Her sixty years had slipped from her. She looked like some ancient priestess ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... give way to your weaknesses. That is the problem of all of us. "I see two men looking from your eyes," said the Norse seeress, "a young man and an old man. Do not let the old man in you conquer the young man in you." Very well! Barring the loss of health, you can always make the young man ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... I question if Norse heroes of the sea could boast more thrilling adventure than the wild buffalo hunts of American plain-rangers. A cavalcade of six hundred men mounted on mettlesome horses eager for the furious dash through a forest of tossing buffalo-horns was quite as imposing as any clash ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... extended their expeditions to Spain, Italy, and even into Russia. In England, under the name of Danes, we find them forcing Alfred the Great to recognize them as the masters of northern England (878). The Norse pirates were often called vikings, from their habit of leaving their long boats in the vik, i.e., bay or inlet. A goodly number of the Northmen settled in Iceland, and our knowledge of their civilization and customs comes chiefly from the Icelandic sagas, or tales. Some of ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... market rules the supply of light literature in Great Britain. While Lang culls us tales and legends and lyrics from the Norse or Provensal, Stevenson will engage to supply us with tales and legends of his own—something just as good. The two men serve the ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... Vuffingus appellant"[196]). In some one or other of his forms, Woden (observes Mr. Kemble) "is the eponymus of tribes and races. Thus, as Geat, or through Geat, he was the founder of the Geatas; through Gewis, of the Gewissas; through Scyld, of the Scyldingas, the Norse Skjoldungar; through Brand, of the Brodingas; perhaps, through Baetwa, of the Batavians."[197] It could therefore scarcely be regarded as very exceptional at least, if Vetta, one of the grandsons of Woden, should have given, in the same ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... far-famed pagan battle flag, the Raven Standard, was unfurled, and floated freely over the host. The War-arrow had been industriously sent round to all the neighbouring shores, peopled largely at that time with men of Norse blood. As the fleet swept south it had gathered in contingents from every island along the Scotch coast, upon which Viking settlements had been established. Manx men, too, and men from the Scandinavian settlements of Angelsea, Danes under Carle Canuteson, representatives, in fact, ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... left incomplete: it only hides its records, while fire destroys them. In the Norse Edda, when the gods try their games, they find themselves able to out-drink the ocean, but not to eat like the flame. Logi, or fire, licks up food and trencher and all. This chimney is more voracious than the ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... poem of Gottfried von Strassburg, composed about 1210-20. 2. An old-Norse translation made in 1226 by command of King Hakon. 3. A Middle-English poem of the thirteenth century preserved in the so-called Auchinleck MS. of the library of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, and familiar to English readers from the edition published by Sir Walter ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... the air of a Norse sea king for nothing!" They dipped into a bare, red gully, scrambled up the opposite bank, and fought again with the dewberry vines. "When the battle's over you're to report to General Jackson. Say that I sent you—that you're the man he ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... triumphs. The "Targum" consists of translations from the following languages: Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Tartar, Tibetian, Chinese, Mandchou, Russian, Malo-Russian, Polish, Finnish, Anglo-Saxon, Ancient Norse, Suabian, German, Dutch, Danish, Ancient Danish, Swedish, Ancient Irish, Irish, Gaellic, Ancient British, Cambrian British, Greek, Modern Greek, Latin, Provencal, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Rommany. A ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... slowly, in the old Norse tongue, but Father Johannes had studied it, and understood her ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... to believe that about the year 1000 A.D. the northeast coast of America was discovered by a Norse voyager named Leif Ericsson. The records are very meager; but the discovery of our country by such a people is possible and not improbable. For an account of the pre-Columbian discoveries see Fiske's Discovery of America, Vol. I., ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... (Jones Collection) Writing Table (Riesener) The "Marie Antoinette" Writing Table Bedstead of Marie Antoinette A Cylinder Secretaire (Rothschild Collection) An Arm Chair (Louis XVI.) Carved and Gilt Settee and Arm Chair A Sofa En Suite A Marqueterie Escritoire (Jones Collection) A Norse Interior, Shewing French Influence A Secretaire with Sevres Plaques A Clock by Robin (Jones Collection) Harpsichord, ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... come from the British Isles and British America. Germany, including Bohemia, Holland and Switzerland, sums up 1,883,285; Scandinavia, 241,685; and France and Belgium, 128,955. The Celtic influx from Ireland, and the Teutonic and Norse together, form two currents of almost identical volume. Compared with either, the contribution of the Latin or the Romance races sinks into insignificance—an insignificance, however, that shows itself chiefly in numbers, the traces ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... great Norse harper, could give on his harp the Gyarslager, or stroke of the sea gods, which ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... duly folded. Without delay or haste, and with the minimum of speech, the whole great establishment turned on wheels like a machine. Nowhere have I seen order more complete and pervasive. And yet I was always reminded of Norse tales of trolls and ogres who kept their hearts buried in the ground for the mere safety, and must confide the secret to their wives. For these weapons are the life of Tembinok'. He does not aim at popularity; but drives and braves his subjects, with a simplicity of domination ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... may serve as a text for my whole lecture. Not only does it smack of the sea-breeze and the salt water, like all the finest old Norse sagas, but it gives a glimpse at least of the nobleness which underlay the grim and often cruel nature of the Norseman. It belongs, too, to the culminating epoch, to the beginning of that era when the Scandinavian peoples had their ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... lectured and read for a life-time. When the historian fully realizes his ignorance — which sometimes happens to Americans — he becomes even more tiresome to himself than to others, because his naivete is irrepressible. Adams could not get over his astonishment, though he had preached the Norse doctrine all his life against the stupid and beer-swilling Saxon boors whom Freeman loved, and who, to the despair of science, produced Shakespeare. Mere contact with Norway started voyages of thought, and, under ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... speculations tend to the same conclusions. One day it is a discovery of cinerary vases, the next, it is etymological research; yet again it is ethnological investigation, and the day after, it is the publication of unsuspected tales from the Norse; but all go to heap up proof of our consanguinity with the peoples of history—and of an original general belief, ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... interesting to note, too, that two scholars, well known in widely different fields, Monrad, the philosopher—for some years a sort of Dr. Johnson in the literary circles of Christiania—and Unger, the scholarly editor of many Old Norse texts, assisted him in ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... Commissioner watched the bullet head; the points of that Norse rover's moustache, falling below the line of the heavy jaw; the whole full and pale physiognomy, whose determined character was marred by too much flesh; at the cunning wrinkles radiating from the outer corners of the eyes—and in that purposeful contemplation of the valuable and ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... poetry, if not characterised by uniformity of power, never descends into weakness. Triumphant in humour, he is eminently a master of the plaintive; his tender pieces breathe a deep-toned cadence, and his sacred lyrics are replete with devotional fervour. His Norse ballads are resonant with the echoes of his birth-land, and his songs are to be remarked for their deep ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... reckoned churls," one of the gentlemen exclaimed indignantly. "The fame of Harold's bravery, wisdom, and courtesy to all men is known in every court in Europe, and that the duke's vassal should have dared to imprison and chain him will excite universal indignation. Why, the rudest of our own Norse ancestors would not have so foully treated one so noble whom fate had cast into his hands. Had we been at war with England it would be shameful, but being at peace there are no words that can fitly describe ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... way, past the deliciously smelling, whispering pine-woods that sheltered the Norwegian homestead, starting a little aside when a great, tall, fair-faced, fair-haired Norse farmer came striding along, singing some old old song, as he carried a heavy log on his shoulder, past a seater or mountain meadow where the girls were pasturing their cows, much like Lucy's friends in the Tirol, out ...
— Little Lucy's Wonderful Globe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that the place was holy; Osiris was at times regarded as a Tree-spirit (1); and in inscriptions is referred to as "the solitary one in the acacia"—which reminds us curiously of the "burning bush." The same is true of others of the gods; in the old Norse mythology Ygdrasil was the great branching World-Ash, abode of the soul of the universe; the Peepul or Bo-tree in India is very sacred and must on no account be cut down, seeing that gods and spirits dwell among its branches. It is of the nature ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... their Influence on the English Race.—2. The Mythology.—3. The Scandinavian Languages.—4. Icelandic, or Old Norse Literature: the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, the Scalds, the Sagas, the "Heimskringla," The Folks-Sagas and Ballads of the Middle Ages.—5. Danish Literature: Saxo Grammaticus and Theodoric; Arreboe, Kingo, Tycho Brahe, Holberg, Evald, Baggesen, Oehlenschlaeger, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... scop would recite that part of Beowulf which tells of the monster Grendel. Again, he named Sigard the Volsung (the Siegfrid of the Niebelungenlied and of Wagner's opera), and this would recall the slaying of the dragon Fafnir, or some other story of the old Norse saga. So every name or place which Widsith mentioned was an invitation. When he came to a hall and "unlocked his word-hoard," he offered his hearers a variety of poems and legends from which they made their own selection. Looked at in this ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Mifflin & Co., Dodd, Mead & Co., and the Macmillan Company, by means of which they have been enabled to reprint stories from Hawthorne's "Wonder Book" and "Tanglewood Tales," from "In the Days of Giants," from "Norse Stories," from Church's "Stories from Homer," and ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... positively cruel to turn Peyton loose among his folios, and invite him to afflict that innocent orphaned brute with some dreadful seven-syllabled abomination, which he will convince you is Arabic, or Sanscrit, classic or mediaeval, Gaelic, Finnish or Norse, but which I warn you will serve your jaws (more elegant form—'maxillary bones') very much as an attack of mumps would, and will torture the victim into hydrophobia. Be pitiful, and say Teazer, Tiger, Towser, but don't throw ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... present, it is urged, is a particularly favorable time to establish prosperous small farmers in many parts of the Highlands where sheep-farming has proved a failure. The inhabitants of the coasts and islands are largely a seafaring people. There is quite as much Norse as Celtic blood in the veins of many of them, and the Norseman's love of the sea leads them naturally to fishing or navigation. The herring-fisheries, with liberal encouragement on the part of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... depth of tranquil water, and the sea-birds, screaming and flickering from the ruined crags, alone disturb the silence and the sunshine. One such place has impressed itself on my memory beyond all others. On a rock by the water's edge, old fighting men of the Norse breed had planted a double castle; the two stood wall to wall like semi-detached villas; and yet feud had run so high between their owners, that one, from out of a window, shot the other as he stood in his own doorway. There is something in the juxtaposition ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chiefs stood when publicly invested with the insignia of office, is still, or was lately, in existence in Ladykirk, at Burwick, South Ronaldshay, Orkney. A local tradition, that originated long after the Pictish chiefs passed away, and a new Norse race, ignorant of the customs of their predecessors, came in, says that the stone in question was used by St. Magnus as a boat to ferry him over the Pentland Firth; while an earlier tradition looked upon it as a miraculous whale which opportunely appeared at ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... that so anomalous a system of government should have persisted as late as the eleventh century, in other words for a period of over 500 years. But we must take account of the Danish—or as we should rather call it, the Norse—invasion of Ireland. Danish ships first appeared off the Irish coasts about the year 800. From that time for two centuries Ireland was to a large extent cut off from intercourse with the rest of Europe. The aim of the northern hordes, as it seems, was not mere pillage, but the extinction ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... not uncommon among Norwegian peasants, was no doubt natural to Bjrnson, but was confirmed by the influence of the Old Norse sagas and skaldic poetry. The latter may also have increased his use of alliteration, masterly not only in the direct imitation of the old form, as in Bergliot, but also in the enrichment of the music of his rhymed verse in modern ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... something like a rival, a man from Barra to be more than half a foreigner. Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection joins us on the instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one Celtic, and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have it not among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English, or Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other's ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... young Olaf came of hardy Norse stock. His father, Harald Graenske, or "Gray-mantle," one of the tributary kings of Norway, had fallen a victim to the tortures of the haughty Swedish queen; and now his son, a boy of scarce thirteen, but a warrior already by training and from desire, came to avenge his ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... ultima Thule, "that they might pray to God in peace"; but whether they did any direct work of conversion is doubtful. The actual conversion came undoubtedly from Norway. A Christian queen lived in Iceland at the end of the ninth century, the wife of the Norse Olaf who was king in Dublin; but little if any impression was made on the heathenism of the people. Nearly a century later an Icelander called Thorwald Kothransson brought a Christian bishop Frederic from Saxony, who wrought some ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... town-meeting is to a very limited extent a legislative body; it can make sundry regulations for the management of its local affairs. Such regulations are known by a very ancient name, "by-laws." By is an Old Norse word meaning "town," and it appears in the names of such towns as Derby and Whitby in the part of England overrun by the Danes in the ninth and tenth centuries. ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... and having neither a reading nor speaking acquaintance with the Norse language, I am unable to decide abstruse points on which such learned doctors disagree; but not being altogether without some practical experience of English and French drama, I venture to call in question not only the dramatic ability of the dramatist himself, but also, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... adverse conditions of his life, but he was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost its self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men who were not afraid of anything but the ice and the devil, and he had prospects before him when his father went down off the North Cape ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... and his attention divided between the tiller of a vessel, which flew up in the wind's eye with the slightest negligence, and his anxiety for the well-being of his own boat,—the countenance of the Norse tar was a book on whose leaves the student might have seen how truly "the ridiculous ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... went to Saratoga in July and August to study the analytical processes of chemistry. There was also a course there on the history of the Revolution. They went to Newport alternate years in the same months, to study the Norse literature and swimming. They went to the White Sulphur Springs and to Bath, to study the history of chivalry as illustrated in the annual tournaments. They went to Paris to study French, to Rome to study Latin, to Athens to study Greek. In all parts of the ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... used, I can refer my questioner to the little story of "Gertrude's Bird," or the woodpecker, that is said to "fly about with a red mutch on her head." The legend is in Dasent's "Popular Tales from the Norse." ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... face was red, and the glint of blue ice was in her eyes. Her eyelashes and eyebrows, as well as the almost imperceptible down that edged her cheek when she turned against the light, were blond almost to whiteness. What beauty she had was of the fine, hardy Norse type. Her hands were red and hard, and even beneath the coarse sleeve of the oilskin coat one could infer that the biceps and deltoids were large and powerful. She was coarse-fibred, no doubt, mentally as well as physically, but her coarseness, so Wilbur guessed, would prove to be the ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... bards of Wales and in the Scalds of the Sagas did he seem to find his kindred spirits, though it has been suggested that his complex nature took this means of informing the world that he could read both Cymric and Norse. But we must not be unkind behind the magic door—and yet to be charitable to the uncharitable is ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... subject of speech. The "Havamal" is full of teaching on this subject—the necessity of silence, the danger and the folly of reckless talk. You all know the Japanese proverb that "the mouth is the front gate of all misfortune." The Norse poet puts the same truth into a grimmer shape: "The tongue works death to the head." Here are a number of ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... feel (and I did feel uncommonly funny, you may take your oath!), under such circumstances. However, as the song says, "Home once more," and many a yarn shall I have to tell when I gather myself round the fireside, pipe all hands for grog, and sing you an old Norse song with real humour in it—though I dare say you'll say you don't see it—and so no more a present from yours seasickly (I am quite well, but I mean I'm sick of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... mere nine hundred years semi-civilisation? Two thousand years before the Conquest the fierce warrior Northmen lived by the might of the halbert, fighters one and all from the days when the war-inspired mother croned of the battle-axe to her babe. And in the Normans was that Norse spirit dormant; but one night of such hardship as yet undreamt of had sufficed for ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... of the Sussex dialect is derived from the Saxon. Its accessories can be traced to the Celts, to the Norse—thus rape, a division of the county, is probably an adaptation of the Icelandic hreppr—and to the French, some hundreds of Huguenots having fled to our shores after the Edict of Nantes. The Hastings fishermen, for example, often say boco for plenty, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... they had been discovered, had been named from Norse mythology—Odin and Baldur and Thor, Uller and Freya, Bifrost and Asgard and Niflheim. When the Norse names ran out, the discoverers had turned to other mythologies, Celtic and Egyptian and Hindu and Assyrian, and by the middle of ...
— Graveyard of Dreams • Henry Beam Piper
... chronologically interjected among the saga-plays, and dealing with the more definite history of the hapless Queen of Scots in much of the saga-spirit. Bjoernson felt that the Scots had inherited no little of the Norse blood and temper, and believed that the psychology of his saga-heroes was adequate to account for the group of men whose fortunes were bound up with those of Mary Stuart in Scotland. He finds his key to the problem of her career in the fact that she was by nature incapable of yielding herself ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... mentioned in the record itself. The not exterminated germs of the nature-worship (with the adoration of fire) spring up again, but the moral life remained. (1.) Therefore the Veda language is to me the precipitate of the Old Bactrian (as the Edda language of the Old Norse). (2.) The Zend language is the second step from the Northern Old Bactrian. (3.) The Sanskrit is one still further advanced from the Southern Old Bactrian, or from the Veda language. (4.) All Indian literature, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... it is stated that the ballads are translated from Oehlensloeger, and from the Kiaempe Viser, the old Norse book referred ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... worked that the four-and-twenty immortal blackbirds could not have put more music into a pie than she did. Saul was piling wood into the big oven, and Sophie paused a moment on the threshold to look at him, for she always enjoyed the sight of this stalwart cousin, whom she likened to a Norse viking, with his fair hair and beard, keen blue eyes, and six feet of manly height, with shoulders that looked broad and strong enough to ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... Scandinavian in Russia Rurik Oleg Igor Olga's Vengeance Olga a Christian Sviatoslaf Russia the Champion of the Greek Empire in Bulgaria Norse Dominance in Heroic Period ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... that relates to the history of the Normans, confirms what is said by Sir F. Palgrave of the ignorance of the North and the indifference to it which characterized the Normans. Speaking of the Norman literature, he observes: "In vain we seek herein imitations of the old Norse poesy, or allusions to the history or customs of Scandinavia. There may, perhaps, exist more resemblance between the heroic sagas of the North and the romances of chivalry of the South of Europe, both ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... again, their hearts now filled with ardent expectation. At length rose again the stirring cry of "Land!" or its Norse equivalent, and as the dragon-peaked craft glided swiftly onward there rose into view a long coast-line, flat and covered with white sand in the foreground, while a dense forest spread over the rising ground in ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... goodness, something true From sun and spirit shining through All faiths, all worlds, as through the dark Of ocean shines the lighthouse spark, Attests the presence everywhere Of love and providential care. The faith the old Norse heart confessed In one dear name,—the hopefulest And tenderest heard from mortal lips In pangs of birth or death, from ships Ice-bitten in the winter sea, Or lisped beside a mother's knee,— The wiser world hath not outgrown, And the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... from Norse sources that may be classed as "Original Narratives of Early American History" are the Icelandic sagas (prose narratives) that tell of the voyages of Northmen to Vinland. There are two sagas that ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... Fraser from the French "fraise," a strawberry (the Frasers have a strawberry in their coat-of-arms); Chisholm is English and means "gravel-holm,"—the Anglo-Saxon ceosol (pebble) is preserved in Chesil Beach and Chiselhurst; MacLeod signifies "son of Ljot"; and ljotr is the Norse word for "ugly." Campbell is probably Norman-French, though Dr. Macbain suggests cam-beul, Gaelic for "crooked mouth." In olden times an external conqueror would sometimes subdue a district, and call the natives ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... ode that follows" (Gray). This ode (The Fatal Sisters, translated from the Norse) describes the Valkyriur, "the choosers of the slain," or warlike Fates of the Gothic mythology, as weaving the destinies of those who were doomed to perish in battle. It ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... wonderfully meaningless sensation to know nobody and to discover myself equally unknown amid that matchless companionship. We were like a mixed bunch of gods, Greek, Norse, Hindu, Hottentot—all gathered on Olympus, having never heard of each other but taking it for granted that we were all gods together and all ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... was the English national weapon in early times. It was originally used by the Norse tribes, and was brought into Western Europe by Rollo, first Duke of Normandy, a direct ancestor of William the Conqueror. When the Normans invaded England they carried the long-bow with them, and as the Saxons had no weapon so powerful, they readily adopted it. ...
— Harper's Young People, March 9, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... riddles with them. When he does attack them, it is because he is stung by personal injuries; and it is only with his own arm that he strikes. His exploits have a mixture of grim humour and fierce hatred quite unlike anything else in Scripture, and more resembling the horse-play of Homeric or Norse heroes than the stern purpose and righteous wrath of a soldier who felt that he was God's instrument. We seem to hear his loud laughter as he ties the firebrands to the struggling jackals, or swings the jaw-bone. A strange champion for Jehovah! But we ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... steeple-chimney yet got on end from sea to sea! North of the Humber, a stern Willelmus Conquaestor burnt the Country, finding it unruly, into very stern repose. Wild fowl scream in those ancient silences, wild cattle roam in those ancient solitudes; the scanty sulky Norse-bred population all coerced into silence,—feeling that, under these new Norman Governors, their history has probably as good as ended. Men and Northumbrian Norse populations know little what has ended, what is but beginning! The Ribble and the Aire roll down, as yet ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... primroses, and cowslips, grew around; these Edith began to pluck. Singing, as she wove, a simple song, that, not more by the dialect than the sentiment, betrayed its origin in the ballad of the Norse [11], which had, in its more careless composition, a character quite distinct from the artificial poetry of the Saxons. The song ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Fair Head, and then later at Rathlin Island, where their fate met them at last, as Deirdre had prophesied. It is a sad story, and we can easily weep at the thrilling moment when, there being no man among the Ultonians to do the king's bidding, a Norse captive takes Naisi's magic sword and strikes off the heads of the three sons of Usnach with one swift blow, and Deirdre, falling prone upon the dead bodies, chants a lament; and when she has finished singing, she puts her pale cheek against Naisi's, and dies; and a great cairn is piled over ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Fozlan, sent by the caliph Al Moktader, in the tenth century, as ambassador to a Scandinavian king established on the banks of the Volga (Journal Asiatique, 1825, vol. vi. pp. 16 ff.). In some cases there was an interment but no incineration, and thus it is that Norse ships have been found. Two of these precious relics are preserved in the museum of Christiania. One of them, discovered in 1880, constructed out of oaken planks held together by iron nails, still retained several of its oars; ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... 169: The proper division of this Old Norse word is not into v[i]-king, but into v[)i]k-ing. The first syllable means a "bay" or "fiord," the second is a patronymic termination, so that "vikings" are "sons of the fiord,"—an eminently appropriate ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... deepest claim to my gratitude if I did not here acknowledge it. Mr. Laing was or is of a stock which deeply appealed to my sympathies, for he is the son of the famous translator of the Heimskringla, a great collection of Norse sagas, which I had read, and in which he himself somewhat aided. Of late years, since he has retired from more active financial business, Mr. Laing has not merely turned his attention to literature; he has deservedly distinguished himself by translating, as I may say, into the ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... shout from the other boat, for the last of the flying herd had been overtaken by hard pulling; and, watching his opportunity so as to pick out a finely tusked head, the Norse harpooner there had made a successful thrust, and they, too, were fast ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... contains certain animal pairs which seem to reflect the two dualities, sun and moon, and day and night. There is here no certainty as to detail; the Norse myth is advanced and congealed, if not spurious, as Professor Bugge and his school would have us believe. At the feet of Odin lie his two wolves, Geri and Freki, "Greedy" and "Voracious." They hurl themselves across the lands when peace is broken. Who shall ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield
... of the Sun. Moreover, when the early Christians prayed, they turned to the East. Their holy day was, as the holy day of Christendom still is, Sunday, day of the Sun, an expression that comes from the Norse, on whom also shone the light of ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... shows no results while accomplishing great ends. It cannot be made easy. The gale and the lee-shore are the same as when the sea-kings of old dared them and did battle with them in the heroic energy of their old Norse blood. The wet, the cold, the exposure must be, since you cannot put a Chilson's furnace into a ship's forecastle, nor wear India-rubbers and carry an umbrella when you go aloft. But men will brave all such discomforts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... saved Europe from the Saracens. England had not been recreated by a Norman Conqueror. The Crusades were still undreamed of. Art, science, letters, were in custody in the East. These armed children ran riot,—passionate, intense, uncontrolled, loving fight and finery as the Trojans, or the Norse heroes ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... should take it into her head to accept him! No logic could take account of a woman's whimsies. Then what a pretty fix he would have got himself into, just by a foolhardy freak! But there was a strain of Norse blood in Hunt, and in spite of occasional touches of ague, the risk of the scheme had in itself a certain fascination for him. And yet he could n't help wishing he had carried out a dozen desperate devices for disgusting her with him, which at the time had seemed to ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... not found in the original notes we are chiefly indebted to Prof. R. B. Anderson, of the University of Wisconsin, and to his valuable work, NORSE MYTHOLOGY. We are also under obligations to Mrs. E. Hasselqvist, of the Augustana ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... their Harp, was suggested by the digging up of a mail-clad skeleton at Fall River—a circumstance which the poet linked with the traditions about the Round Tower at Newport, thus giving to the whole the spirit of a Norse viking song of war and of the sea. The Wreck of the Hesperus was occasioned by the news of shipwrecks on the coast near Gloucester and by the name of a reef—"Norman's Woe"—where many of them took place. It was written one night between twelve and three, and cost ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... help in her tribal fights, notwithstanding the rubbish she talked about the chief, Rezu, who according to her account of him, must resemble one of the fabulous "trolls," half-human and half-ghostly evil creatures, of whom I have read in the Norse Sagas, who could only be slain by some particular hero ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... in the beginnings of dusk, and hear them out on the Lake where they moor at night, a bedtime music that makes for strange dreaming—we know well what kind of a gift to the community Jack Miner is; and we are almost as sorry as he, when the keen, hardy Norse blood of the birds calls them ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... knew his gift of the ring to be our safety, and surely he had given it to me for this. So I grew confident, and even longed to see the sharp bow of the boat cleave the mist, if only her crew knew of our friend by name at least. Yet they might be Norse—not Danish. ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... quite innocent so long as you surrender to them simply without any admixture of interested motive.—But there were men of a more worldly type who only played the game of set purpose: the popular movement was to them only a road to success. Like the Norse pirates, they made rise of the rising tide to carry their ships up into the land: they aimed at reaching the innermost point of the great estuaries so as to be left snugly ensconced in the conquered cities when the sea fell back once more. The channel was narrow and the tide was capricious: ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... B. somewhat out of countenance), 'Oh! Aye! Keatinge is THE authority; a most extraordinary writer.' 'Well, I should call him the Geoffrey of Monmouth of Ireland.' (Mr B. changing the VENUE), 'I delight in Norse-stories; they are far grander than the Greek. There is the story of Olaf the Saint of Norway. Can anything be grander? What a noble character!' 'But,' I said, 'what do YOU think of his putting all those poor Druids on the ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... the meaning of, e.g. 'the Dark One.' Before there can be a myth, ex hypothesi the words Dark One must have become hopelessly unintelligible, must have become a proper name. Thus suppose, for argument's sake only, that Cronos once meant Dark One, and was understood in that sense. People (as in the Norse riddle just cited) said, 'Cronos [i.e. the Dark One—meaning mist] swallows water and wood.' Then they forgot that Cronos was their old word for the Dark One, and was mist; but they kept up, and understood, all the rest of the phrase about ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... copy down any folk tale that he found surviving in the more isolated districts. In 1842-1844 appeared Norwegian Folk Tales by Moe and Asbjoernsen; in 1845, Norwegian Fairy Tales and Folk Legends; and there were subsequent additions. The five tales following are from these Norse collections. They were first made accessible in English in Dasent's Popular Tales from the Norse (1858). This book with its long introductory essay on the origin and diffusion of popular tales constitutes a landmark in the study of folklore. It and Dasent's later volume, Tales from ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... brought farming, and Scandinavians who taught nautical skill. The Celts revolted more than once, but Malcolm Canmore and his successors crushed them and confiscated their lands. In the reign of Alexander I. (d. 1124) mention is first made of Aberdeen (originally called Abordon and, in the Norse sagas, Apardion), which received its charter from William the Lion in 1179, by which date its burgesses had alfeady combined with those of Banff, Elgin, Inverness and other trans-Grampian communities to form a free Hanse, under which they enjoyed exceptional trading privileges. By ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Napoleon of 1792 and 1813, but during the long interval between devoted himself actively to intellectual culture and literary pursuits. He began his career as an author by translating the "Numancia" of Cervantes, but his admiration of the ancient Norse sagas and the old German legends led him into the composition of exquisitely beautiful and tender, though exceedingly fantastic, romances which speedily gained immense popularity. In these productions fairy and magical elements predominate. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... the sublime philosophic poem. In the Purusha Sukta, the ninetieth hymn of the tenth book of the Rig-Veda Sanhita, we have a description of the creation of all things out of the severed limbs of a magnified non-natural man, Purusha. This conception is of course that which occurs in the Norse myths of the rent body of Ymir. Borr's sons took the body of the Giant Ymir and of his flesh formed the earth, of his blood seas and waters, of his bones mountains, of his teeth rocks and stones, of his hair ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... small o above, used in one Middle High German passage] [This form was used in place of the expected [ou] because "uo" is often found in transliterations.] [e,] [e with tilde-shaped "tail", used in a few Old Norse words] [] [dagger, used only ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... devastating expeditions of the Norse or Northmen, the Carlovingian empire, now weakened by division, became an easier prey for the invaders. Emboldened by success, the Northmen at length commenced to settle in the regions they invaded, no longer returning, as formerly, to their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... The Norse conception of death as a vast, cloudy presence, darkly sweeping on its victims, and bearing them away wrapped in its sable folds, is evidently a free product of imagination brooding not so much on the distinct phenomena of an individual case as on the melancholy ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... a fair Norse maiden in Horlingdal. The father of the maid favoured the elder warrior; the maid herself ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... in the version here given, is a fine old English story, evidently very popular with the common people. Earlier versions were probably familiar to the Norse in the tenth century, at which time Dublin was the capital of a Norse kingdom. Suddenne was possibly ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... palace on Mount Takachiho, which is one of the two highest peaks in Kyushu, situated in the province of Hyuga, nearly in the middle of the southern extension of the island of Kyushu. It was from this place that the two brothers started on their expedition. It was no doubt such an expedition as the Norse Vikings of a later day often led into the islands of their neighbors. They had with them a force composed of the descendants of the invaders who had come with their grandfather from the continent. They marched ...
— Japan • David Murray
... originally a symbol of the Sun, perhaps of the vernal sun as opposed to the autumnal sun, the Sauvastika, and therefore a natural symbol of light, life, health, and wealth. That in ancient mythology the sun was frequently represented as a wheel is well known. Grimm identifies the Old Norse hjol or hvel, the A.-S. hvehol, English 'wheel,' with {kappa|upsilon with tonos|kappa|lambda|omicron|rho}, Sk. Kakra, wheel; and derives jol, 'yule-tide,' the time of the winter solstice, from hjol, 'the ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... in his youth with English songs, and most probably knew the old Norse sagas; but he had to learn Latin in his later life. We must remember that most of the literature which Alfred could get at was locked up in Latin; even the invaluable Church History of St Bede needed a ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... a daughter of the gods, or the old Norse Vikings before they were Anglicised, with fair hair. And you have the ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... twelve pillars at Sinai. The Mandan Indians celebrated the Flood with twelve typical characters, who danced around the ark. The Scandinavians believed in the twelve gods, the Aesir, who dwelt on Asgard, the Norse Olympus. Diligent investigation may yet reveal that the number of a modern jury, twelve, is a survival of the ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... cordially welcomed. He was afterwards joined by his son, who, curiously enough, married a Shetland lady, and thus, even in the days of my father, who was his grandson, a constant communication was kept up with our Norse connections. I, also, have more than once heard of them since my father's death, and have determined to become more intimately acquainted with my relatives during this northern voyage of ours. But where are we getting to? What with the strong tide, and the favourable breeze, we positively ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... dull, it is regaining credit.—3. Aeschylus, the grandest of the three tragedians, who has given us under a thin veil the first plantation of Europe. The "Prometheus" is a poem of the like dignity and scope as the book of Job, or the Norse "Edda."—4. Of Plato I hesitate to speak, lest there should be no end. You find in him that which you have already found in Homer, now ripened to thought,—the poet converted to a philosopher, with loftier strains of musical wisdom than Homer reached, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... of artistic materials for household decoration. His work in this direction has improved the beauty of all household fabrics, and has affected the taste in household art in both England and America. Nevertheless he is best known as a poet. His finest poems are "The Earthly Paradise," a series of Norse legends, "Three Northern Stones," translated from Icelandic poems, and his translations of "The Odyssey." ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... Celts, and spoke Celtic; when they were conquered by the Romans, Latin words crept into the tongue; and as Romans gave place to the Saxons, and the Saxons to the Danes, words from the German and Norse tongues were added to the language. Finally, came the Norman Conquest, and with it a flood of French words. The English we speak to-day is a mixture of Celtic, Latin, Saxon, ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 58, December 16, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... Great Eastern and Great Central lines also afford communications. The land is extremely fertile. The name, properly Axeyholm (cf. Haxey), is hybrid, Ax being the Celtic uisg, water; ey the Anglo-Saxon for island; and holm the Norse word with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... and why the goddess should put herself out to allay tempests in his behalf, or why hostile deities should be disturbed to tumble seas into turbulence for such a voyager, is a query. He merits neither their wrath nor their courtesy. I confess to liking heroes of the old Norse mythology better. They, at least, did not cry nor grow voluble with words when obstacles obstructed the march. They possess the merit of tremendous action. Aeneas, in this regard, is the inferior of Achilles. Excuse us from hero worship, if Aeneas be hero. In this old company of heroes, Ulysses ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... came in contact, or of infusing their own energy into them. During the long reign of Duke Richard the Fearless, the son of William Longsword, a reign which lasted from 945 to 996, the heathen Norman pirates became French Christians and feudal at heart. The old Norse language lived only at Bayeux and in a few local names. As the old Northern freedom died silently away, the descendants of the pirates became feudal nobles and the "Pirates' land" sank into the most loyal ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... ship fight against contending wind and wave, and shiver under the blows received in a struggle which dashes the salt spray high over the decks. There is an aroma in the air then that breathes new life into jaded nerves, and stirs the drop of old Norse blood, dormant in most American veins, into quivering ecstasy. One dreams of throwing off the trammels of civilized existence and returning to the free ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... surprise some that so anomalous a system of government should have persisted as late as the eleventh century, in other words for a period of over 500 years. But we must take account of the Danish—or as we should rather call it, the Norse—invasion of Ireland. Danish ships first appeared off the Irish coasts about the year 800. From that time for two centuries Ireland was to a large extent cut off from intercourse with the rest of Europe. The aim of the northern hordes, as it seems, was not mere pillage, ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... really the first of the literary Vikings. In the essay on the Sagas here I have tried to show, very imperfectly, what the Norsemen were actually like. They caught Kingsley's fancy, and his "Hereward," though born on English soil, is really Norse—not English. But Kingsley did not write about the Vikings, nor about his Elizabethan heroes in "Westward Ho!" in a perfectly simple, straightforward way. He was always thinking of our own times and referring to them. That ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... can only arise in that early period of a nation's history when political combination is as yet imperfect, and scientific knowledge has not begun to mark off the domain of historic fact from the cloudland of fancy and legend. Of this class are the Homeric poems, the Nibelungen Lied, the Norse ballads, the Edda, the Kalewala, the legends of Arthur, and the poem of the Cid: all these, whatever their differences, have this in common, that they sprang at a remote period out of the earliest traditions of the several peoples, and neither did nor could have originated in a state ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... curious proofs of the actual British origin of the legend is in the statement that the death of Havelok's father occurred as the result of a British invasion of Denmark for King Arthur, by a force under a leader with the distinctly Norse name of Hodulf. The claim for conquest of the north by Arthur is very old, and is repeated by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and may well have originated in the remembrance of some successful raid on the Danish coasts by the Norse settlers in the Gower district ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... beside Mr. Morris's, for here we have a true work of art, a rendering not merely of language into language, but of poetry into poetry, and though the new spirit added in the transfusion may seem to many rather Norse than Greek, and, perhaps at times, more boisterous than beautiful, there is yet a vigour of life in every line, a splendid ardour through each canto, that stirs the blood while one reads like the sound of a trumpet, and that, producing a physical as well as a spiritual delight, exults ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Eric had made this agreement between them, that, if they slew Olaf Tryggvason, he of them who should be nearest at the time should own the ship and all the share of booty taken in the battle; but of the realm of the Norse king they should each have ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... Sheila also caught the young of the wild-duck when the mother was guiding them down the hill-rivulets to the sea. She had tamed many of them, catching them thus before they could fly. The names of most of the mountains about here ended in bhal, which was a Gaelic corruption of the Norse fiall, a mountain. There were many Norse names all through the Lewis, but more particularly toward the Butt. The termination bost, for example, at the end of many words, meant an inhabited place, but she fancied bost was Danish. And did Mr. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... of writing remote from each other. Snorri Sturluson, the greatest of Icelandic historians, was born in 1179. His Prose Edda, the companion-piece of the present volume, is a Christian's account of Old Norse myths and poetic conceptions thus happily preserved as they were about to pass into oblivion. More than seven hundred years separate Johann Sigurjonsson from Snorri, and his work is in dramatic, not saga form. But even as in outward appearance modern ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... realizes his ignorance — which sometimes happens to Americans — he becomes even more tiresome to himself than to others, because his naivete is irrepressible. Adams could not get over his astonishment, though he had preached the Norse doctrine all his life against the stupid and beer-swilling Saxon boors whom Freeman loved, and who, to the despair of science, produced Shakespeare. Mere contact with Norway started voyages of thought, and, under their illusions, he took the mail steamer to the north, and ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... along came a fleet of marauding Norse. The English ships on the lookout gave the alarm, and England's navy put out to meet them. The enemy were taken by surprise, and the fate that five hundred years later was to overtake the Spanish Armada, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... rough population. Their accost is curt; their accent and tone of speech blunt and harsh. Something of this may, probably, be attributed to the freedom of mountain air and of isolated hill-side life; something be derived from their rough Norse ancestry. They have a quick perception of character, and a keen sense of humour; the dwellers among them must be prepared for certain uncomplimentary, though most likely true, observations, pithily expressed. Their feelings are not easily roused, but their duration ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... changed and blasted world. No cloud is in the sky, no rivers or lakes are on the earth; only the deep springs of the caverns are left; the sun, a ball of fire, glares in the bronze heavens. It is to this period that the Norse legend of Mimer's well, where Odin gave an eye for a ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... Capitol!" he proclaimed triumphantly, and shutting up the brass telescope with a facile snap of sliding tubes, he slipped it into his pocket and sprang off the stile. In three seconds he was on Ferris territory—and a trespasser. Louis Raincy was quick, impulsive, with fair Norse hair blown in what the country folk called a "birse" about his face, and dark-blue western eyes—the eyes of the island MacBrydes who had built ships to ride the sea, and whose younger branches had ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... Olaf, however, determined to drive the Danes from the bridge, adopted a daring expedient to accomplish this object, and, fastening his ships to the piles of the bridge, from which the Danes were raining down stones and beams, dragged it to pieces, upon which, on very fair provocation, Ottar, a Norse bard, broke forth into the following eulogy of King Olaf, the patron saint ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... follows of the Norse-pilot mooring his boat under the lee of the monster is completed in a line that attunes the mind once more to all the pathos and gloom of those ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... who were to tell stories had special training under Miss Shedlock, a well-known English story teller, and gave thorough study to the subject before attempting to interest the children. This library has published a pamphlet on Story telling to children from Norse mythology and the Nibehulgenlied. This pamphlet contains references to material on selected stories, an annotated reading list for the story teller and for young people, a full outline of a course, and many valuable suggestions. ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... which the landowner was until 1890 the only type. In most of the older states immigration from foreign lands has not greatly affected the country community. In Wisconsin, Minnesota and other states of the Northwest substantial sections of the community are invaded by people of sturdy Germanic and Norse extraction. In New England the Poles, French, Portuguese and some Jews are settling in the country. But throughout the states of the Union as a whole the population, both the newcomers and ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... Square, where his wife died in 1869. He died himself at Oulton in August 1881, leaving behind him, so it is frequently asserted, many manuscript volumes, including treatises on Celtic poetry, on Welsh and Cornish and Manx literature, as well as translations from the Norse and Russ and the jest-books of Turkey. Some, at all events, of these works were advertised as 'ready for the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... he went brought little that was new; he was but a Norseman—a Viking—with a French polish. He had no law of his own; he had forgotten his own language, he had no literature. But he had the old Norse energy; which not only drove him or his ancestors to settle and conquer in lands so distant and diverse as Russia and Sicily, Syria and North America, but enabled him to infuse new life into the countries he conquered. Further, ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... them. Only Jeannie Deans really met her requirements as a "part" and she left much to be desired in the way of romance and beauty. Most often she was young Lochinvar or Rob Roy; sometimes Coeur de Lion led her on full-blooded adventure. There were quaint old books of Norse and Keltic legend, musty, leather-bound books with wood-cut illustrations and long "s's" in the printing. There was Fox's Book of Martyrs: there were many tales of the Covenanters, ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... the labours of the Columban clergy, and there are many traces in the islands that speak of their work. Under the rule of the Norse, in the ninth and tenth centuries any Christian influence that survived from the labours of such early pioneers of the Christian faith must have died out. The first actual Bishop of Orkney was William the Old, who was consecrated in 1102, held the bishopric for sixty-six years, and ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... Both loved a fair Norse maiden in Horlingdal. The father of the maid favoured the elder warrior; the maid ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... came the bards and gleemen, who used to delight the company with their songs and stories of the gallant deeds of their ancestors, the weird legends of their gods Woden and Thor, their Viking lays and Norse sagas, and the acrobats and dancers astonished them with their ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... prairie-dogs will not permit weeds or tall grass to grow about their burrows, as these afford cover for coyotes and other enemies to stalk them. If they cannot remove these screens, they will leave the place. And yet they will sometimes allow a weed such as the Norse nettle or the Mexican poppy to grow on the mound at the mouth of the den where it will afford shade and not obstruct the view. At first thought this conduct may look like a matter of calculation and forethought, but it is doubtless ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... the things that the Ministry of Transport has, so to say, up its sleeve, and is alone a sufficient answer to those who suggest that this Ministry has outlived its hour. There is a grim Norse spirit amongst its officials, inspired perhaps by their chieftain's name, and already the plans for a first-class Pullman galley are ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... the wild fiction that follows is probably grounded; which, extravagant as it is, possesses something striking to the imagination. Saxo Grammaticus tells us of the fame of two Norse princes or chiefs, who had formed what was called a brotherhood in arms, implying not only the firmest friendship and constant support during all the adventures which they should undertake in life, but binding them by a solemn ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... this dominating dullness upon foreigners. She remembered the feeble exotic quality to be found in the first-generation Scandinavians; she recalled the Norwegian Fair at the Lutheran Church, to which Bea had taken her. There, in the bondestue, the replica of a Norse farm kitchen, pale women in scarlet jackets embroidered with gold thread and colored beads, in black skirts with a line of blue, green-striped aprons, and ridged caps very pretty to set off a fresh face, had served rommegrod og lefse—sweet cakes ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... long as you surrender to them simply without any admixture of interested motive.—But there were men of a more worldly type who only played the game of set purpose: the popular movement was to them only a road to success. Like the Norse pirates, they made rise of the rising tide to carry their ships up into the land: they aimed at reaching the innermost point of the great estuaries so as to be left snugly ensconced in the conquered ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... in Russia Rurik Oleg Igor Olga's Vengeance Olga a Christian Sviatoslaf Russia the Champion of the Greek Empire in Bulgaria Norse Dominance in Heroic Period ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... insisted on taking her grandfather's dog with her, and, notwithstanding the horrified looks of the passengers and the scowl of the conductor, he followed her into the car and threw himself under the seat, glaring at all who passed, and looking as hideously savage as the Norse Managarmar. ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... notwithstanding the rubbish she talked about the chief, Rezu, who according to her account of him, must resemble one of the fabulous "trolls," half-human and half-ghostly evil creatures, of whom I have read in the Norse Sagas, who could only be slain by some particular hero armed ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... to these Northern Isles of the Sea in 1859, sailing from Aberdeen in a once-a-week steamer; some of our passengers were notable, as Dasent of the Norse Tales (since Sir George) and his sons, Day the Oxonian in Norway, Ellicott, now Bishop of Bristol, Biot Edmondstone, and some others, inclusive of our noble selves. It was a dark night and a dense fog, and we had perilously to thread our careful way through the herring-fleet, fog-horns ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... aspect singularly ripe and mellow. No fire had consumed and no lumberman plundered. Every trunk and limb and leaf lay where it had fallen. At every step the foot sank into the moss, which, like a soft green snow, covered everything, making every stone a cushion and every rock a bed,—a grand old Norse parlor; adorned beyond art ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... to a certain callousness with regard to human life, and to a certain enjoyment in inflicting physical anguish. There was an element of Red Indian ruthlessness in the Viking, which looms large in the story of the years of Norse ascendancy over Western Europe. Yet there was also a power of bold and daring action, of reckless valour, of rapid conception and execution, which contrasted strongly with the slower and more placid temperament of the Anglo-Saxon, and to this Danish strain modern Englishmen probably ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... the rest of Europe, it was his policy to draw to St. Petersburg—the city of his own creation—leaders of thought from every capital in Europe. And as his aim was to establish a navy, he especially endeavored to attract foreign navigators to his kingdom. Among these were many Norse and Danes. The acquaintance may have dated from the apprenticeship on the docks of the East India Company; but at any rate, among the foreign navigators was one Vitus Ivanovich Bering, a Dane of humble origin from Horsens,[4] who ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... coat-of-arms); Chisholm is English and means "gravel-holm,"—the Anglo-Saxon ceosol (pebble) is preserved in Chesil Beach and Chiselhurst; MacLeod signifies "son of Ljot"; and ljotr is the Norse word for "ugly." Campbell is probably Norman-French, though Dr. Macbain suggests cam-beul, Gaelic for "crooked mouth." In olden times an external conqueror would sometimes subdue a district, and call the natives ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... into the Scandinavian countries, and the Norse Sea-kings. This Markgraviate did not last long under that title. I guess, it, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... became convinced that her boys were to become world famous. They came of very good stock, and the family traced their ancestry back to the great Leif Ericsson, son of Eric the Red, who had been the Norse discoverer of America. ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... Medival History, pp. 34-39. The Northmen extended their expeditions to Spain, Italy, and even into Russia. In England, under the name of Danes, we find them forcing Alfred the Great to recognize them as the masters of northern England (878). The Norse pirates were often called vikings, from their habit of leaving their long boats in the vik, i.e., bay or inlet. A goodly number of the Northmen settled in Iceland, and our knowledge of their civilization and customs ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... was an old Norse god," muttered Captain Jack. "And the early Norsemen were very largely pirates. Perhaps we are to take the signal on the 'Thor' as an intimation that Rhinds is out to play pirate ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... it, and he was confident that within the next half hour he could force matters to an issue. The scout was of the opinion that a couple of Apaches had accidently struck his trail, or happened directly upon his norse while he was grazing, and, without suspecting his ownership, aad taken him away. The trail led toward the Apache camp, although by a winding course, and that was not far away. He was desirous of coming ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... of this race I will not here speak at any length: only note of it this essential point, that their religion was at once more practical and more imaginative than that of the Norwegian peninsula; the Norse religion being the conception rather of natural than moral powers, but the Saxon, primarily of moral, as the lords of natural—their central divine image, Irminsul,[10] holding the standard of peace in her ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... pendulum-like brooms, and working their way aft in a regular, serried rank. The phalanx moved with an even stroke, and each bare foot advanced just so many inches at every third sweep of the broom, while the yellow-haired Norse 'prentice played the hose in front of them. Mr. Barker perceived that they would overtake him before long, and he determined on flight, not forward or aft, but aloft; and he leisurely lifted himself into the main-shrouds, and climbing half-way, hooked his feet through the ratlines. In this position ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... on which stood an oak rocking-chair. The floor was a friendly chequer of red and black tiles. On the high mantelpiece were canisters and an alarm-clock and utensils; sundry other utensils hung on the walls, among the coloured images of sweet girls and Norse-like men offered by grocers and butchers under the guise of almanacs; and cupboard doors ajar dimly disclosed other utensils still, so that the kitchen had the effect of a novel, comfortable kind of workshop; which effect was helped ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... 500,000 sq. miles in area)—for the whole interior of Greenland rises abruptly from the sea-coast to altitudes of from 5000 to 11,000 ft.—this discovery was of small use to the early Norwegians or their Iceland colony. After it was governed by the kingdom of Norway in the thirteenth century, the Norse colonization of south-west Greenland faded away under the attacks of the Eskimo, until it ceased completely in the fifteenth century. When Denmark united herself with the kingdom of Norway in 1397, the Danish king became also the ruler of Iceland. In the eighteenth century the Norwegian and Danish ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... in his person a transitional time, the old Norse world, mingling strangely in him with the new. He was the last outcome of his race. Norse daring and cruelty were side by side with gentleness and aspiration. No human pity tempered his vengeance. ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... York City, of Norse descent; parents Wisconsin pioneers; studied art in Boston; became ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... and Denmark, has succeeded admirably in reproducing its national spirit in its pavilion. The building is a long story-and-a-half structure, in the ancient Norse style, dominated by a beautiful tower on which is emblazoned the Norwegian coat-of-arms. The lower floor contains three large dioramas of characteristic Norwegian scenery, and an exhibit hall wherein are shown products of the industries of Norway, especially her great ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... masterful a fashion by one who is not first of all a philologist excites our wonder and admiration. And let us not forget that it was above all else a labor of love, such as probably never was undertaken elsewhere, unless the work of Ivar Aasen in the Old Norse dialects be counted as such; and there is something that appeals strongly to the imagination in the thought of this poet's labor to render imperishable the language so dear to him. Years were spent in journeying about ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... leaning over the bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe. lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked. In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... it does, Jasper; it means fun, ridicule, jest; it is an ancient Norse word, and is found ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... such,—for any good matter is American enough for a truly American poet; but we cannot help thinking that Mr. Longfellow has sometimes mistaken mere strangeness for freshness, and has failed to make his readers feel the charm he himself felt. Put into English, the Saga seems too Norse; and there is often a hitchiness in the verse that suggests translation with overmuch heed for literal closeness. It is possible to assume alien forms of verse, but hardly to enter into forms of thought ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... sight, their dusty and sweaty shirts grew biting as the poisoned shirt of the Norse myth, their bare feet in the brown dirt grew distressingly flat and hoof-like, and their huge, dirty, brown, chapped, and swollen hands grew so repulsive that the mere remote possibility of some time ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... come first. They cluster and dance everywhere upon the bare boughs above the watercourses; the blackness of the buds is softened into rich brown and yellow; and as this graceful creature thus comes waving into the spring, it is pleasant to remember that the Norse Eddas fabled the first woman to have been named Embla, because she was created ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... a fairy, from the Anglo-Saxon, refers especially to tiny sprites, fond of mischief and tricks. But there were various kinds of elves, according to the Norse mythology. Consult Gayley's "Classic Myths." Explain ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... [Holberg's Danemarkische Reichs-Historie, pp. 406-409.]—to the wonder of all mankind. An imperious, stern-browed, swift-striking man; who had dreamed of a new Goth Empire: The mean Hypocrites and Fribbles of the South to be coerced again by noble Norse valor, and taught a new lesson. Has been known to lay his hand on his sword while apprising an Ambassador (Dutch High-Mightiness) what his royal intentions were: "Not the sale or purchase of groceries, observe you, Sir! My aims go higher!"—Charles ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... Wreck of the Hesperus we have a miniature nautical epic, in the Skeleton in Armor our only epic relating to the Norse discovery, in the Golden Legend, and in many of the Tales of a Wayside Inn, happy adaptations ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... follow the polar star To the seat of the old Norse Kings, Past the death-white halls of Valhalla, Where the Norn to the tempest sings— Follow the steady needle That cleaves to its steady star To the uttermost realms of Odin ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... most beautiful expression in drama of that Irish fantasy, which overflowing through all Irish Literature that has come out of Ireland itself (compare the fantastic Irish account of the Battle of Clontarf with the sober Norse account) is the unbroken character of Irish genius. In modern days this genius has delighted in mischievous extravagance, like that of the Gaelic poet's curse upon his children, 'There are three things that I hate, the devil that is waiting ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... to the elucidation of the Icelandic Sagas, or vague accounts of voyages which Bjorne Heriulfson and Lief Ericsson, sons of the first Norse settlers of Greenland, are supposed to have made at the end of the tenth century, to the eastern parts of what is now British North America, and, in the opinion of some writers, even as far as the shores of New England. It is just possible that such voyages were made, and that Norsemen ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... forth, Arne Fern, as he was called (his Norse name having simply been translated into English), was a man of distinction. After the death of his father-in-law, in 1859, he sold his Louisiana property and emigrated with his wife and three children to San Francisco, where by successful real-estate investments he greatly increased ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... north coast of Scandinavia. This appears the less improbable, as a walrus now and then even in our days drifts to land on the Norwegian coast, and walruses are still annually killed off Swjatoinos on the Kola peninsula,[80] The walrus is very correctly described in the well-known Norse confession written in the end of the eleventh century, "Konungs skuggsja" (the King's Mirror), as an animal resembling the seal,[81] except that, besides several smaller teeth, it has two large tusks which project beyond the upper jaw. This clear ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... romantic school, like the English, but more learnedly and systematically, sought to reinforce its native stock of materials by motifs drawn from foreign literatures, and particularly from Norse mythology and from Spanish romance. Percy's translation of Malet: Gray's versions from the Welsh and the Scandinavian: Southey's "Chronicles of the Cid" and Lockhart's translations of the Spanish ballads are paralleled in Germany by William Schlegel's, and Uhland's, and others' studies in ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... might; but by Englishmen of recent generations, and not by Danish immigrants of the ninth century. To balance the anomaly of what certainly wears a faint soupcon of anachronism—namely, the apparent anticipation of the modern Norse word field, Mr. Ferguson's conjecture would take a headlong plunge into good classical English. Now of this there is no other instance. Even the little swells of ground, that hardly rise to the dignity of hills, which might be expected ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... least, I—had read about the competitions at Holmen Kollen, near Christiania, when the Norsemen have their annual fling for the great "ski-hop." Reading of this had caused me to have a great ambition to be able to shoot hills and precipices upon snowshoes as the Norse fellows do, and I persuaded Billy to be ambitious also, and to practise the things with me near St. Petersburg, where they use the same kind of ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... aloof on a pair of horizontal bars, swinging his legs with agitated quickness, while the others covertly watched him—slim, wire-drawn, his china-blue eyes blurred with fury, his fair Norse skin glowing dull red, his chest strong under his tight ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... the sea seemed to cling about him as he swung down the narrow trail in advance of the dogs; and he brought the butt of his dog whip against Malemute Kid's door as a Norse sea rover, on southern foray, might thunder for admittance at the ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... of those who have done most, by untiring, laborious search among old parish registers, etc., and dusty old records, to bring to light interesting social ordinances, details of ancient parish government, and gems of Norse literature and archaeological research, there have been none in the last century who have by patient work attained more knowledge of their country's inner history ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... Stuart i Skotland' (1864), chronologically interjected among the saga-plays, and dealing with the more definite history of the hapless Queen of Scots in much of the saga-spirit. Bjoernson felt that the Scots had inherited no little of the Norse blood and temper, and believed that the psychology of his saga-heroes was adequate to account for the group of men whose fortunes were bound up with those of Mary Stuart in Scotland. He finds his key to the problem of her career in the fact that she was by nature incapable ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... "Tales of Youth," are old Welsh romances similar to the Norse Sagas, which are supposed by critics to date from a very rude ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... goodly knight who goes out into the forest to seek adventures, or "see wonders." He finds a party of maidens engaged in a bewildering dance, and tarries to enjoy the spectacle. Frau Frene, or, as we would write it now, Freya (the Norse Venus whose memory we perpetuate in our Friday), seeks to persuade him to remain with her, promising to give him her youngest daughter to wife. The knight remains, but will not mate with the maiden, for he ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... had the tales of the ingenious Mr. Edgar Poe and of Charlotte Bronte "put into my hands" by a cousin who had served as a Bashi Bazouk, and knew not the meaning of fear. But I DID, and perhaps even Nelson would have found out "what fear was," or the boy in the Norse tale would have "learned to shiver," if he had been left alone to peruse 'Jane Eyre,' and the 'Black Cat,' and the 'Fall of the House of Usher,' as I was. Every night I expected to wake up in my coffin, having been prematurely buried; or to hear sighs in the area, ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... of the now rare opportunity of pleasing him. Farraday had brought her some Norse ballads not long before; their sad elfin cadences had charmed her. She sang these now, touching the piano lightly for fear of waking the sleeping baby overhead. Turning to Stefan at the end, she found him sound asleep, one arm drooping over the sofa, the nervous ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... "averia lanata" likewise. Similar apparently whimsical adaptations of words will not shock those who are aware that "pig" in England properly means a little fellow of the swine species, and that "pige" in Norse signifies a little ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... wore such robes and ornaments as these? And that sword hilt, worn smooth by handling and with an amber knob? Whence came it? To my mind—this was before expert examination confirmed my view—it looked very Norse. I had read the Sagas and I remembered a tale recovered in them of some bold Norsemen who about the years eight or nine hundred had wandered to the coast of what is known now to be America—I think a certain Eric was their captain. Could the fair-haired man in ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... as we please of these Beggars of the Ocean, these Norse corsairs come to life again with the flavour of Genevan theology in them; but for daring, for ingenuity, for obstinate determination to be spiritually free or to die for it, the like of the Protestant privateers of the ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... the Norse proverb, "without brother behind it"; and this is, by analogy, true of an elective magistracy. The hereditary ruler in any critical emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible resources of prestige, of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent interest, while the new ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... legends of the Icelandic and Scandinavian poets are here recounted in a cohesive and lucid style suitable for boys and girls, thus in an easy way introducing the famous and fantastic heroes and heroines of Norse Mythology. The beautiful colour pictures, with the black and white drawings, are full of poetry and interest. Printed on rough art paper. 12 full-page colour plates. 144 ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... When Norse and Danish galleys plied Their oars within the Firth of Clyde, When floated Haco's banner trim Above Norwegian warriors grim, Savage of heart and ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... the gods that they come in low disguises. 'T is the vulgar great who come dizened with gold and jewels. Real kings hide away their crowns in their wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor exterior. In the Norse legend of our ancestors, Odin dwells in a fisher's hut, and patches a boat. In the Hindoo legends, Hari dwells a peasant among peasants. In the Greek legend, Apollo lodges with the shepherds of Admetus; and Jove liked to rusticate among ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... looking into it." For some years the elf's injunction was observed; but one day, in a fit of curiosity, the peasant looked into the bottom of the flask, and there sat a horrid toad! The toad disappeared, and so did the liquor; and the man in a short time fell miserably sick. In a Norse tale, a man whose bride is about to be carried off by Huldre-folk, rescues her by shooting over her head a pistol loaded with a silver bullet. This has the effect of dissolving the witchery; and he is forthwith enabled to seize her and gallop off, not unpursued. ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... 296. 335.).—This noble monument of Old Norse literature was written at the close of the twelfth century by a Norwegian of high rank, but who expresses his resolution to remain unknown, in which he has perfectly succeeded. He probably resided near Trondhjem. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 56, November 23, 1850 • Various
... which forbids alike the keen winter frosts, and the fierce thunder heats of the midland; and pleasantly it has stood there for now, perhaps, eight hundred years since the first Grenville, cousin of the Conqueror, returning from the conquest of South Wales, drew round him trusty Saxon serfs, and free Norse rovers with their golden curls, and dark Silurian Britons from the Swansea shore, and all the mingled blood which still gives to the seaward folk of the next county their strength and intellect, and, even in these levelling days, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... the bullet head; the points of that Norse rover's moustache, falling below the line of the heavy jaw; the whole full and pale physiognomy, whose determined character was marred by too much flesh; at the cunning wrinkles radiating from the outer corners of the eyes—and in that purposeful contemplation of the valuable and trusted officer ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... youth with English songs, and most probably knew the old Norse sagas; but he had to learn Latin in his later life. We must remember that most of the literature which Alfred could get at was locked up in Latin; even the invaluable Church History of St Bede needed a translator's key; and it was Alfred who first ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... though the place was damp, and they had a fire. Still, until you are used to it, it is trying to sit in the company of a score of black people and of many thousand fleas, enveloped with a cloud of pungent smoke, according to the custom of our Norse ancestors. ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... touch with the parent stock. The change of blood was probably as great in one case as in the other. The modern Englishman is descended from a Low-Dutch stock, which, when it went to Britain, received into itself an enormous infusion of Celtic, a much smaller infusion of Norse and Danish, and also a certain infusion of Norman-French blood. When this new English stock came to America it mingled with and absorbed into itself immigrants from many European lands, and the process has gone on ever since. It is to ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the contrast between the conventional and the natural motives in behavior. In Greek mythology, individual traits of human nature are abstracted, idealized, and personified into gods. The heroes of Norse sagas and Teutonic legends are the gigantic symbols of primary emotions and sentiments. Historical characters live in the social memory not alone because they are identified with political, religious, or national movements but also because ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of Gottfried von Strassburg, composed about 1210-20. 2. An old-Norse translation made in 1226 by command of King Hakon. 3. A Middle-English poem of the thirteenth century preserved in the so-called Auchinleck MS. of the library of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, and familiar to English readers from the edition ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... feelings but his pride; for was he not a lineal descendant of that Fergus McKay who had been a chief in one of the Western Isles of Scotland—he could not tell which, but no matter—at that celebrated period of Scottish history when the great Norse king, Harold Fairhair, had made a descent on the Scottish coast and received one of the few thorough thrashings that ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... undisturbed and isolated as Finland, fantastic mythology took firm root, and we certainly find the most romantic and weird verses in connection with the chief heroes of the Kalevala, namely, Winminen and Ilmarinen, who broadly resemble the Norse demigods Odin ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... the stars—the spirits fairy—walked the welkin one by one. Swift and silent in the gloaming on the waste of waters blue, Speeding downward to the foaming, shot Wanata's birch canoe, In it stood Anpetu-sapa—in her arms her sleeping child; Like a wailing Norse-land drapa [c] rose her death-song weird ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... and of the three most popular (Erec, Yvain and Perceval) there exist old Norse translations, while the two first were admirably rendered into German by Hartmann von Aue. There is an English translation of the Yvain, Ywain and Gawain, and there are Welsh versions of all three stories, though their exact relation to the French has ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Mr. MAURICE HEWLETT would consult a good man about the Saga habit, which appears to be growing upon him, to the loss (or so I think) of all those who were lovers of his more human and companionable fiction. But I repeat that this is no more than individual prejudice, based on the fact that these Norse chronicles (of unpronounceable people in prehistoric times) leave me singularly cold. This apart, however, The Light Heart (CHAPMAN AND HALL) may be admitted an excellent sample of its kind. It is all about the friendship of Thorgar and Thormod, with the former's untimely death, and the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... a wonderfully meaningless sensation to know nobody and to discover myself equally unknown amid that matchless companionship. We were like a mixed bunch of gods, Greek, Norse, Hindu, Hottentot—all gathered on Olympus, having never heard of each other but taking it for granted that we were all gods together and all members ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... shorter text, which is admirably suited for the purposes of this book. The story of Auðun is not only a beautiful one in itself, but, together with the preceding piece, gives a vivid idea of the Norse ideal of the kingly character, which was the foundation of their whole political system. As the Reader does not include poetry (except incidentally), I have added one of the finest of the Eddaic poems, which is at the same time freest from obscurity and ...
— An Icelandic Primer - With Grammar, Notes, and Glossary • Henry Sweet
... goat's-hair wig: wig blazes into flame; Gundling falls shrieking, a dead man, to the earth; and they quench and revive him with a bucket of water. Was there ever seen such horse-play? Roaring laughter, huge, rude, and somewhat vacant, as that of the Norse gods over their ale at Yule time;—as if the face of the Sphinx were to wrinkle itself in laughter; or the fabulous Houyhnhnms themselves were there to mock in ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... by practice one of those pirates who called themselves friends to the sea and enemies to all who sailed upon that element. He attacked and plundered vessels of all nations, like one of the ancient Norse sea kings, as they were termed, whose dominion was upon the mountain waves. The master added that no vessel could escape the rover by flight, so speedy was the bark he commanded; and that no crew, however hardy, could hope to resist him, when, as was ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... not appear an unsearchable armoury of spears or as walls of protective flames, temporarily frozen black so that people should be able to enter and leave their house. Every child knows that the old Norse story of a sleeping Brunnhilde encircled by flames is true; to him or her, there is a Brunnhilde in every street, and the child knows that there it always has a chance of being the chosen Siegfried. But because this view of life is so much cosier than that of the grown-ups, ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... some of the old Norse stories of the first finding of America. The country which Leif called Helluland was most likely Labrador, Markland ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... of Norse blood and certain traditions anent "usquebae" and "barley bree" it would—with so large a liberty—be naturally expected, a liberal proportion of drouthy souls, but with an abundance of what cheers and distinctly inebriates in their midst they were a temperate people in its best sense, with no ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... as they had been discovered, had been named from Norse mythology—Odin and Baldur and Thor, Uller and Freya, Bifrost and Asgard and Niflheim. When the Norse names ran out, the discoverers had turned to other mythologies, Celtic and Egyptian and Hindu and Assyrian, and by the middle ...
— Graveyard of Dreams • Henry Beam Piper
... that the earliest adventurers in America were men of Norse stock. More than a thousand years ago Greenland was explored by Vikings from Iceland, and a hundred years later Leif Ericsson discovered a land—Markland, the land of woods—which is plausibly identified with Newfoundland. Still keeping a southern ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... beaten down, but their leader desperately defended the ladder leading to the poop. He was struck by two arrows, and fell on one knee, and Edmund was about to climb the ladder when the door of the cabin in the poop opened, and a Norse maiden some sixteen years old sprang out. Seeing her father wounded at the top of the ladder and the Saxons preparing to ascend it, while others turned their bows against the wounded Northman, she sprang forward and throwing herself upon her knees ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... the fishing. If we were tired of driving, we took to the water, and travelled by steamer along a fjord, or hired a rowboat to cross from point to point. One day we would be in a good little hotel, with polyglot guests, and serving-maids in stagey Norse costumes,—like the famous inn at Stalheim, which commands the amazing panorama of the Naerodal. Another day we would lodge in a plain farmhouse like the station at Nedre Vasenden, where eggs and fish were the staples of diet, and the farmer's daughter wore the ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... What can be more interesting than a study of these characters from the borderland of history? These great figures come forth from the shadows of the past and move before us like living men: Beowulf, the Saxon; Frithiof, the Norse hero; Siegfried, the German; Roland, the French knight; The Cid, Spain's greatest warrior and gentleman; Hector and Ulysses, the Greeks; King Arthur and his knights from England; Horatius, the Roman, and Sohrab, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... bearing no real relation to his desire for reading matter, it gradually acquired a certain homogeneity reflecting the boy's state of mind. Books of travel and adventure continued to prevail for a long while. Equally favoured were stories dealing with Norse Mythology and the heroic legends of his race. The grim record of the Niebelungs was familiar to him at the age of eight, and the first heroes of his worship were young Siegfried of divine aspect and Dietrich of Bern, who seemed to the boy the final embodiment of worldly wisdom. To ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... the deck. I have spoken of our concerts. We were indeed a musical ship's company, and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the accordion, and the songs of all nations. Good, bad, or indifferent—Scottish, English, Irish, Russian, German or Norse,— the songs were received with generous applause. Once or twice, a recitation, very spiritedly rendered in a powerful Scottish accent, varied the proceedings; and once we sought in vain to dance a quadrille, ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hopeful mood. It is, rather, a protest against that optimism which in fiction we call poetic justice. The harsh and unsentimental logic of reality is emphasized with a ruthless disregard of rose-colored traditions. The peasant lad Wold, who, like all Norse peasants, has been brought up on the Bible, has become deeply impressed with the story of Jacob, and God's persistent partisanship for him, in spite of his dishonesty and tricky behavior. The story becomes, half unconsciously, ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... Island, where their fate met them at last, as Deirdre had prophesied. It is a sad story, and we can easily weep at the thrilling moment when, there being no man among the Ultonians to do the king's bidding, a Norse captive takes Naisi's magic sword and strikes off the heads of the three sons of Usnach with one swift blow, and Deirdre, falling prone upon the dead bodies, chants a lament; and when she has finished singing, ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of the Heodenings (i.e., of the court of Heoden) is mentioned in Deor's Lament, vv. 36 and 39. Wada is a widely-known legendary character. He had power over the sea. He was the father of Weland, the Vulcan of Norse myth (see Deor's Lament, and Waldhere, A, v. 2). The Holm-Rugians and the Haelsings were in the fourth century on the Baltic coast of Germany. The Glommas ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, between Charles the Simple and Rollo, the chief of the Norse barbarians, gives Rollo's name followed by all his titles, among which we read that of Master of the ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... think we parted only to dream of the literature which we poured out upon each other in every waking moment. I had just learned to know Bjornson's stories, and Boyesen told me of his poetry and of his drama, which in even measure embodied the great Norse literary movement, and filled me with the wonder and delight of that noble revolt against convention, that brave return to nature and the springs of poetry in the heart and the speech of the common people. Literature was Boyesen's religion more than ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... consecrated, was partaken of as a sacrament. An oak was the sacred tree of the ancient Druids of Britain. We inherit their custom of gathering the sacred mistletoe at Yule-tide, while in our Christmas Tree we have a remnant of the old Norse tree-worship. During the Middle Ages the worship of trees was forbidden in France by the ecclesiastical councils, and in England by the laws of Canute. A learned antiquary remarks that "the English maypole decked with colored ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... days in cutting one another to pieces, and were healed of their wounds in the evening that they might join in the nightly feast, and be able to fight again on the morrow. He that died in bed was condemned to a chilly and dreary existence in the abode of the goddess Hela, whose name is the Norse equivalent of Hell. ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... part of the field, in another, stout Ole Thorwald, with several of the white settlers and the greater part of the native force, was guarding the principal approach to the church against immensely superior numbers. And nobly did the descendant of the Norse sea-kings maintain the credit of his warlike ancestors that day. With a sword that might have matched that of Goliath of Gath, he swept the way before him wherever he went, and more than once by a furious onset turned the tide of war in ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... place-names predominate. A distinguished Celtic scholar tells us: "In all our ancient literature, the inhabitants of ancient Lothian are known as Saix-Brit, i.e. Saxo-Britons, because they were a Cymric people, governed by the Saxons of Northumbria".[31] A further non-Celtic influence was that of the Norse invaders, who attacked the country from the ninth to the eighteenth century, and profoundly modified the racial character of the population on the south and west coasts, in the islands, and along the east coast as far ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... fair young Olaf came of hardy Norse stock. His father, Harald Graenske, or "Gray-mantle," one of the tributary kings of Norway, had fallen a victim to the tortures of the haughty Swedish queen; and now his son, a boy of scarce thirteen, but a warrior already by training and from desire, came to avenge his father's death. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... I enumerate the parts of a norse in language so simple any bloomin' fool can understand. This'll be useful to you, for if you ever 'ave a norse to deal with and he loses one of 'is parts you'll know 'ow to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... saluted him with a surly nod, and he answered with such smooth words as the thrifty old Norse proverbs advise every ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... of wireless was proclaimed to those who cared to listen, and on it all formed their own judgments. In the same way poems and even romances were repeated, as in Homer's day or in the time of the Norse sagas, by word of mouth. None of their secret knowledge was written down. Like the ritual of Freemasonry it ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... those positions it cannot be harmed by what happens to the body, which is therefore deathless for the time. But if the external seat of the soul be attacked or destroyed, the man immediately dies. This is illustrated from the Norse, Saxons, Celts, Italians, Greeks, Kabyles, Arabs, Hindus, Malays, Mongolians, Tartars, Magyars, and Slavonians. It may well, then, be considered as a piece of inherent psychology: and following this interpretation, ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... or barrow that rose out of a flat field not far from the vicarage windows. Dr. Baker grasped his whiskers, threw the young man a queer glance, and replied. Thenceforward he and Robert kept up a lively antiquarian talk on the traces of Norse settlement in the Cumbrian valleys, which lasted till the ladies left ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to him two officers serving in the army, one a Swede and the other a Norwegian. Immediately he repeated, to their delight, a poem of some eight or ten verses descriptive of Scandinavian scenery, and an old Norse legend. He said he had read the poem in a newspaper some years before, and liked it, but it had passed out of his memory until their visit had recalled it. The two books which he read most were the Bible and Shakespeare. With ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... had, but women were so cursedly unaccountable. Supposing she should take it into her head to accept him! No logic could take account of a woman's whimsies. Then what a pretty fix he would have got himself into, just by a foolhardy freak! But there was a strain of Norse blood in Hunt, and in spite of occasional touches of ague, the risk of the scheme had in itself a certain fascination for him. And yet he could n't help wishing he had carried out a dozen desperate devices for disgusting her with him, which at the time had seemed ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... passion for classic treatment, and his ornament, which gave a distinct cachet to Punch up to 1878, was not founded on a mere grotesque treatment of classical subjects, but was the fruit of a close study of and easy familiarity with heathen mythology, classical, Egyptian, and, in particular, Norse. The fun was not particularly broad, but Tom Taylor was especially tickled by his attempts to find amusement in the extraordinary head-dresses worn by ladies of Ancient Egypt—such as that in the cut (July 11th, 1874) learnedly ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... zenith Sir James Mackintosh, Mrs. Barbauld, Crabb Robinson, the solemn Dr. John Alderson, Amelia Opie, Henry Reeve of Edinburgh fame, Basil Montagu, the Sewards, the Quaker Gurneys of Earlham, and Dr. Frank Sayers, whom the German critics compared to Gray, who had handled the Norse mythology in poetry, to which Borrow was introduced by Sayer's private biographer, the eminent and aforesaid William Taylor" [no relation of the "Taylors of Norwich"] "whose 'Jail-delivery of German Studies' the jealous Thomas Carlyle stigmatized in 1830 ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... in knowledge human and divine. Two generations after, Mr. Carlyle, during a visit to the late Lord Ashburton at the Grange, caught sight of Macaulay's face in unwonted repose, as he was turning over the pages of a book. "I noticed," said he, "the homely Norse features that you find everywhere in the Western Isles, and I thought to myself 'Well! Anyone can see that you are an honest good sort of fellow, made ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... latter case the islands are far apart, it is harder to cross the water from Norway and the Lofoten Islands to Iceland and Greenland than it is to cross from Asia by way of the Aleutian Islands or Bering Strait. Nevertheless in the tenth century of the Christian era bold Norse vikings made the passage in the face of storm and wind. In their slender open ships they braved the elements on voyage after voyage. We think of the vikings as pirates, and so they were. But they were also diligent colonists who tilled the ground wherever it would yield even the scantiest living. ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... mythology, and in the Oriental literature is treated as a sacred animal. "The clouds are cows and the rain milk." I remember what Herodotus says of the Egyptians' worship of heifers and steers; and in the traditions of the Celtic nations the cow is regarded as a divinity. In Norse mythology the milk of the cow Andhumbla afforded nourishment to the Frost giants, and it was she that licked into being and into shape a god, the father of Odin. If anything could lick a god into shape, certainly the cow could do it. You may see her perform this office for young ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... him; he saw the handsome women in brilliant costumes laughing and chatting gayly; the apathetic policemen promenading in stoic dignity up and down upon the smooth pavements; the jauntily attired nurses, whom in his Norse innocence he took for mothers or aunts of the children, wheeling baby-carriages which to Norse eyes seemed miracles of dainty ingenuity, under the shady crowns of the elm-trees. He did not know how long ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Haxey junction; and the Great Northern, Great Eastern and Great Central lines also afford communications. The land is extremely fertile. The name, properly Axeyholm (cf. Haxey), is hybrid, Ax being the Celtic uisg, water; ey the Anglo-Saxon for island; and holm the Norse word ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... children Greek cycle stories Norse cycle stories King Arthur tales Charlemagne and Roland legends Chivalry tales Stories from Chaucer Stories from the Faerie Queene Irish hero tales Stories from Shakespeare Stories from the Old Testament ...
— Lists of Stories and Programs for Story Hours • Various
... whom they thus sought to propitiate. We hang up our bunches of mistletoe now, but we do not attach any superstitious importance to it, nor imagine that any gods of the woods will be influenced by our procedure. The bringing in of the Yule-log was a Norse custom observed in honour of Thor, from whose name we derive our word Thursday or Thor's-day. The mighty log was drawn into the baronial hall with great pomp, while the bards sang their songs of praise ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... Table (Riesener) The "Marie Antoinette" Writing Table Bedstead of Marie Antoinette A Cylinder Secretaire (Rothschild Collection) An Arm Chair (Louis XVI.) Carved and Gilt Settee and Arm Chair A Sofa En Suite A Marqueterie Escritoire (Jones Collection) A Norse Interior, Shewing French Influence A Secretaire with Sevres Plaques A Clock by Robin (Jones Collection) Harpsichord, About ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... then the blue-eyed Norseman told A Saga of the days of old. "There is," said he, "a wondrous book Of Legends in the old Norse tongue, Of the dead kings of Norroway,— Legends that once were told or sung In many a smoky fireside nook Of Iceland, in the ancient day, By wandering Saga-man or Scald; Heimskringla is the volume ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... modern maps, and then the Icelandic names are put on where Rafn thought they ought to go, i. e. Markland upon Nova Scotia, Vinland upon New England, etc. Any person using such a map is liable to forget that it cannot possibly represent the crude notions of locality to which the reports of the Norse voyages must have given rise in an ignorant age. (The reader will find the map reproduced in Winsor, Narr. and Crit. Hist., i. 95.) Rafn's fault was, however, no greater than that committed by the modern makers of so-called "ancient atlases"—still current and in use in schools—when, ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... though not extremely good. Its subject is connected with that of Gray's Descent of Odin, but handled much more fully, and in blank-verse narrative instead of ballad form. The story, like most of those in Norse mythology, has great capabilities; but it may be questioned whether the Greek-Miltonic chastened style which the poet affects is well calculated to bring them out. The death of Nanna, and the blind fratricide Hoder, are ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... supposed in the germs of civilization,—a remark which may in all likelihood be extended to the background of history in general. Nothing surely can be more grotesque than the idea of a set of wolves, like the Norse pirates before their conversion to Christianity, constructing in their den ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... part and interest of Brynhild, he has lifted Kriemhild to a higher, a more thoroughly expounded, and a more poetical position, and has made her one of the greatest heroines of epic, if not the greatest in all literature. The Gudrun of the Norse story is found supplying the loss of one husband with the gain of another to an extent perfectly consonant with Icelandic ideas, but according to less insular standards distinctly damaging to her interest as a heroine; and in revenging her brothers on Atli, after revenging Sigurd on her brothers ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... had twelve primal gods, "the Aditya." Moses erected twelve pillars at Sinai. The Mandan Indians celebrated the Flood with twelve typical characters, who danced around the ark. The Scandinavians believed in the twelve gods, the Aesir, who dwelt on Asgard, the Norse Olympus. Diligent investigation may yet reveal that the number of a modern jury, twelve, is a survival of the ancient council ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... things that the Ministry of Transport has, so to say, up its sleeve, and is alone a sufficient answer to those who suggest that this Ministry has outlived its hour. There is a grim Norse spirit amongst its officials, inspired perhaps by their chieftain's name, and already the plans for a first-class Pullman galley are under way. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... so long as you surrender to them simply without any admixture of interested motive.—But there were men of a more worldly type who only played the game of set purpose: the popular movement was to them only a road to success. Like the Norse pirates, they made rise of the rising tide to carry their ships up into the land: they aimed at reaching the innermost point of the great estuaries so as to be left snugly ensconced in the conquered cities when the sea fell back once more. The channel was narrow and the tide was capricious: ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... battle flag, the Raven Standard, was unfurled, and floated freely over the host. The War-arrow had been industriously sent round to all the neighbouring shores, peopled largely at that time with men of Norse blood. As the fleet swept south it had gathered in contingents from every island along the Scotch coast, upon which Viking settlements had been established. Manx men, too, and men from the Scandinavian settlements of Angelsea, Danes under Carle Canuteson, representatives, in fact, of all the old ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... of large low-ceiled rooms, with big stoves that would need a deal of firewood in winter. The furniture was a mixture of every possible sort and style: a mahogany sofa, cupboards with painted roses on the panels, chairs covered with "Old Norse" carving, and on the walls appalling pictures of foreign royal families and of the Crucifixion. "Good Heavens!" said Merle, as they went round the rooms alone: "how shall we ever get used ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... Grim seemed born again in his son Egil. A man of great size, swarthy face, harsh of aspect, and of fierce temper, in him was the old, tameless spirit of the Norse sea-kings, turbulent, passionate, owning no man master, he bent his strong soul to no man's rule. Rash and adventurous, he had a long and stormy career, while nature had endowed him with a rich gift of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... Glasgow; Corresponding Member Davenport Academy of Sciences, and Western Reserve Historical Society; Author of History of Clan MacLean, Antiquity of Man, The Mound Builders, Mastodon, Mammoth and Man, Norse Discovery of America, Fingal's Cave, Introduction Study St. John's ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... in a loud voice to say a paternoster, not in Norse but in Latin, as had been the use of the country before his time. And as he uttered each word of the prayer he pointed with his finger at one of those who sat with him at the table. He went through them all in this way many times, until he came to Amen. And as he spoke this word ...
— The Treasure • Selma Lagerlof
... and a slender hand-rail. Here the bottom of the cave seemed to have dropped out, and the roof to have gone in search of it; and but for the dim glimpse of the rock on the other side one might have suspected that this bridge would launch him into that ungeographical locality called, in the old Norse mythology, "Ginnunga Gap,"—a place where there was neither side, edge, nor bottom ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... show a decided trend to Central Germanic cohesion. The whole of Europe is roughly divided into three dominant races—the Teutonic, the Latin and the Slavish. The Teutonic has Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and Norse subdivisions. The Latin, Gallic, has the French, Italian and Spanish nations; and the Slavonic comprises the Slavs and Romanic races with their innumerable subdivisions such as Moscovite, Chech, Pole, Croat, Serb, Bulgar, Bojar, etc. These three groups are distinctly different in habits, thoughts, ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... which saved labour. They had no journals, since news which arrived telepathically or by some form of wireless was proclaimed to those who cared to listen, and on it all formed their own judgments. In the same way poems and even romances were repeated, as in Homer's day or in the time of the Norse sagas, by word of mouth. None of their secret knowledge was written down. Like the ritual of Freemasonry it ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... Conqueror. The Crusades were still undreamed of. Art, science, letters, were in custody in the East. These armed children ran riot,—passionate, intense, uncontrolled, loving fight and finery as the Trojans, or the Norse heroes of ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... piratical life. These villains had at that time been about six months on their cruise. They had made the entire circuit of Borneo, murdering, and plundering, and striking terror and desolation wherever they went. The scenes enacted by Norse pirates in the tenth century were repeated in the middle of the nineteenth by a people who, unlike the Norsemen, had no regard whatever for law; and now they were returning home ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... the Scandinavian countries, and the Norse Sea-kings. This Markgraviate did not last long under that title. I ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... their dusty and sweaty shirts grew biting as the poisoned shirt of the Norse myth, their bare feet in the brown dirt grew distressingly flat and hoof-like, and their huge, dirty, brown, chapped, and swollen hands grew so repulsive that the mere remote possibility of some time in the far future "standing a chance" of having an introduction to her, caused them to wipe them ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, between Charles the Simple and Rollo, the chief of the Norse barbarians, gives Rollo's name followed by all his titles, among which we read that of Master of the Secret ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... sundry dialects of the north of Europe, the preposition at has been preferred for the governing of the infinitive: "The use of at for to, as the sign of the infinitive mode, is Norse, not Saxon. It is the regular prefix in Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, and Feroic. It is also found in the northern dialects of the Old English, and in the particular dialect of Westmoreland at the present day."—Fowler, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... himself led to a certain callousness with regard to human life, and to a certain enjoyment in inflicting physical anguish. There was an element of Red Indian ruthlessness in the Viking, which looms large in the story of the years of Norse ascendancy over Western Europe. Yet there was also a power of bold and daring action, of reckless valour, of rapid conception and execution, which contrasted strongly with the slower and more placid temperament of the Anglo-Saxon, and to this Danish strain modern Englishmen probably ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... was probably not the only Norse Viking whose keel touched here. Other saints have left their mark on Scilly: Samson of Glamorgan came hither, about the middle of the sixth century, after founding a church near Fowey; he is the same Samson that we find at Guernsey, who ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... them. As rushing down, when winter reigns, resistless to the shaking plains, the torrent tears its way, and all that bars its onward course sweeps to the sea with headlong force, so swept your sires the Dane and Norse;—can ye do less than they? Rise! Ressert your ancient pride, and down the hills a living tide of fiery valor pour. Let but the storm of battle lower, back to his den the foe will cower;—then, then shall Freedom's glorious hour strike for our land once more! What! silent motionless, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... in the Prussian-Lithuanian both genders occur. (Gothic sunnan and Old High-German sunno). Sol in the Norse Edda is a female deity, and the Anglo-Saxon sol is also feminine. The transition from the male to the female gender was achieved in the Middle-High-German language of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the German language is the only one ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... on which he dwells with zest, to that of his greater and more enduring triumphs. The "Targum" consists of translations from the following languages: Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Tartar, Tibetian, Chinese, Mandchou, Russian, Malo-Russian, Polish, Finnish, Anglo-Saxon, Ancient Norse, Suabian, German, Dutch, Danish, Ancient Danish, Swedish, Ancient Irish, Irish, Gaellic, Ancient British, Cambrian British, Greek, Modern Greek, Latin, Provencal, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Rommany. A few specimens from this work may be acceptable to the English reader—a ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... submersion; and his attention divided between the tiller of a vessel, which flew up in the wind's eye with the slightest negligence, and his anxiety for the well-being of his own boat,—the countenance of the Norse tar was a book on whose leaves the student might have seen how truly "the ridiculous and ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... a kind of Scottish, but not with the Scottish accent. Four hundred years ago, when the islands were transferred from Norway to the British crown, their language was Norse, but that tongue, although some of its words have been preserved in the present dialect, has become extinct. "I have heard," said an intelligent Shetlander to me, "that there are yet, perhaps, half a dozen persons in one of our remotest neighborhoods, who ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... poem "Gudrun," belonging to the twelfth or thirteenth century. It is evidently compiled from two or more much older lays which are now lost, which are alluded to in the Nibelungenlied. The original poem was probably Norse, and not German like the only existing manuscript, for there is an undoubted parallel to the story of the kidnaping of Hilde in the Edda. In the Edda, Hilde, the daughter of Hoegni, escapes from home with her lover Hedin, and is pursued by her irate father. He overtakes the fugitives ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... learned), a son of Thorgils the son of Geller, was the first man in this country who wrote down in the Norse language narratives of events both old and new. In the beginning of his book he wrote principally about the first settlements in Iceland, the laws and government, and next of the lagmen, and how long each had administered the law; and he reckoned ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... interior of Greenland rises abruptly from the sea-coast to altitudes of from 5000 to 11,000 ft.—this discovery was of small use to the early Norwegians or their Iceland colony. After it was governed by the kingdom of Norway in the thirteenth century, the Norse colonization of south-west Greenland faded away under the attacks of the Eskimo, until it ceased completely in the fifteenth century. When Denmark united herself with the kingdom of Norway in 1397, the ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... good deal for it, and expended money on the understanding that he should have the lease renewed, but he was a man of bold, independent northern tongue, and gave great offence to his lordship, who was used to be listened to with a sort of feudal deference. He was of the fierce old Norse blood, and his daughters were tall, fair, magnificent young women, not at all uneducated nor vulgar, and it was the finding that my brothers were becoming intimate at his farm that made Lord Erymanth refuse to renew the lease and turn the family out so harshly, ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in the west wall (now covered with a pane of glass) is an inscription which was discovered in 1853. It is written in Norse runes, and ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Carlisle - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. King Eley
... for a truly American poet; but we cannot help thinking that Mr. Longfellow has sometimes mistaken mere strangeness for freshness, and has failed to make his readers feel the charm he himself felt. Put into English, the Saga seems too Norse; and there is often a hitchiness in the verse that suggests translation with overmuch heed for literal closeness. It is possible to assume alien forms of verse, but hardly to enter into forms of thought alien both in time and in the ethics from which ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... states of the great Russian plains did not fare well. It was the Norse habit to divide every inheritance equally among all the sons. No sooner had a small state been founded but it was broken up among eight or nine heirs who in turn left their territory to an ever increasing number of descendants. It was inevitable that these small competing ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... can feel the ship fight against contending wind and wave, and shiver under the blows received in a struggle which dashes the salt spray high over the decks. There is an aroma in the air then that breathes new life into jaded nerves, and stirs the drop of old Norse blood, dormant in most American veins, into quivering ecstasy. One dreams of throwing off the trammels of civilized existence and returning to the ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... of the Norse-pilot mooring his boat under the lee of the monster is completed in a line that attunes the mind once more to all the pathos and ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... British workers in comparative philology, has pierc'd and dispers'd many of the falsest bubbles of centuries; and will disperse many more. It was long recorded that in Scandinavian mythology the heroes in the Norse Paradise drank out of the skulls of their slain enemies. Later investigation proves the word taken for skulls to mean horns of beasts slain in the hunt. And what reader had not been exercis'd over the traces of that feudal custom, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... this was done by the hauling up of waist-trees, or spars of rough untrimmed timber, to form a sort of wooden wall. Sometimes they rigged what was called a top-arming, or top armour, a strip of cloth like the "war girdle" of the Norse longships, across the unprotected space. This top-arming was of canvas some two bolts deep (3 feet 6 inches), gaily painted in designs of red, yellow, green, and white. It gave no protection against shot, but it prevented the enemy's gunners from taking ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... the first time in English translation. A. Johnstone published in Translations from the Norse, by a B. S. S. (Gloucester, about 1876), an English rendering of the first act of Catiline and a synopsis of the last two acts. William Archer explains at length his omission of Catiline from his ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... Heimskringla or Sagas of the Norse Kings, from the Icelandic of Snorre Sturlason (4 ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Page 101, line 8. The island of Oesel was named in Old-Norse Ey-Sysla (island district) and the mainland opposite Adal-Sysla (chief district), and the whole of Estland (or Esthonia) ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... say a good word for any considerable English writer then living. It is true that he criticises, more or less disparagingly, all his own works, from Sartor, of which he remarks that "only some ten pages are fused and harmonious," to his self-entitled "rigmarole on the Norse Kings": but he would not let his enemy say so; nor his friend. Mill's just strictures on the "Nigger Pamphlet" he treats as the impertinence of a boy, and only to Emerson would he grant the privilege to hold his own. Per contra, he overestimated those who were content ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... and incidents of Aylwin.' He seems to have forgotten, however, that one incident—the most daring incident in the book—that of the rifling of a grave for treasure —is not new: it will at once remind folk-lorists of certain practices charged against our old Norse invaders. And students of Celtic and Gaelic literature are familiar with the same idea. Quite, lately, indeed, Mr. Alfred Nutt, in his analysis of the Gaelic Agallamh na Senorach, or 'Colloquy of the Elders,' has made some ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... and spoke Celtic; when they were conquered by the Romans, Latin words crept into the tongue; and as Romans gave place to the Saxons, and the Saxons to the Danes, words from the German and Norse tongues were added to the language. Finally, came the Norman Conquest, and with it a flood of French words. The English we speak to-day is a mixture of Celtic, Latin, Saxon, ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 58, December 16, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... clad, able and efficient, he looked through the streets, seeing and hearing the hurry and the roar and the shouting of voices, and then with a smile upon his lips went inside. In his brain was an unexpressed thought. As the old Norse marauders looked at the cities sitting in their splendour on the Mediterranean so looked he. "What loot!" a voice within him said, and his brain began devising methods by which he should ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... brother author. Only in the bards of Wales and in the Scalds of the Sagas did he seem to find his kindred spirits, though it has been suggested that his complex nature took this means of informing the world that he could read both Cymric and Norse. But we must not be unkind behind the magic door—and yet to be charitable to the uncharitable is surely the ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... four-and-twenty immortal blackbirds could not have put more music into a pie than she did. Saul was piling wood into the big oven, and Sophie paused a moment on the threshold to look at him, for she always enjoyed the sight of this stalwart cousin, whom she likened to a Norse viking, with his fair hair and beard, keen blue eyes, and six feet of manly height, with shoulders that looked broad and strong enough to ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... idea that the fact that it took place at midsummer eve (June 27), the eve of the Feast of St. John, upon which occasion the shepherds hereabout used to light bonfires on the hills (no doubt a relic of the custom of the Beltane fires of old Norse days, perhaps of earlier sun-worship festivals of British times), may have had something to do with the naming of the mountain Blencathara of which Southen-fell (or Shepherd's-fell, as the name implies) is part. Blencathara, we are told, may mean the Hill of Demons, or ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... that its existence was unknown to the learned editors of the new Oxford Dictionary. This is to be the more regretted as its etymology is very obscure. It may, however, be traced with little doubt to the old Norse 'grein,' a branch or prong, surviving in the word 'grains,' a pronged harpoon or fish spear. From its meaning, 'branch,' it might seem to be akin to 'stem' and to 'bow,' which is only another spelling of'bough.' But this is not likely. The older meaning ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... the dogs, ye jolly Norse-men, To the chine strike down and cleave them!" Then the Scots would fain be at home again, ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... history when political combination is as yet imperfect, and scientific knowledge has not begun to mark off the domain of historic fact from the cloudland of fancy and legend. Of this class are the Homeric poems, the Nibelungen Lied, the Norse ballads, the Edda, the Kalewala, the legends of Arthur, and the poem of the Cid: all these, whatever their differences, have this in common, that they sprang at a remote period out of the earliest traditions of the several peoples, and neither ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... poetry, and then set it to music. And it is one of the greatest of religions,—what Nature engraved on the heart of our own Teutonic ancestors. It is all there,—its thousand phantasmal years, from the first cowering cry of the Norse savage before the chariot of his storm-god to the last gentle hymn that rose to Freya under her new name of Mary,—all. It is interpreted as a purely human expression; and, I repeat, no man has done so vast and worthy an artistic work in ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... would have expected. It touched not only his feelings but his pride; for was he not a lineal descendant of that Fergus McKay who had been a chief in one of the Western Isles of Scotland—he could not tell which, but no matter—at that celebrated period of Scottish history when the great Norse king, Harold Fairhair, had made a descent on the Scottish coast and received one of the few thorough thrashings that darkened his otherwise ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... "aver" denoted the animal produce or stock on a farm; and there were "averia lanata" likewise. Similar apparently whimsical adaptations of words will not shock those who are aware that "pig" in England properly means a little fellow of the swine species, and that "pige" in Norse signifies a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... his gift of the ring to be our safety, and surely he had given it to me for this. So I grew confident, and even longed to see the sharp bow of the boat cleave the mist, if only her crew knew of our friend by name at least. Yet they might be Norse—not Danish. ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... she left much to be desired in the way of romance and beauty. Most often she was young Lochinvar or Rob Roy; sometimes Coeur de Lion led her on full-blooded adventure. There were quaint old books of Norse and Keltic legend, musty, leather-bound books with wood-cut illustrations and long "s's" in the printing. There was Fox's Book of Martyrs: there were many tales of the Covenanters, things ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... names of those who have done most, by untiring, laborious search among old parish registers, etc., and dusty old records, to bring to light interesting social ordinances, details of ancient parish government, and gems of Norse literature and archaeological research, there have been none in the last century who have by patient work attained more knowledge of their country's inner history than Mr. ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... and isolated as Finland, fantastic mythology took firm root, and we certainly find the most romantic and weird verses in connection with the chief heroes of the Kalevala, namely, Winminen and Ilmarinen, who broadly resemble the Norse demigods ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... about the agents and the completeness of these periodical destructions. In the Norse mythology and in the doctrine of Buddhism, not one of the gods can survive the fire of the last day. Among the Greeks, great Jove alone will await the appearance of the virgin world after the icy winter and the fiery summer ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... the Norman Conquest.*—Normandy was a province of France lying along the shore of the English Channel. Its line of dukes and at least a considerable proportion of its people were of the same Scandinavian or Norse race which made up such a large element in the population of England. They had, however, learned more of the arts of life and of government from the more successfully preserved civilization of the Continent. The relations between England and Normandy ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... brethren in this country a noble example. Every year sees one or more of them engaged in the production of carefully-edited volumes of early Scandinavian history. We have now to record the publication, by Professor Munch, of the old Norse text of Kong Olaf Tryggvesoen's Saga from a MS. in the Library at Stockholm which has not hitherto been made use of; and also, by the same gentleman, in conjunction with his friend Professor Unger, of an edition of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various
... opera-glass, or as Mr. Joseph Cook's theory of Solar Light. Why didn't his parents give him my "Mathematical Exposition of Orthodoxy for Children," or my "The Theology of Euclid," on his birthdays, instead of Hans Andersen's "Fairy Tales" and the "Tales from the Norse?" It was very remiss ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... knight who goes out into the forest to seek adventures, or "see wonders." He finds a party of maidens engaged in a bewildering dance, and tarries to enjoy the spectacle. Frau Frene, or, as we would write it now, Freya (the Norse Venus whose memory we perpetuate in our Friday), seeks to persuade him to remain with her, promising to give him her youngest daughter to wife. The knight remains, but will not mate with the maiden, for he has seen the devil lurking in her brown eyes and learned ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... from being regarded as the abode of the god it had finally been called by his name. Fergunna and Virgunia, two names of mountains in Germany, are relics of the name. The name of the god, if preserved in the Gothic, would have been Fairguneis; and indeed in the Old Norse language Fioergynn is the father of Frigg, the wife of Odin, and Fioergynnior, the Earth-goddess, is mother of Thor. Professor Zimmer takes the same view. Grimm thinks that the Greeks and Romans, by changing f into ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... classic treatment, and his ornament, which gave a distinct cachet to Punch up to 1878, was not founded on a mere grotesque treatment of classical subjects, but was the fruit of a close study of and easy familiarity with heathen mythology, classical, Egyptian, and, in particular, Norse. The fun was not particularly broad, but Tom Taylor was especially tickled by his attempts to find amusement in the extraordinary head-dresses worn by ladies of Ancient Egypt—such as that in the cut (July 11th, 1874) ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... boys were aroused at seven o'clock by a servant, who brought a tray with the most fragrant coffee and hot rolls. It was in honor of the guest that, in accordance with Norse custom, this early meal was served; and all the boys, carrying pillows and blankets, gathered on Albert's and Ralph's bed and feasted right royally. So it seemed to them, at least; for any break in the ordinary routine, ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of Copenhagen, began to translate the Heimskringla, planned a History of the Vikings. Emphatically, this kind of thing suited him. No one was less likely to turn out a bookworm, yet in the study of Norse literature he found that combination of mental and muscular interests which was perchance what ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... was tinged with Iberian, and who was followed by the Brython or Belgian. And, at some unknown date, we have to allow for the invasion of North Britain by another Germanic type, the Caledonian, which would seem to have been a Norse stock, foreshadowing the later Norman Conquest. And, as if this mish-mash was not confusion enough, came to make it worse confounded the Roman conquerors, trailing like a mantle of many colours the ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... plague on [1] your languages, German and Norse! Let me have the song of the kettle; And the tongs and the poker, instead of that horse That gallops away with such fury and force On this [2] dreary dull plate of black metal. 5 [3] See that Fly, [4]—a disconsolate creature! perhaps A child of ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... expeditions she always spoke French; he begged her to talk Norse at least now and ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... first met him," said the jam-manufacturer, "he struck me as the queerest man of business—except myself—that I had ever seen. He talked about Norse sagas, witchcraft, and so on, and when he began about business, I felt uneasy. Of course I ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... strong as ever, having been replenished over the centuries by fresh infusions from Norwegian and Danish princesses. Richard's mother, Queen Helga, wife to His late Majesty, Henry X, spoke very few words of Anglo-French, and those with a heavy Norse accent. ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... train from Calcutta to Benares. Flat fields of white poppies were on either side, and English park-like scenes, without the mansions, and we thanked our stars we had not to live in what the Norse call "Eng" or ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... clasping her bare hands on her lap. Guest glanced at her curiously from his point of vantage in the rear. She was like no other girl whom he had met, but somewhere, in pictured form, he must surely have seen such a face, for it struck some sleeping chord of memory. A fantasy perhaps of some Norse goddess or Flame Deity; a wild, weird head, painted in reds and whites, with wonderful shaded locks, and small white face aglow with the fire within. His lips twisted in an involuntary smile. Could anything be more aggressively unlike ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... so Torridge boatmen tell, sleeps now the old Norse Viking in his leaden coffin, with all his fairy treasure and his crown of gold; and, as the boy looks at the spot, he fancies, and almost hopes, that the day may come when he shall have to do his duty ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce
... lopsided Stetson to announce that Time hasn't been standing still for any of us. But one would never have taken him for an ex-lunger. And there is a wholesomeness about the man, for all his quietness, which draws one to him. Olga herself still again impressed me as a Zorn etching come to life, as a Norse myth in petticoats, with the same old largeness of limb and the same old suggestion of sky-line vastnesses about her. She still looks as though the Lord had made her when the world was young and the women ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... but a disparagement, to consult a man only on horses, or on steam, or on theatres, or on eating, or on books, and, whenever he appears, considerately to turn the conversation to the bantling he is known to fondle. In the Norse heaven of our forefathers, Thor's house had five hundred and forty floors: and Man's house has five hundred and forty floors. His excellence is facility of adaptation, and of transition through many related ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... Vikings): (1) Snorro Sturleson's Heimskringla or Sagas of the Norse Kings; (2) Dozy's essays; (3) the, possibly spurious, Voyages of the Zeni, with the Journey of Ivan Bardsen, in the Hakluyt ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... she was beautiful; one was only sure that she was unforgetable, and that after other faces had faded from the memory, hers remained to haunt the heart. And that red hair of hers, like the hair of a Norse sun-goddess! ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... under the chestnut-trees. Then, while they mended their stockings, Margaret would give Peggy a "talk-lesson," the only kind that she was willing to receive, on English history, with an occasional digression to the Trojan war, or the Norse mythology, as the case might be. Peggy detested history, and knew next to nothing of it, and this was a grievous ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... It is interesting to note, too, that two scholars, well known in widely different fields, Monrad, the philosopher—for some years a sort of Dr. Johnson in the literary circles of Christiania—and Unger, the scholarly editor of many Old Norse texts, ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... priest at Aricia, kept watch and ward was no other than a branch of mistletoe growing on an oak within the sacred grove; and as the plucking of the bough was a necessary prelude to the slaughter of the priest, I have been led to institute a parallel between the King of the Wood at Nemi and the Norse god Balder, who was worshipped in a sacred grove beside the beautiful Sogne fiord of Norway and was said to have perished by a stroke of mistletoe, which alone of all things on earth or in heaven could wound him. On the theory here suggested both Balder and the King of the Wood ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... the sin be mine as the shame was hers, In desolate days of departed years She had leisure for shame and sorrow— There was light repentance and brief remorse, When I rode against Saxon foes or Norse, With clang of harness and clatter of horse, And little heed for ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... a surly nod, and he answered with such smooth words as the thrifty old Norse proverbs advise every ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... that Carlyle effected by his book on Heroes we must put ourselves at the point of view of the time when it was written, the days of Wellington and Melbourne, Brougham and Macaulay, Southey and Coleridge. None of these men understood the heroic in Norse mythology, or the grandeur of Oliver Cromwell, or the supreme importance of the Divina Commedia as the embodiment of Catholic Feudalism. All this Carlyle felt as no Englishman before him had felt, and told us in a voice ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... which was nevertheless coincident with a high and pure morality. It has been suggested that the severe conditions imposed by the Church on divorces may have had something to do with the peculiar marital usages of the Teutonic and Norse chieftains. Reasons of state might require Theudemir the Ostrogoth, or William Longsword the Norman, to ally himself some day with a powerful king's daughter, and therefore he would not go through ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... Olaf came of hardy Norse stock. His father, Harald Graenske, or "Gray-mantle," one of the tributary kings of Norway, had fallen a victim to the tortures of the haughty Swedish queen; and now his son, a boy of scarce thirteen, but a warrior already ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... 1916 are by natives of Iceland. They belong, however, to periods of time and to modes of writing remote from each other. Snorri Sturluson, the greatest of Icelandic historians, was born in 1179. His Prose Edda, the companion-piece of the present volume, is a Christian's account of Old Norse myths and poetic conceptions thus happily preserved as they were about to pass into oblivion. More than seven hundred years separate Johann Sigurjonsson from Snorri, and his work is in dramatic, not saga form. But even ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... of defense in inactivity. There must have been some psychological undercurrent carrying strength and skill to him through all the years of his romantic imaginings; the spirits of old heroes of that land must have lent him their counsel and might in that desperate battle with the Norse flockmaster. ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... steamers lying in long succession beside the shore where the gardens of the Delicias were waiting to welcome us that afternoon to our first sight of the pride and fashion of Seville. I never got enough of the brave color of those tramp steamers; and in thinking of them as English, Norse, French, and Dutch, fetching or carrying their cargoes over those war-worn, storied waters, I had some finer thrills than in dwelling on the Tower of Gold which rose from the midst of them. It was built in the last ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... supply of light literature in Great Britain. While Lang culls us tales and legends and lyrics from the Norse or Provensal, Stevenson will engage to supply us with tales and legends of his own—something just as good. The two men serve ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... be more interesting than a study of these characters from the borderland of history? These great figures come forth from the shadows of the past and move before us like living men: Beowulf, the Saxon; Frithiof, the Norse hero; Siegfried, the German; Roland, the French knight; The Cid, Spain's greatest warrior and gentleman; Hector and Ulysses, the Greeks; King Arthur and his knights from England; Horatius, the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... another across the valleys. An infectious spirit of jubilation pervaded the air. The sun himself, in these cheerful latitudes, is transformed from an instrument of torture to the golden-locked hero of Norse and Greek legend; and with every step of the ascent Lenox felt the blood course more swiftly ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... adapted themselves to the habits, customs, and language of the people among whom they settled. We find the Norse names of Rurik, Oleg, and Igor, but after the last named their descendants were Russians and bore ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... back," says the Norse proverb, "without brother behind it"; and this is, by analogy, true of an elective magistracy. The hereditary ruler in any critical emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible resources of prestige, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... narratives for popular reading, designed to set forth, in historic continuity, the principal events and movements in Canada, from the Norse Voyages to ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... 875 that Ingolf, a jarl of Norway, came to Iceland with Norse settlers. They built their habitation at first where a pleasant headland seemed attractive, the present Ingolfshofdi, and later founded Reikjavik, where the signs directed them; for certain carved posts, which they had thrown overboard as they approached the ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... freemen), while from laws and a few charters we can perceive some influence on criminal law (nidings-vaerk), special usages as to fines (lahslit), the keeping of peace, attestation and sureties of acts (faestermen), &c. But, on the whole, the introduction of Danish and Norse elements, apart from local cases, was more important owing to the conflicts and compromises it called forth and its social results,—than on account of any distinct trail of Scandinavian views in English law. The Scandinavian ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... introduced to him two officers serving in the army, one a Swede and the other a Norwegian. Immediately he repeated, to their delight, a poem of some eight or ten verses descriptive of Scandinavian scenery, and an old Norse legend. He said he had read the poem in a newspaper some years before, and liked it, but it had passed out of his memory until their visit had recalled it. The two books which he read most were the Bible and Shakespeare. With ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... whereas in the runic inscription it seems to be implied that it was Christ Himself that was so wounded. The allusion is in any case very obscure; but the latter notion makes the better sense, and is capable of being explained by the Norse legend of Balder, who was frequently shot at by the other gods in sport, as he was supposed to be invulnerable; but he was slain thus one day by a shaft made of mistletoe, which alone ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... water in a heavy sea than her one little pump could conveniently keep under. As the fitful gust struck her headlong, as if it had been some invisible missile hurled at us from off the hill-tops, she stooped her head lower and lower, like old stately Hardyknute under the blow of the "King of Norse," till at length the lee chain-plate rustled sharp through the foam; but, like a staunch Free Churchwoman, the lowlier she bent, the more steadfastly did she hold her head to the storm. The strength of ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... peoples with whom they came in contact, or of infusing their own energy into them. During the long reign of Duke Richard the Fearless, the son of William Longsword, a reign which lasted from 945 to 996, the heathen Norman pirates became French Christians and feudal at heart. The old Norse language lived only at Bayeux and in a few local names. As the old Northern freedom died silently away, the descendants of the pirates became feudal nobles and the "Pirates' land" sank into the most loyal ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... certain animal pairs which seem to reflect the two dualities, sun and moon, and day and night. There is here no certainty as to detail; the Norse myth is advanced and congealed, if not spurious, as Professor Bugge and his school would have us believe. At the feet of Odin lie his two wolves, Geri and Freki, "Greedy" and "Voracious." They hurl themselves across the lands ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield
... Head, and then later at Rathlin Island, where their fate met them at last, as Deirdre had prophesied. It is a sad story, and we can easily weep at the thrilling moment when, there being no man among the Ultonians to do the king's bidding, a Norse captive takes Naisi's magic sword and strikes off the heads of the three sons of Usnach with one swift blow, and Deirdre, falling prone upon the dead bodies, chants a lament; and when she has finished singing, she puts her pale cheek against Naisi's, and dies; and a great cairn is ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... goddess should put herself out to allay tempests in his behalf, or why hostile deities should be disturbed to tumble seas into turbulence for such a voyager, is a query. He merits neither their wrath nor their courtesy. I confess to liking heroes of the old Norse mythology better. They, at least, did not cry nor grow voluble with words when obstacles obstructed the march. They possess the merit of tremendous action. Aeneas, in this regard, is the inferior of Achilles. Excuse us from hero worship, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... paid to Odin in the name given by almost all the people of the north to the fourth day of the week, which was formerly consecrated to him. It is called by a name which signifies "Odin's day;" "Old Norse, Odinsdagr; Swedish and Danish, Onsdag; Anglo-Saxon, Wodenesdaeg, Wodnesdaeg; Dutch, Woensdag; English, Wednesday. As Odin or Wodun was supposed to correspond to the Mercury of the Greeks and Romans, the name of this day was expressed ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... his father, he found Erik the Red directing the building of one of the great Norse galleys, nearly eighty feet long and seventeen wide and only six feet deep. The boat had twenty ribs, and the frame was fastened together by withes made of roots, while the oaken planks were held by iron rivets. The oars were twenty feet long, and were put through oar holes, and the rudder, ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... followed her sister into a simply furnished, pine-boarded room with a big stove at one end of it, where a middle-aged woman set food and coffee before them. She spoke English haltingly, but her lined face lighted up when Muriel thanked her in Norse. Then there followed a flow of eager words, a few of which the girl caught, until the woman broke off when their host came in. He was silent, for the most part, during the meal, and shortly afterward Muriel was shown into a small ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... "will." The rustics of this part of England are in the habit of saying "they are led will" (vild or wild), when from intoxication or some other cause they are bewildered at night and cannot find their way home. This expression is clearly from the old Norse or Danish. I am not at all certain that "Bil" in Bilinger may not be this same "will" or "Vild," and that the word may not be a corruption of Vilden, old or elder, ...
— Letters to his mother, Ann Borrow - and Other Correspondents • George Borrow
... glint of blue ice was in her eyes. Her eyelashes and eyebrows, as well as the almost imperceptible down that edged her cheek when she turned against the light, were blond almost to whiteness. What beauty she had was of the fine, hardy Norse type. Her hands were red and hard, and even beneath the coarse sleeve of the oilskin coat one could infer that the biceps and deltoids were large and powerful. She was coarse-fibred, no doubt, mentally as well as physically, but her coarseness, so Wilbur guessed, would prove ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... sea-birds, screaming and flickering from the ruined crags, alone disturb the silence and the sunshine. One such place has impressed itself on my memory beyond all others. On a rock by the water's edge, old fighting men of the Norse breed had planted a double castle; the two stood wall to wall like semi-detached villas; and yet feud had run so high between their owners, that one, from out of a window, shot the other as he stood in his own doorway. There ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the name given to the bold Norse seamen who in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries infested the northern seas. Tradition maintains that a band of these rovers discovered America centuries ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... the walls of the Moot-Hall of the Hammersmith of Nowhere. It was by tales such as these that he first won a hearing from all lovers of English literature. The story of Jason is but a Greek setting of a folk-tale known among the Gaels as the Battle of the Birds, and in Norse as the Master Maid. Many of the tales which the travellers told one another in the Earthly Paradise, such as The Man Born to be King (itself derived from the first of our stories), The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and The Ring given to Venus, ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... handsome women in brilliant costumes laughing and chatting gayly; the apathetic policemen promenading in stoic dignity up and down upon the smooth pavements; the jauntily attired nurses, whom in his Norse innocence he took for mothers or aunts of the children, wheeling baby-carriages which to Norse eyes seemed miracles of dainty ingenuity, under the shady crowns of the elm-trees. He did not know how long he had been sitting there, when a little bright-eyed girl with light ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... not for me. My nature is such that I do not like the gloomy songs you sing; nor do I care for green things, except to wear in my hair. And it seems to me that I should be spiritless and a coward if I should like such a life. I am no English girl, to tremble and hide under a mean kirtle. I am a Norse maiden, the kinswoman of warriors. I think I should not show much honor to my father and my brother were I to leave them unavenged and sit down here with you. No, I will go to my King and get justice. ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... house where a company of the bride's companions were met, and then occurred the ceremony of washing the bride's feet. This was generally the occasion of much mirth. And this was in all probability a survival of an old Scandinavian custom under which the Norse bride was conducted by her maiden friends to undergo a bath, called the bride's bath, a sort of religious purification. On the marriage day, every trifling circumstance which would have passed without notice at other times was noted and ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... mother, where he was cordially welcomed. He was afterwards joined by his son, who, curiously enough, married a Shetland lady, and thus, even in the days of my father, who was his grandson, a constant communication was kept up with our Norse connections. I, also, have more than once heard of them since my father's death, and have determined to become more intimately acquainted with my relatives during this northern voyage of ours. But where are we getting to? What with the strong tide, and the favourable breeze, ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... than it would have done outside. They were dry, though the place was damp, and they had a fire. Still, until you are used to it, it is trying to sit in the company of a score of black people and of many thousand fleas, enveloped with a cloud of pungent smoke, according to the custom of our Norse ancestors. ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... THE INDIAN LANGUAGE.—S. The Hebrew is based on roots like the Indian, which appear to have strong analogies to the Semitic family. It is not clearly Hindostanee, or Chinese, or Norse. I have perused Rafn's Grammar by Marsh. The Icelandic (language) clearly lies at the foundation ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... pp. 328, 343. Gods also die, as in the Egyptian religious creed (Maspero, Dawn of Civilization, p. 111), in Greek myths and folk-beliefs (the grave of Zeus, etc.), and in the Norse myth of the combat of ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe. lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked. In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... cured by following the saintly recommendation to shape the figure of a head and place it on a cross. Fort tells us that "The introduction of Christianity among the Teutonic races offered no hindrance to a perpetuation, under new forms, of those social observances with which Norse temple idolatry was so intimately associated. Offering to proselytes an unlimited number of demoniacal aeons, similar in individuality and prowess to those peopling the invisible universe, Northern mythology ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... Bear," whose part in the war brought on internal strife and revolution which robbed Czar Nicholas of his throne, traces its history back for more than ten centuries, when the Norse invaded the territory and founded Veliki Novgorod, for many years one of the chief Russian cities. The Norse, to use the modern vernacular, "put Russia on the map" when the Russian army fought its way to the very walls of Constantinople. Much of the early history of the country ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... tend to the same conclusions. One day it is a discovery of cinerary vases, the next, it is etymological research; yet again it is ethnological investigation, and the day after, it is the publication of unsuspected tales from the Norse; but all go to heap up proof of our consanguinity with the peoples of history—and of an original ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... Middle Ages of Europe, with their wildest romance and strangest elements. It is pleasant to think that far back in the night there walked for a short season on these shores great men of that hearty Norse-Teuton race which in after times flowed through France into England, and from England through the long course of ages hitherward. Among the old Puritan names of New England there is more than one which may be found in the roll of Battle Abbey, and through the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
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