第99章

To his mother's counsels he objected the greatness of the peril;but she bade him take hope, declaring, that either a sea-cow should have a calf, or that the king's vengeance should be baulked by some other chance.By this speech she banished her son's fears, and made him obey her advice.When the deed was done, Frode, stung by the affront, rushed with the utmost heat and fury to raze the house of the matron, sending men on to arrest her and bring her with her children.This the woman foreknew, and deluded her enemies by a trick, changing from the shape of a woman into that of a mare.When Frode came up she took the shape of a sea-cow, and seemed to be straying and grazing about the shore; and she also made her sons look like calves of smaller size.This portent amazed the king, and he ordered that they should be surrounded and cut off from returning to the waters.Then he left the carriage, which he used because of the feebleness of his aged body, and sat on the ground marvelling.But the mother, who had taken the shape of the larger beast, charged at the king with outstretched tusk, and pierced one of his sides.The wound killed him; and his end was unworthy of such majesty as his.His soldiers, thirsting to avenge his death, threw their spears and transfixed the monsters, and saw, when they were killed, that they were the corpses of human beings with the heads of wild beasts: a circumstance which exposed the trick more than anything.

So ended Frode, the most famous king in the whole world.The nobles, when he had been disembowelled, had his body kept embalmed for three years, for they feared the provinces would rise if the king's end were published.They wished his death to be concealed above all from foreigners, so that by the pretence that he was alive they might preserve the boundaries of the empire, which had been extended for so long; and that, on the strength of the ancient authority of their general, they might exact the usual tribute from their subjects.So, the lifeless corpse was carried away by them in such a way that it seemed to be taken, not in a funeral bier, but in a royal carriage, as if it were a due and proper tribute from the soldiers to an infirm old man not in full possession of his forces.Such splendour did his friends bestow on him even in death.But when his limbs rotted, and were seized with extreme decay, and when the corruption could not be arrested, they buried his body with a royal funeral in a barrow near Waere, a bridge of Zealand;declaring that Frode had desired to die and be buried in what was thought the chief province of his kingdom.

BOOK SIX.

After the death of Frode, the Danes wrongly supposed that Fridleif, who was being reared in Russia, had perished; and, thinking that the sovereignty halted for lack of an heir, and that it could no longer be kept on in the hands of the royal line, they considered that the sceptre would be best deserved by the man who should affix to the yet fresh grave of Frode a song of praise in his glorification, and commit the renown of the dead king to after ages by a splendid memorial.Then one HIARN, very skilled in writing Danish poetry, wishing to give the fame of the hero some notable record of words, and tempted by the enormous prize, composed, after his own fashion, a barbarous stave.Its purport, expressed in four lines, I have transcribed as follows:

"Frode, whom the Danes would have wished to live long, they bore long through their lands when he was dead.The great chief's body, with this turf heaped above it, bare earth covers under the lucid sky."When the composer of this song had uttered it, the Danes rewarded him with the crown.Thus they gave a kingdom for an epitaph, and the weight of a whole empire was presented to a little string of letters.Slender expense for so vast a guerdon! This huge payment for a little poem exceeded the glory of Caesar's recompense; for it was enough for the divine Julius to pension with a township the writer and glorifier of those conquests which he had achieved over the whole world.But now the spendthrift kindness of the populace squandered a kingdom on a churl.Nay, not even Africanus, when he rewarded the records of his deed, rose to the munificence of the Danes.For there the wage of that laborious volume was in mere gold, while here a few callow verses won a sceptre for a peasant.

At the same time Erik, who held the governorship of Sweden, died of disease; and his son Halfdan, who governed in his father's stead, alarmed by the many attacks of twelve brothers of Norwegian birth, and powerless to punish their violence, fled, hoping for reinforcements, to ask aid of Fridleif, then sojourning in Russia.Approaching him with a suppliant face, he lamented that he was himself shattered and bruised by a foreign foe, and brought a dismal plaint of his wrongs.From him Fridleif heard the tidings of his father's death, and granting the aid he sought, went to Norway in armed array.At this time the aforesaid brothers, their allies forsaking them, built a very high rampart within an island surrounded by a swift stream, also extending their earthworks along the level.Trusting to this refuge, they harried the neighborhood with continual raids.For they built a bridge on which they used to get to the mainland when they left the island.This bridge was fastened to the gate of the stronghold; and they worked it by the guidance of ropes, in such a way that it turned as if on some revolving hinge, and at one time let them pass across the river; while at another, drawn back from above by unseen cords, it helped to defend the entrance.