"Norse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Existence, as conceived of by the Norse, and reflecting the Norse idea of the universe, "has its roots deep down in the kingdoms of Hela, or Death; its trunk reaches up heaven-high, and spreads its boughs over the whole universe. At the foot of it, in the Death-Kingdom, sit ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 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 ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... Colum's rich, musical voice captures all the magic and majesty of the Norse sagas in his retellings of the adventures of the gods and goddesses who lived in the Northern paradise of Asgard ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... 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 ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... in English the metrical tale of "The Wright's Chaste Wife," by Adam of Cobham (edited by Mr. Furnivall from a MS. of circ. A.D. 1460) where the victims are a lord, a steward and a proctor. See also "The Master-Maid" in Dr. (now Sir George) Dasent's "Popular Tales from the Norse," Mr. Clouston, who gives these details more fully, mentions a similar Scottish story concerning a lascivious monk and the chaste wife of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 Language, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... 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 called; And he who looks may find therein The story ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... 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 ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... this 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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 Rock ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... slopes near Hutton Buscel, and the detritus was carried to the front of the glacier. This deposit terminates in a crescent-shape and now forms the slightly elevated ground upon which Wykeham Abbey stands. The Norse word Wyke or Vik means a creek or bay, and the fact that such a name was given to this spot would suggest that the Vale was more than marshy in Danish times, and perhaps it even contained enough water to float shallow draught boats. ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... 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? ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... 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 ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... a way of writing the history of Senlac which Voltaire, Thierry, Michelet, and Guizot dote upon, infecting certain English historians with their complacency, as if the Norse Vikings were the descendants of Chlodovech, and the conquest of England were the glory of France. The absurdity was crowned in 1804, when Napoleon turned the attention of his subjects to the history of 1066, as an auspicious study for the partners of his great enterprise ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... 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 ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... is reason 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, ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... composition; and his 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
... 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 Latin, to Athens to study Greek. In all parts ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... frost is personified as a mischievous boy, "Jack Frost," to whose pranks its vagaries are due. In old Norse mythology we read of the terrible "Frost Giants," offspring of Ymir, born of the ice of Niflheim, which the warmth exhaled from the sun-lit land of Muspelheim caused to drop off into the great Ginnunga-gap, the void that once was where earth ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... among lesser shadows. Nine more Indians appear bearing three boats but, seeing the phantom, fear fell upon them and they dropped to the shore, covering themselves with their canoes. From the right appears a Norse galley, the armor-clad warriors and their leader Thorwald making a fine picture as they disembark, carrying their shields, spears, and battle axes. As the men draw near they see the three canoes, and Thorwald forms three ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... 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
... 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
... lesser romanticists. 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, assisted him ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... human utterance. Moreover, the honest delving, as of late years, by the German and 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 ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... 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 ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... 'absolute newness of the plot 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 interesting ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... or Fitz-Stephens, were famous men of war; nor were the children of her daughter, who had married William de Barri, behind them in valour. No less than eighteen knights of this extraordinary family took part in the conquest, where in feats of war they renewed the glories of their ancestors both Norse and Welsh; a son of Nesta's, David, the Bishop of St. David's, gave his sympathy and help; while her grandson, Gerald de Barri, became the famous ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... 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 among all classes of people, questioning ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... Australians, Americans or Afrikanders. But we use it in an entirely different sense from that in which we use it when speaking of such communities as those founded by the Northmen and their descendants during that period of astonishing growth which saw the descendants of the Norse sea-thieves conquer and transform Normandy, Sicily, and the British Islands; we use it in an entirely different sense from that in which we use it when speaking of the new states that grew up around Warsaw, Kief, Novgorod, and Moscow, as the wild savages of the ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... vessel the Griffin in honor of the Frontenacs, the supporters in whose family coat-of-arms were two Griffins. Where all is so uncertain in an important matter, a third suggestion may be as near the mark as the first two. As the Norse or Norman sea-kings bore the raven for a standard, perhaps La Salle adopted the raven's master-symbol, in right of a hoped-for sovereignty ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... But the lords indicated were Baalim who were Lords 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
... 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. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... 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 having for subjects wonderful adventures, and the praise of heroism and beauty; but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... 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
... I, 'is the fall and debasement of words; you talk of a gang, or set, of shorters; you are, perhaps, not aware that gang and set were, a thousand years ago, only connected with the great and Divine; they are ancient Norse words, which may be found in the heroic poems of the north, and in the Edda, a collection of mythologic and heroic songs. In these poems we read that such and such a king invaded Norway with a gang of heroes; or so and so, for example, Erik Bloodaxe, was admitted ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... 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
... or dig their way out, to look upon a 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
... 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 ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... 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, have gained ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... trashy mind of our generation is still aghast, like the Jews of old, at any word of an unsuccessful virtue. Job has been written and read; the tower of Siloam fell nineteen hundred years ago; yet we have still to desire a little Christianity, or, failing that, a little even of that rude, old Norse nobility of soul, which saw virtue and vice alike go unrewarded, and was yet not shaken in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fight one another before we understand one another. In the old Norse mythology Love is the wife of Strife; when we come to consider the nature of man, not such an ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... 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 Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... of the great German family. Their language, the old Norse, was distinguished from the Alemannic, or High German tongue, and from the Saxonic, or Low German tongue. From the Norse have been derived the languages of Iceland, of the Ferroe Isles, of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. From the Germanic branch have come German, Dutch, Anglo-Saxon, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... 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
... light whereby it lives Somewhat of 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 All-Father is ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... illustrated from the German whlen—to choose. The heathen idea was that Woden chose those who should fall in battle to dwell with him in Walhalla, the Hall of the chosen. In the exercise of this choice, Woden acted by female messengers, called in the Norse mythology valkyrja, pl. valkyrjor.[49] ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... 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 ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... from those which precede and follow them, in virtue of a certain archaic freshness and of a greater freedom from traces of late interpolation and editorial trimming. Jephthah, Gideon and Samson are men of old heroic stamp, who would look as much in place in a Norse Saga as where they are; and if the varnish-brush of later respectability has passed over these memoirs of the mighty men of a wild age, here and there, it has not succeeded in effacing, or even in seriously obscuring, the essential characteristics of the theology traditionally ascribed ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... security for life and property, native and foreign, in great commercial centers like Manila, Iloilo, and Cebu, against hordes of uncivilized pagans and Mohammedan Malays, should we then scuttle out and leave them to their fate? A band of old-time Norse pirates, used to swooping down on a capital, capturing its rulers, seizing its treasure, burning the town, abandoning the people to domestic disorder and foreign spoliation, and promptly sailing off for another piratical foray—such a band of pirates might, ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... Saxon blood. Tomorrow's hopes, an April flood Come roaring in. The newest race Is born of her resilient grace. We here renounce our Teuton pride: Our Norse and Slavic boasts have died: Italian dreams are swept away, And Celtic feuds ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... 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 ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... 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 opposition served but to speed her on all the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... 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
... are good stories enough left, and 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
... 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
... buttons. It must be admitted 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
... Dulcibel, the Norse blood of her father glowing in her face. "Good evening, Sir!" and she left ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... The "Nornagestsaga" or "Nornageststhattr", the story of "Nornagest", forms the fourth source of the Siegfried story. It is really a part of the Olaf saga, but contains the story of Sigurd and Gunnar (the Norse forms of Siegfried and Gunther), which an old man Nornagest relates to King Olaf Tryggvason, who converted the Norwegians to Christianity. The story was written about 1250 to illustrate the transition from heathendom to the Christian faith. It is based on the "Edda" and the ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... story of supposed Norse sea-rovers hither, derived from certain Icelandic manuscripts of the fourteenth century. It is a pleasing narrative, that of Lief Ericson's sail in 1000-1001 to Helluland, Markland, and at last to Vineland, and of ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... would bring the ravens to feast upon the Saxon. Oh! had I been his son, how I would have carried on the feud! How I would have laughed when I cut down the false traitors, and burnt their palaces!" Richard's eye kindled, and his words, as he spoke the old Norse language, flowed into the sort of wild verse in which the Sagas or legendary songs were composed, and which, perhaps, he was ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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, in company ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... various 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 ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... unveiled masterpiece); Whose words, in simplest home-spun clad, The Saxon strength of Caedmon's had, With power reserved at need to reach The Roman forum's loftiest speech, Sweet with persuasion, eloquent In passion, cool in argument, Or, ponderous, falling on thy foes As fell the Norse god's hammer blows. Crushing as if with Talus' flail Through Error's logic-woven mail, And failing only when they tried The adamant of the righteous side,— Thou, foiled in aim and hope, bereaved Of old friends, by the new deceived, Too ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... 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 after his ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... 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
... 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 Wanta's birch canoe, In it stood Anptu-spa—in her arms her sleeping child; Like a wailing Norse-land drapa [c] rose her ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... 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
... of the hall was usually open, and thither 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 ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... appears in fragmentary and lyrical shape, but in a purer version, without additions from the new faith or from mediaeval chivalry. It is in the Sigurd-, Fafnir-, Brynhild-, Gudrun-, Oddrun-, Atli-, and Hamdir Lays of the Norse Scripture that the original nature of the older German songs, which must have preceded the epic, can best be guessed. Rhapsodic lays, referring to Siegfried, were, in all probability, part of the collection ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... 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. ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... not send out much more than half our fleet if a pinch came, because we have not enough real sailors. Is it not well for us, as Britons, to care as much as we can for our own hardy flesh and blood—the finest pilots, the cleverest seamen, the bravest men in the world? They would fight in the old Norse fashion if it came to that, and they would be the exact sort of ready-made bluejackets needed to man the swarms of Wasps which must, some day, be ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... Norse maiden in Horlingdal. The father of the maid favoured the elder warrior; the ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... 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 ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... Science Monthly." This and the "Geographic" and "Current Events" were regularly taken by her and most thoroughly digested. She read with keen intelligence; her comments were as shrewd as a knife-edge. The chair she sat in was made from elk-horns and looked like the throne of some Norse chieftain. Behind her on the wall hung the stuffed head of a huge walrus, his tusks gleaming, the gift of that exploring brother who seemed to be her only living relative. There were other tokens of his wanderings, a polar-bear skin, an ivory Eskimo spear. As a more homelike trophy ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... 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 ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... 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 points to wide contrasts and extremes. Culture kills his exaggeration, his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... 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, ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... thing if ever a fellow 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 ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... fairy charm. As the Saxon names of places, with the pleasant wholesome smack of the soil in them,— Weathersfield, Thaxted, Shalford,—are to the Celtic names of places, with their penetrating, lofty beauty,—Velindra, Tyntagel, Caernarvon,— so is the homely realism of German and Norse nature to the fairy-like loveliness of Celtic nature. Gwydion wants a wife for his pupil: "Well," says Math, "we will seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him out of flowers. So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... The barditus of Tacitus, or the "din" made by the Norse "bards" (skalds) on shields and with shouts as they rushed into battle. It is not in Molbech, but Snorro frequently uses it in his Chronica, 1633.—43. Kalevala: Title of the great Finnish epic, of ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... remembered, are not, in general, a sea-going folk. They have always neglected the rich fisheries of their coasts; and in Ireland every seaport owes its existence, not to the natives, but to Norse colonists. Even now, the Irishman or Western Highlander, who emigrates to escape the "Saxons," sails in a ship built and manned by those very "Saxons," to lands which the Saxons have discovered and civilized. But in the seventh and eighth centuries, ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... of the fair Norse type, so akin to the Greek in adventurous spirit. Dunn was of the dark, stocky, imperial Roman type. In a toga he would ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... Newport. He may have helped to carve the rock at West Newbury, or the better-known Dighton rock at Taunton River that is covered with inscriptions which the tides and frosts are fast effacing, and which have been construed into a record of Norse exploration and discovery, though some will have it that the inevitable Captain Kidd cut the figures there to tell of buried treasure. The Indians have a legend of the arrival of white men in a "bird," undoubtedly a ship, from ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... 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
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... 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 ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... Heimskringla, I have been able to give the 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 ...
— An Icelandic Primer - With Grammar, Notes, and Glossary • Henry Sweet
... 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, of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... 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. When he has slain the murderer and ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... sources of information both written and oral, but the Saga itself in its present form appears to contain the story of Theodoric as current in the neighbourhood of Bremen and Muenster, translated into the old Norse language, and no doubt somewhat modified by the influence of Scandinavian legends on the mind of the translator. In its present form it is not a poem but a prose work, and though the flow of the ballad and the twang of the minstrel's ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... 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 ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 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 h, represented Fergunni by Hercynia, and, in fine, he ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... extracts have been placed at his disposal by the following authors and publishers:—Mr. Ruskin and Mr. William Allingham; Mr. Nimmo (for extract from Hugh Miller's works); Mr. Nelson (for poems by Mr. and Mrs. Howitt); Messrs. Edmonston and Douglas (for extract from Dasent's "Tales from the Norse"); Messrs. Chapman and Hall (for extracts from the works of Charles Dickens and Mr. Carlyle); Messrs. Longmans, Green, and Co. (for extracts from the works of Macaulay and Mr. Froude); Messrs. Routledge and Co. (for extracts from Miss Martineau's works); ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... came in 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 in ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... 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
... me, and for a fortnight after I 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 the Swedenborgian philosophy ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... ideas of strength, daring, and superhuman stature; and an undefinable curiosity for all that is connected with the Danish race began to pervade me; and if, long after, when I became a student, I devoted myself with peculiar zest to Danish lore and the acquirement of the old Norse tongue and its dialects, I can only explain the matter by the early impression received at Hythe from the tale of the old sexton, beneath the pent-house, and the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... 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
... an 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 artistic ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... unsurpassed, wrote of his complete skill in the Scandinavian languages, and his "copious body of translations from their popular minstrelsies, not at all to be confounded with that of certain versifiers. . . . His Norse ditties have the unforgeable stamp of authenticity on every line." W. Bodham Donne, a well-known critic, even went so far as to rank them above Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome." A fine facsimile edition of Borrow's "Romantic Ballads" was brought ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... 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 Stories from the New Testament Robin ...
— Lists of Stories and Programs for Story Hours • Various
... 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
... 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 room where she went to sleep ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... 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 his wealth. ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Orkneys through 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 ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... This verb is allied to various words in different languages signifying movement, course or journey: —to the Sanscrit Il, ila, to go; to the Russian Gulliat, to stroll, to walk about; to the Turkish Iel, a journey; to the Jol of the Norse, and the Yule of the Anglo-Saxons, terms applied to Christmas-tide, but which properly mean the circular journey which the sun has completed at that season: for what are Jol and Yule but the Ygul of the Hebrews? who call the zodiac 'Ygul ha mazaluth,' or the circle of the signs. ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... 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
... 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 they are derived. "The Building ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... 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 ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... 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, ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... favour, 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... lessening the 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 ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... amenities of life among this wild, 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 is lasting. Hence there is much ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... devoted auburn head. Truly, I believe that an evil star attends my course in Wallencamp. My own ideas seem strange to me. I cannot grasp them. My language is wild and disconnected, I fancy, like that of the early Norse poets. When I meet you in the world, I shall hope to recover some of the old-time coherence and felicity of speech which I remember to have heard practised among the world's people; and it isn't long now, thank Heaven, before ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... existence of a deep prehistoric background, richer than is commonly 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 the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... they established themselves in Stanhope Gate than he perceived to his dismay a return of her old absorbed and brooding manner. She would sit, staring in front of her, her chin on her hand, like a little Norse spirit, grim and intent, while all around in the electric light, then just installed, shone the great, drawing-room brocaded up to the frieze, full of furniture from Baple and Pullbred's. And in the huge gilt mirror were reflected those ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... normally imaginative town-bred 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 ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... 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, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • 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 Secret ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... 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 When the western ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... or for inventing one, is not lost. He is characteristic of a fine, bold race. Long may he wave! It is true that we cannot lie as gloriously as our ancestors did about him. When the great news-dealer of Norse times had no home-news he took his lyre, and either spun a yarn about Vinland such as would smash the "Telegraph," or else sung about "that sea-snake tremendous curled, whose girth encircles half the world." It is wonderful, it is awful, ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland |
