"Norse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... London in Hereford 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
... 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, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... that he named his 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
... and oiled, the goods 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 ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which Joseph Priestley did the work which lay before him, and then, as the Norse Sagas say, went out of the story. The work itself was of the most varied kind. No human interest was without its attraction for Priestley, and few men have ever had so many irons in the fire at once; but, though he may have burned ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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 ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... 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 ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... 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
... lofty tower and west front. Brightlingsea, which appears in Domesday, is a member of the Cinque Port of Sandwich in Kent. Near the opposite shore of the creek is St Osyth's priory, which originated as a nunnery founded by Osyth, a grand-daughter of Penda, king of Mercia, martyred (c. 653) by Norse invaders. A foundation for Augustinian canons followed on the site early in the 12th century. The remains, incorporated with a modern residence, include a late Perpendicular gateway, abbots' tower, clock ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... 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
... here renounce our 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 are ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... 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 alien both in time and in the ethics from which they are derived. "The ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... stranger, looking more like a Norse war god than a mere human being, reached one signal after another, he passed it without pausing for examination until he had gained a point about half way to the coast. Then he came to an abrupt halt and studied the surrounding snow intently. He had ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... that exactly the same tradition is reechoed by the mountains of Norway and Sweden in the ballad of "Sir Olaf and the Erl-king's Daughter," which the milkmaid of Brittany sings in the lay of the "Sieur Nann and the Korigan," and in a language radically different from the Norse,—when, here and there, the same forms of superstition meet us in the ancient popular poetry of the Servians and modern Greeks, which were familiar to the Teutonic and Cambrian races of early centuries,—must we not believe in a primeval ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... they dashed past 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 he had been sitting there, when a little bright-eyed ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... confesses his sins to his doctor, and when that ghostly friend has heard all, he sings and plays the tambour, invoking the spirit to descend on the sick man. The singing of barbarous songs was part of classical spiritualism; the Norse witch, in The Saga of Eric the Red, insisted on the song of Warlocks being chanted, which secured the attendance of 'many powerful spirits'; and modern spiritualists enliven their dark and dismal programme by songs. Presently the Hareskin physician blows on the ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... the cottage with the arnica for Maren, they have returned to Smutty-Nose. John, her husband, is there. He is a young man of the true Norse type, blue-eyed, fair-haired, tall and well made, with handsome teeth and bronzed beard. Perhaps he is a little quiet and undemonstrative generally, but at this moment he is superb, kindled from head to feet, a firebrand of woe and wrath, with eyes that flash ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... 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
... novelist, 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 ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... there 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 prose version ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... "Popular 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 ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... these verbal inflexions were well known and extensively used. We have to choose between several localities, but if we assign the poems to Lancashire we are enabled to account for the large number of Norse terms employed. It is true that the ancient examples of the Lancashire dialect contained in Mr. Robson's Metrical Romances,[31] the Boke of Curtasye,[32] and Liber Cure Cocorum,[33] present us with much broader forms, as -us for -es in the plural number and possessive case of ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... transmitted 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 ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... (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
... 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 ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... of Norway it used to be believed that on Christmas Eve, at rare intervals, the old Norse gods made war on Christians, coming down from the mountains with great blasts of wind and wild shouts, and carrying off any human being who might be about. In one place the memory of such a visitation was preserved in the nineteenth century. The people were preparing for their festivities, ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... went off to Iceland, returned to rummage in the libraries 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
... 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
... Olaf, the Swedish king, and Earl 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 ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... 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
... As the Fates were represented by the ancient Greeks as spinning the destinies of men, so the Norns in the Norse mythology are said to weave the destinies of the heroes ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... 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 Language, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... in recent years. The most remarkable of them are Mr. Colin MacAlpin's 'The Cross and the Crescent,' which won the prize offered by Mr. Charles Manners in 1903 for an English opera, and Mr. Nicholas Gatty's 'Greysteel,' a very able and musicianly setting of an episode from one of the Norse sagas, which was produced at Sheffield ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... an infusion 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 ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... a certain laxity as to the marriage rite, 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 the marriage rite with the ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... despair upon the whiter bank. The bare, writhing branches of yonder sombre oak-grove are steeped in snow, and in the misty air they look so remote and foreign that there is not a wild creature of the Norse mythology who might not stalk from beneath their haunted branches. Buried races, Teutons and Cimbri, might tramp solemnly forth from those weird arcades. The soft pines on this nearer knoll seem separated from them by ages and generations. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... 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 Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... to Washington 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 Latin, to Athens to study Greek. In all parts ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... of Glasgow, and Clan MacLean Association of 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 Gospel, ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... to be of native English growth and to have come down to us from the times of the Danish invasions is the story of King Horn; but although "King Horn," like "Havelok the Dane," was originally a story of Viking raids, it has been so altered that the Norse element has been nearly obliterated. In all but the bare circumstances of the tale, "King Horn" is a romance of chivalry, permeated with the Crusading spirit, and reflecting the life and customs of the thirteenth century, instead of the more barbarous ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... 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
... character, the most notable of all being a white pony called Tinker. At some remote and unidentified period of her life she had bucked and killed a tradesman who bestrode her against her will, and thereby, as in the old Norse legends, she has inherited his strength, his wickedness, and his name. And when, after many adventures, I came back from this strange land and told the story of its fishes other men were sent out from Washington ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... have been remote, did a golden-bearded man come to foregather with a woman who 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 ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... 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 ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... interesting to know that King Olaf Tryggvasson, on one of his early Viking expeditions, was baptized in the Scilly Isles, that as his second wife he married an Irish Princess, and that for some time he lived in Dublin. To the Norwegians he is a Norse hero of the greatest renown, who during his short reign of barely five years never ceased to force Christianity on the heathen population, and who, at the age of thirty-one, came to an untimely end. His fleet was ambuscaded and surrounded, and when his men had made their last stand ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... 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 afterwards ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... it is stated that the ballads are translated from Oehlensloeger, and from the Kiaempe Viser, the old Norse ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... "that was just a legend, and the Greeks made it into a play. It was just like the German stories of Thor and the Norse gods that Wagner used in his operas. They're wonderful, and all that, but folks don't take them seriously. ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... 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 ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... 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 all manner of plants, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... not long in obtaining European celebrity by his brilliant playing of his own pieces and arrangements. His first visit to the United States lasted from 1843 to 1845, and on his return to Norway he formed a scheme for the establishment of a Norse theatre in Bergen; this became an accomplished fact in 1850; but in consequence of harassing business complications he went again to America. During this visit (1852-1857) he bought 125,000 acres in Potter county, Pennsylvania, for a Norwegian colony, which was to have been called Oleana ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... swallowing a big bouncer, 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
... 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. When hides were hung on the City Walls ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... differed widely from that of the other Spanish republics of South America. Its nucleus was a large immigration of Canary Islanders. These were descendants of Spaniards and the native Guanches of the Canaries, mingled also with Norman, Flemish and Moorish blood.[153] The Norse on their way to Iceland may have picked up a Celtic element in the islands north of Scotland; but from the Faroe group onward they found only empty Iceland and Greenland. This was an exceptional experience. Early navigation, owing to its limitations, purposely restricted ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... 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. When he has slain the murderer and given me the castle again, I will come back; and ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... 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 not only the dramatic ability of the dramatist himself, but also, after perhaps ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... In all 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... 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 ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... 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 ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... 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 died in ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... 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 ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... 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
... 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 ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... Northern Europe. "Do you renounce the devils, and all their words and works; Thonar, Wodin, and Saxenote?" was part of the form of recantation administered to the Scandinavian converts;[1] and at the present day "Odin take you" is the Norse equivalent of "the devil take you." On the other hand, an attempt was made to identify Balda "the beautiful" with Christ—a confusion of character that may go far towards accounting for a custom joyously observed by our forefathers at Christmastide but which the false modesty ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... 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 ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Ban!" she cried. "Maker of kings and mayors and things. Skoal! As you're a viking or something of the sort, the Norse salutation is appropriate." ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... following: A gentleman called at the White House one day, and 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 these he was perfectly familiar. From the Bible, as has before ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... 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
... 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 of mediaeval ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... 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 ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... 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. The same library published ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... 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
... 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 sense and experience ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... 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. How far deeper is ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... over into the Scandinavian countries, and the Norse Sea-kings. This Markgraviate did not last long under that title. I guess, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 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
... 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
... York City, of Norse descent; parents Wisconsin pioneers; studied art in Boston; became member ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... the winds 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 ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... the richness, fertility, and beauty of the island had fully spread throughout Denmark and Norway, a large fleet gathered in the harbors of the Baltic and put to sea. The famous Turgesius or Turgeis—Thorgyl in the Norse—was the leader. The Edda and Sagas of Norway and Denmark have been examined with a view to elucidate this passage in Irish history, but thus far fruitlessly. It is known, however, that many Sagas have been lost which ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... character. Rome, a famous but mystical city to the northern pagans, whose imaginations invested it with untold wealth and splendor, was the proposed goal of the enterprising Norseman, who hoped to make himself fabulously wealthy from its plunder. With a hundred ships, filled with hardy Norse pirates, he swept through the Strait of Gibraltar and along the coasts of Spain and France, plundering as he went till he reached ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... popular serial. There is nothing essentially heroic in life-saving. Indeed, all the old heroes of Norseland, Rome, and Greece regarded the saving of life with a contempt that was only natural when we consider the utter lack of board schools and their frantic belief in a hereafter. I imagine the Norse Sea-kings who pushed out to Vine-land—aye, even down to Cape Cod—would have been puzzled to hear an undersized clerk who had saved a man from a watery grave described as a hero. Their method was to pull the drowning wretch ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... Brahma^, Brahma^, cloud-compeller, Devi, Durga, Kali, oread^, the Great Spirit, Ushas; water nymph, wood nymph; Yama, Varuna, Zeus; Vishnu [Hindu deities], Siva, Shiva, Krishna, Juggernath^, Buddha; Isis [Egyptian deities], Osiris, Ra; Belus, Bel, Baal^, Asteroth &c; Thor [Norse deities], Odin; Mumbo Jumbo; good genius, tutelary genius; demiurge, familiar; sibyl; fairy, fay; sylph, sylphid; Ariel^, peri, nymph, nereid, dryad, seamaid, banshee, benshie^, Ormuzd; Oberon, Mab, hamadryad^, naiad, mermaid, kelpie^, Ondine, nixie, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... particularly frequent. The whole nomenclature of the lower Thames navigation, as Canon Isaac Taylor has pointed out, is Scandinavian to this day. Deptford (the deep fiord), Greenwich (the green reach), and Woolwich (the hill reach) all bear good Norse names. So do the Foreness, the Whiteness, Shellness, Sheerness, Shoeburyness, Foulness, Wrabness, and Orfordness. Walton-on-the-Naze near Harwich in like manner still recalls the time when a Danish 'wall'—that is to say, a vallum, or earthwork—ran across the isthmus ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... the young American as he appeared that day at Madame Choudey's; and he looked like one of the pictured Norse sea kings as he towered, sallow and bronzed, back of the vivacious Frenchmen and their neighbors of the ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... 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 ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... 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 ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... 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 ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... 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, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... 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 ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... 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 of ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... 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 to the imagination of successive generations of skalds; ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... 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 this time, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... There 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 ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... friends the trail was exceedingly "hot," as he expressed 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 up with the marauders before they joined in with the others. In that case he would consider ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... years female (1992) Total fertility rate: 2.2 children born/woman (1992) Nationality: noun - Faroese (singular and plural); adjective - Faroese Ethnic divisions: homogeneous Scandinavian population Religions: Evangelical Lutheran Languages: Faroese (derived from Old Norse), Danish Literacy: NA% (male NA%, female NA%) Labor force: 17,585; largely engaged in fishing, manufacturing, transportation, and commerce ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... 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
... attempt of Claudius to have been favoured by the lingering influence of the old Norse custom of succession, by which not the son but ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... twenty years older than myself—would know that true love never 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
... 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 ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... 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 was considered ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... 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 of advanced ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... 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 ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... far 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 ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... 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 compact, that after the death of either, ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 south ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... based on that of the country districts, as opposed to the literary language, which is practically the same as Danish. The maal is more closely related to Old Norse. — Tr. ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... lodgment and spray of mid-Atlantic roller, and dust of that 1100 miles of railroad since New York was left behind, but still with many traces, under dust and seediness, of Scandinavian rustic fashion; altogether a homely people, but destined ere long to lose every vestige of their old Norse habits under the grindstone of the great mill they are now entering. That vast human machine Which grinds Celt and Saxon, Teuton and Dane, Fin and Goth into the same image and likeness of the inevitable Yankee—grinds him too into that image in one ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... 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 ...
— The Treasure • Selma Lagerlof
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... Here is a people with no people at their backs, driving the great world-plough which wins the world's bread up and up over the shoulder of the world—a spectacle, as it might be, out of some tremendous Norse legend. North of them lies Niflheim's enduring cold, with the flick and crackle of the Aurora for Bifrost Bridge that Odin and the Aesir visited. These people also go north year by year, and drag audacious railways with them. Sometimes they burst into good wheat or timber ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... otherwise she would not have needed our 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 armed ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 captained and made fortunes out of far sea adventuring. ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... work has been done in so 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 workmen and sailors, asking them ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... 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 ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... 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, ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... 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 and chanted ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... (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
... 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 way, the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... course no other than the roar of Curly's gun in the act of bursting and vanishing; for neither stock, lock, nor barrel was ever seen again. It left the world like a Norse king on his fire-ship. But, at the moment, Alec was too busy in the depths of his snow-vault to hear ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... 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 course, the adventurer ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... extrasolar planets, 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 of the ...
— Graveyard of Dreams • Henry Beam Piper
... and the All-father (Alfadhir). From the union of heaven and earth, there springs the god Thunar or Donar among the Germans, Thor among the Norsemen, the bold god of thunder who wages war against the enemies of gods and men. Besides these there are the sons of Wodan, Fro (German), Freyx (Norse), the god of peace, Zio (German), Tyx (Norse), the god of war, Aki (German), Oegir (Norse), god of the sea, Vol (German), Ullr (Norse), god of hunting, and others, to whom are joined female divinities, such as Nerthus (German), Joerdh ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... 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 ...
— Harper's Young People, March 9, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... 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 ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... "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 ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... 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. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... a stone 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, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Carlisle - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. King Eley
... jewelled ornaments, bespoke him no commonplace adventurer. But the most striking feature in his appearance was his hair, which fell in sunny locks upon his shoulders from under his velvet hat with its spreading plume. In truth he looked more like a Norse Viking of old than a ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... significant, as Canon Isaac Taylor has shown, of the necessary connection between salt and the sea. The earliest known way of producing salt was of course in shallow pans on the sea-shore, at the bottom of a shoal bay, called in Norse and Early English a wick or wich; and the material so produced is still known in trade as bay-salt. By-and-by, when people came to discover the inland brine-pits and salt mines, they transferred to them the familiar ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... "Traill," it seems to me, would be meaning in the English, "lazy, useless, bedraggled"; but there is no word in English that would be giving the contempt of that word, which I am thinking would have some connection with the Norse word "troll," but I am not sure of it. But there was no end to ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... 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
... 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
... we obtain some valuable information. First, we find that in the old Norse, or language of the ancient Scandinavians, the sun is always feminine, and the moon masculine. In the Voelu-Spa, a grand, ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... Olaf came of hardy Norse stock. His father, Harald Graenske, or "Greymantle," 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, ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... 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 which Karl the Great, the Frankish Kaiser, ordered to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... life has for the student all the charm of the traveler's real journey through the pleasant valleys of the Norse lands. Much of this charm is explained by the tenacity of the people to the homely virtues of honesty and thrift, to their customs which testify to their home-loving character, and to their quaint costumes. It is a ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... custom among the Norse vikings—a warrior, at the approach of death from natural causes, embarking alone in his vessel, floating out to sea, and setting it afire, that he ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 - Volume III, 1569-1576 • E.H. Blair
... unwieldy, and intractable brute, not comparing for a moment with the dog in intelligence or adaptability. The common notion that his name is derived from the use of reins in driving him, thus putting him in the class with the horse, is a mistake; the word comes from a Norse root which refers to his moss-browsing habit. The "rein" with which he is driven is a rope tied around one of his horns. He has no cognisance of "gee" and "haw," nor of any other vocal direction, but must ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... main 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 story yields ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... illustrated volumes embody the fullest account of our Norse ancestors extant. Mr. Du Chaillu has gone very fully and very carefully over the whole of his ground. This extensive and important work must be of high interest to all ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... the Norwegian 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 ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... 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 left us such a collection of narratives (Sagas, literally "Says") ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... appearance, for there were more light-haired and blue-eyed men by this name in the place than any one, having the popular idea of what an Italian looks like, would believe could be found in a town of the same size in America. Trying to account for the Norse look of many of the Segnians, and the Oriental look of many others, Caper climbed up to the top of the mountain above the town, and seating himself in the shadow of the old Cyclopean wall, looked down the mountain side to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... road winding between the wavelike hills that rose and fell on every side of the horizon, with a long illimitable sinuous look, as if they were a part of the line of the Great Serpent, which the Norse legend says girdles the world. The day was lead-coloured; the road had stone factories alongside of it,—grey, dull-coloured rows of stone cottages belonging to these factories, and then we came to ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... antiquarians make the "white-man's land" (Hvitramannaland) extend down as far as Florida, on the very Gulf of Mexico. It is curious to notice the coincidence between the remark of Bernal Diaz, that the Mexicans called their priests papa (more properly papahua), and that in the old Norse Chronicle, which tells of the first colonization of Iceland by the Northmen, and relates that they found living there "Christian men whom the Northmen call Papa." These latter are shown by the context to have been Irish priests. The Aztec root teo ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... 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 far future "standing a chance" ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... As the Norse peoples, in their land which for so large a part of the year was ice-bound, dreaded the long, hard winter, and looked forward to the blessings brought by the summer, they imagined that the evil forces in the world ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... from old Europe between its waking and the age of Pericles? Some poetry, legends, and unimportant history from Greece; some legends from Rome; the spirit or substance of the Norse sagas; the spirit or substance of the Welsh Mabinogi and the Arthurian atmosphere; and of the Irish tales of the Red Branch and Fenian cycles. The actual tales as we get them were no doubt retold in much ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... in his home at Wittemberg; and the Marseillaise of the Reformation, as that grand hymn of his has been called, came, words and music, from his heart. There was humour in him, coarse horseplay often; an honest, hearty, broad laugh frequently, like that of a Norse god. There were coarse tastes in him, tastes of the peasant folk from whom he came, which clung to him through life, and kept him in sympathy with the common people, and intelligible to them. And withal there was a constitutional ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... hulder in the Norse folk-lore appears like a beautiful woman, and usually wears a blue petticoat and a white sword; but she unfortunately has a long tail, like a cow's, which she anxiously strives to conceal when she ...
— A Happy Boy • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... 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 ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... 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 ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... however, is a very different thing from a delight in extravagance. That, too, is a universal passion, but not so native to the Teuton as to Celt or Finn or Oriental. Its absence is what most differentiates Old Norse literature from Old Irish, with which it so early came into contact. It is in travelers' tales and in the tales of seamen and in the writing that was based on these, in rare moments of religious or romantic ecstasy, or in borrowings from Celt or Oriental ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt |
