"Viking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... power. When Nelson destroyed and captured the Danish fleet at Copenhagen, the Danes consoled themselves by saying that only a leader of their own blood could have conquered them, and that Nelson's name showed he came of the Viking line. ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... in the mystery, the passion, the strength of the elements, as did the Viking chroniclers of old. He understands them and loves them and interprets them as no other writer has heretofore done. The book is too big for conventional phrases. It needs Mr. Roberts's own richness of imagery and masterly ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... car of Juggernaut, or from the stern of a South Sea canoe; or, most of all, to that famous wooden image of Freya, which once leapt lumbering forth from her bullock-cart, creaking and rattling in every oaken joint, to belabour the too daring Viking who was flirting with her priestess. Even so, whispered Elsley, did those brains and tongues creak and rattle, lumbering before the blasts of Pythonic inspiration; and so, he verily believed, would the awkward arms and legs have done likewise, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... close at hand; a splashing of poles in the water; a rippling of eddies against a boat's bows! As the boy drifts by, a blue-eyed, yellow-bearded viking swings himself from the halyard, catches him, pulls him aboard with a jerk and a shout, safe! The long grin snaps emptily together behind him. The boy lies on the deck, a vision of people with leg-coverings and other oddities of costume swimming in his eyes; one ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... the Viking age, who, like John Smith, six hundred years afterward, found in Vinland "a pleasant land to see," understood so little of the importance of what they had found, that, by the next century, their discovery had virtually been forgotten in all Scandinavia. It seems never to have become known anywhere ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... perhaps more fortunate) than the speed with which the past is forgotten. Brandon might have been all his days the odd, muttering, eye-wandering figure that he now appeared. Where was the Viking now? Where the finest specimen of physical health in all Glebeshire? Where the King and Crowned Monarch ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... York. A battle was fought between the Mercians and Norwegians at Fulford, in which the former were worsted, but Harold was marching northward. In the fearful battle of Stamford Bridge both Harold Hardrada and Tostig were slain, and the Viking host was shattered. The victorious English king was banqueting in celebration of the great victory, when a messenger appeared who had come at fleetest pace from ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... comparatively little explored, and is, therefore replete with freshness and delight. This little book can not by any means more than lift the curtain to view the fields of historical and literary interest and the wondrous life lived in the deep fiords of Viking land. But its brief pages will have, at least, the merit of giving information on a subject about which only too little has been written. Taken in all, there are scarcely half a dozen recent books circulating in American literary channels on these interesting lands, and for one reason or another, ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... vigorous is his ballad of The Skeleton in Armor (1840). The Viking hero of the tale, like young Lochinvar, won the heart of the heroine, the blue-eyed ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... made by the late James Drummond, R.S.A., combines the chief weapons mentioned in The Story of Burnt Njal: Gunnar's bill, Skarphedinn's axe, and Kari's sword, bound together by one of the great silver rings found in a Viking's hoard in Orkney. ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... "Broder the Viking rushed upon him in his tent where he was praying, cleft his head from his body, and he is buried in Armagh Cathedral," said Salemina, closing the book. "Penelope, do ring again for breakfast, and just to keep us from realising our hunger read 'Remember the Glories of ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the traditions of the Nile and Trafalgar? As a matter of fact, in the war which followed, the commerce of the United States was swept out of existence. But the Americans were of the same fighting stock as the English; to the Viking blood, indeed, they added Yankee ingenuity and resource, making a very formidable combination; and up to the June morning when the Shannon was waiting outside Boston Harbour for the Chesapeake, the naval honours of the war ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... through the mirk wood till I turned and slew, and armed myself, and tormented my prisoner; then to the collier's hut, and my talking with the child; then on till I saw the lights of the viking ships and so thereafter bore the war arrow—everything, till at last I saw myself sleeping under the trees, on the top of this hill of Combwich, and there I thought my dream would surely end; but it ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... with one guard provided, One nation only and one will. The spirit of our nation's morn, The unity of free gods dreaming, And all things great to be great deeming, Forever must the spurious scorn. The spirit that impelled the viking 'Gainst kingly power for freedom striking,— That, threatened, sailed to Iceland strong With hero-fame and hero-song, And further on through all the ages,— That spirit never dwells in cages. The spirit that at Hjrung broke For thousand years the foreign ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... Polchester created. Many of the Polchester ladies thought that he was like "a Greek God" (the fact that they had never seen one gave them the greater confidence), and Miss Dobell, who was the best read of all the ladies in our town, called him "the Viking." This stuck to him, being an easy and emphatic word ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... viking in his bigness that once, on a picnic, he had carried two girls, screaming their fun, across twenty feet of stream. Hester was one ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... house except one boy are said to have perished. This boy now became king as "Horicus junior." Of his reign we know practically nothing. The next kings mentioned are Sigafrid and Halfdane, who were sons of the great Viking leader Ragnarr Lobrok. There is also mention of a third king named Godefridus. The exact chronology and relationship of these kings it is impossible to determine, but we know that Healfdene died ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... are the stately ships that northward steam away, And gray sails northward blow black hulls, and many more are they; And myriads of viking gulls flap to the northern seas: But Oh my thoughts that go to you are more ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... wonderfully fascinating. Only a daring spirit, the explorer of the type that is born, not made, could have pierced those vast solitudes and wrested from them the secret of their existence. That Hedin had no money for such a costly quest could not deter this Viking of the Northland. Kings headed the subscription and others so eagerly followed that ample funds were soon in hand. Princes helped with equipment and counsel. The Czar made all Russian railways free highways, and every local official and nomad chieftain exerted ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... was such a ship, taut, well kept, larger than the Viking longboats Ross had watched on the tapes of the Project's collection, yet most like those far-faring Terran craft. The prow curved up in a mighty bowsprit where was the carved likeness of the sea ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... action was a fiery indignation at the spectacle of the Spanish monopoly of the New World. No sentiment could stir more of English sympathy. The people heartily shared his determination to rival Spain, and to pillage Spain. He had the Viking spirit, and he burnt with a freebooter's passion for the sea. But he had an intuition also of the national capacity for colonization, in which the purest patriot must have concurred. He was resolved to direct the maritime ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... of Iceland begins about the year 860, when a viking living on the Faroe Islands who was on his way home from Norway, being driven far northward of his course, came to an unknown coast. Climbing a high rock and looking around, he beheld no signs of life; before he could return to his ship, however, a sudden ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... going over the Pitt-Rivers collection, at the Oxford University Museum, to find that in the model of a Viking boat the steering gear is arranged in almost exactly the same manner as that of the modern Malay canoe; and indeed, the lines generally of the two ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... his years, Chichester might easily have been, and indeed often was, mistaken for a young man of twenty-one or twenty-two. While Stukely was spare of frame and sallow of complexion, Chichester possessed the frame, stature, and colouring of a young Viking, being already within a quarter of an inch of six feet two inches in height, although he had by no means done growing, broad in proportion, with eyes of steel blue, and a shock of curly hair which his friends would in these latter days have called auburn, while his enemies—if ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... portraitures and attractive episodes, but never reaching the point of artistic roundness and grace.[1759] The adventures of Odin, Thor, Loki, and other divine persons reflect for the most part the daring and savagery of the viking age, though there are kindly features and an occasional touch of humor.[1760] Loki in some stories is a genuine villain, and the death of Balder is a real tragedy. The great cosmogonic and eschatological myths are conceived in grandiose style. The ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... steppes of Russia as the ice-caps retreated . . . reembodied on the Baltic coast or the shores of the North Sea . . . sleeping for ages in one of the Megaliths, to rise again a daughter of the Brythons, or of a Norse Viking . . . west into Anglia to appear once more as a Priestess of the Druids chaunting in a sacred grove . . . or as Boadicea—who knows! But no prose can regenerate that shadowy time. I see it—prehistory—as a swaying mass of ghostly multitudes, ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... a Norwegian hero, grandson of Viking, who was the largest and strongest man of his time. Viking had sailed the sea in a dragon ship, meeting with many adventures, and Thorsten, Frithiof's father, had likewise sailed abroad, capturing many priceless treasures and making a great ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... Randi." These stand midway between Gray's "Descent of Odin" and the later work of Longfellow, William Morris and others. Since Gray, little or nothing of the kind had been attempted; and Motherwell gave perhaps the first expression in English song of the Berserkir rage and the Viking passion for battle ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... porch; but these made way for the two strangers; and, as Bickersteth was recognized by two or three present, place was found for them. Inside, the old man stared round him in a confused and troubled way, but his motions were quiet and abstracted, and he looked like some old viking, his workaday life done, come to pray ere he went hence forever. They had entered in a pause in the concert, but now two ladies came forward to the chancel steps, and one with her hands clasped before her, began ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... with the Finnish flag. He, with twenty-three friends, had just been to Sweden for a gymnastic competition, in which Finland had won great honours, and no wonder, if the rest of the twenty-three were as well-made and well-built as this hardy descendant of a Viking race. ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... meet the Viking bold, if he The succour of the band, should be Found faltering or in despair? Until that day the Fians ne'er Of ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... they were all that he could do; the proposed Scotch play, the proposed series of Scotch tales in verse, all had gone to water; and in a fling of pain and disappointment, which is surely noble with the nobility of a viking, he would rather stoop to borrow than to accept money for these last and inadequate efforts of his muse. And this desperate abnegation rises at times near to the height of madness; as when he pretended that he had not written, but only found ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... skies are dark, And the stars scarce show us a meteor spark; Yet buoyantly bounds our gallant barque, Through billows that flash in a sea of blue; We are coursing free, like the Viking shark, And ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... at Brattalithe in Ericsfrith, had been a notable man all his life, and a man of mettle. In Earl Hakon's day in Norway he had been a Viking, had made a few friends and many enemies; then he had gone out to Iceland and founded a family in the west country, which might have endured to this day if it had not been for his headstrong way of doing. But, as before, he made more enemies than friends; ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... ourselves to sleep,' or rather let the waves perform that office for us. I shall make it my care to-morrow morning early, if you still hold the helm, to show you my sketch, and convince you that it was never made for fun at all, but that it is a real portrait of a very fine-looking seaman, a real viking in appearance, and somewhat better than one at heart, I trust. I shall hope to earn your good opinion instead of ill-will, when you ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... stroke had sounded the girl was made aware of the betraying light. She whirled out of Rackby's arms and ran toward Sam Dreed. The big viking stood with his feet planted well apart, and a mistrustful ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the Middle Ages; for example, Charlemagne, King Alfred, Rollo the Viking, William the Conqueror, Frederick Barbarossa, Richard the Lion-Hearted, King John, Saint Louis of France, Marco Polo, ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... seat of Viking raiders and later a major north European power, Denmark has evolved into a modern, prosperous nation that is participating in the general political and economic integration of Europe. However, the country has opted out of European Union's Maastricht ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... Neeland saw Golden Beard turn on Doc Curfoot, raging, magnificent as a Viking, his blue eyes ablaze. He hurled his empty pistol at the American; seized chairs, bronzes, andirons, the clock from the mantel, and sent a storm of heavy missiles through the doorway among the knot of men who were pressing him and who ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... as truly as that of the plantation negro, they vanished from the sea with a breed of men who, for all their faults, possessed the valor of the Viking and the fortitude of the Spartan. Outcasts ashore—which meant to them only the dance halls of Cherry Street and the grog-shops of Ratcliffe Road—they had virtues that were as great as their failings. Across the intervening years, with a pathos indefinable, ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... of the death of "King" Waldon, down in Samoa—Waldon, the trader, of the vanishing race of island adventurers—and he expected to travel about the south seas investigating the "king's" past, so he could write a book about the old viking. He had heard that Captain Shreve had known Waldon. Hence, he was honoring a cargo carrier with his presence instead of taking his ease ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... Karlsefne, are recounted in the Sagas. The story of these early colonists or "builders," as they called themselves, is weakened by an infusion of fable, such as the tale of the fast-running one-legged people; but with all allowances, the fact of Viking adventure on the American mainland is unquestioned and unquestionable, though we may say of these brave sailors, with Professor Goldwin Smith, that nothing more came of their visit, or in that age could come, than of the visit ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... Berserk, a Viking mad with battle-frenzy (the nearest modern parallel is the Malay custom of running amok), i. 39 note, ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... realism and won the discipleship of the Goncourts, Daudet, Zola, and Maupassant and the applause of such connoisseurs of technique as Walter Pater and Henry James. From his mother's Norman ancestry he inherited the physique of a giant, tainted with epilepsy; a Viking countenance, strong- featured with leonine moustaches; and a barbaric temper, habitually somewhat lethargic but irritable, and, when roused, violent and intolerant of opposition. He had a private ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... different Celtic nationalities are always recognizable. There was found in a grave-mound at Hof, in Norway, a brooch, showing at a glance that it was Christian and Celtic, though taken from the grave of a pagan Viking. Another at Berdal, in Norway, was at once recognized by M. Lorange as being undoubtedly Irish. There are many other instances of evident Celtic Christian art found on the west coast of Norway under similar conditions—probably spoil from the British Islands, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... Abel is in Pencastle on the eleventh, he can have them cancelled, and his own put up; but till then, I take my course, and woe to anyone who stands in my way!' With that he flung himself down the rocky pathway, and Sarah could not but admire his Viking strength and spirit, as, crossing the hill, he strode away along ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... purpose of the erection was to direct the navigation of Clyde by canoes, or by the long vessels of the Viking raiders, appears to me improbable. I offer, periculo meo, a different conjecture, of which I shall show reason to believe that Dr. Munro ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... for a long, long while," said Ilse, smiling. She lifted a goblet in her big, beautifully shaped hand and drained it with the vigorous grace of a Viking's daughter. ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... throng he madly thrusts, like Viking, through the press Strewing his path with buttons burst and fragments of his dress, Claiming reversal of ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... was afraid of her. A wall seemed to surround her, and nowhere could he discover any breach. Vaguely he wondered how the Viking made love to the Viking's daughter. By storm, or by guile? Yes, he was afraid of her; afraid of her because she could walk alone. He locked up his thoughts in his heart; for instinct advised him to say nothing now; this was no time ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... gallantly? Then he was Gustavus Adolphus,—for had he not come to the aid of the Protestants when they were in sore need? And then things got mixed and the "Royal Swede" was Lars Adolphus or Gustavus Porsena Viking all in one. The honest fellow was more than half crazed by strong waters, incomprehensible words, and "jollying up" which the young chaps ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... "Captains Courageous" and Jack London's "Sea Wolf," with Conrad's "Nigger of the Narcissus." Then you will have enough to turn your study into a cabin and bring the wash and surge to your cars, if written words can do it. Oh, how one longs for it sometimes when life grows too artificial, and the old Viking blood begins to stir! Surely it must linger in all of us, for no man who dwells in an island but had an ancestor in longship or in coracle. Still more must the salt drop tingle in the blood of an American when you reflect that in all that broad continent there is not one whose ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... must always be an aristocracy of those who know, and who can trace back the best which we possess, not merely to a Norman count, or a Scandinavian viking, or a Saxon earl, but to far older ancestors and benefactors, who thousands of years ago were toiling for us in the sweat of their face, and without whom we should never be what we are—the ancestors of the whole Aryan ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... pleasure in subjecting himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence for all that is severe and hard. "Wotan placed a hard heart in my breast," says an old Scandinavian Saga: it is thus rightly expressed from the soul of a proud Viking. Such a type of man is even proud of not being made for sympathy; the hero of the Saga therefore adds warningly: "He who has not a hard heart when young, will never have one." The noble and brave who think thus are the furthest removed from the morality which sees precisely in ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Cincinnatus no longer waits for the office to seek the man: He sells his brace of bullocks and buys a political boom. No more the Spartan mother gives her long black hair for bow- strings: She blondines it, paints, powders and tries to pass as the younger sister of her eldest daughter. The Norse viking no longer plows the unknown wave, his heart wilder than the wat'ry waste, his arm stronger than tempered steel: He comes to America and starts a saloon. No more the untamed Irish king caroms on the Saxon invader ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of Earl Eric, the Red, came down from Greenland with his Viking crew, which of his bearded seamen in Arctic furs leaned over the dragon prow for sight of the lone new land, fresh as if washed by the dews of earth's first morning? Was it Thorwald, Leif's brother, or the ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... tin had been his own flesh the act goaded Barton half upright into the light—a brightly naked young Viking to the waist, a vaguely shadowed equestrian ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... advancing some hundred yards away, as if they had a hundred lives to give. Let coming generations marvel. The Farewell March of the First Ten Hundred. Before the sun had reached its noon many had crossed the Groat Divide and passed the portals of Valhalla to swell the throng of their Viking forefathers. ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... a gleam of hope came with the news that "The Outlaw" was actually to be produced. And his wildest dreams were then realized, for, despite the unappreciative attitude of the critics toward this splendid Viking piece, the King, Carl XV, after seeing the play, commanded Strindberg to appear before him. Strindberg regarded the summons as the perpetration of a practical joke, and only obeyed it after making sure by telegraph that it was ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... minutes before the vessel hove in sight again round the dark rocks of the Hubbastone, as she turned up the Bideford river. Mrs. Leigh had stood that whole time perfectly motionless, a pale and scarcely breathing statue, her eyes fixed upon the Viking's rock. ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... grew stronger and keener; the din of war grew louder and louder. Byrhtnoth fought hand to hand with a strong viking, and with yet another, ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... the Viking period (A.D. 800-1050) were oval and convex, somewhat in the form of a tortoise. In their earliest form they occur in the form of a frog-like animal, itself developed from the previous Teutonic T-shaped type. With the introduction of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... the convention, he would henceforth make his home, for a part of the year at least, in the Bad Lands. He had two friends in Maine, backwoodsmen mighty with the axe, and born to the privations of the frontier, whom he decided to take with him if he could. One was "Bill" Sewall, a stalwart viking at the end of his thirties, who had been his guide on frequent occasions when as a boy in college he had sought health and good hunting on the waters of Lake Mattawamkeag; the other was Sewall's nephew, Wilmot Dow. He flung out ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... LARRY comes to the door and opens it a trifle—then, with a puzzled expression, pulls it wide. ANNA CHRISTOPHERSON enters. She is a tall, blond, fully-developed girl of twenty, handsome after a large, Viking-daughter fashion but now run down in health and plainly showing all the outward evidences of belonging to the world's oldest profession. Her youthful face is already hard and cynical beneath its layer of make-up. Her clothes are the tawdry finery of peasant stock turned prostitute. She comes and ...
— Anna Christie • Eugene O'Neill
... a lowbrowed viking be expected to understand Boston, much less what was going to be Boston in a ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... are flaming fast; From Solent's waves rise many a mast, With swelling sails of gold and red, Dragon and serpent at each head, Havoc and slaughter breathing forth, Steer on these locusts of the north. Each vessel bears a deadly freight; Each Viking, fired with greed and hate, His axe is whetting for the strife, And counting how each Christian life Shall win him fame in Skaldic lays, And in Valhalla endless praise. For Hamble's river straight they steer; Prayer ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of her church investigated Swan Carlson and his claims, finding him all that he professed to be. Hertha wrote to him; in time Swan came to visit her, a tall, long-striding man, handsomer than his picture in the paper, handsome as a Viking lord with his proud foot on the ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... straight at both ends.[80] It is curious to compare this clumsy structure with a boat recently discovered beneath a tumulus at Gogstadten in Norway (Fig. 14), of which, though it dates from historic times, we give a drawing, as it is a good illustration of the progress made. The dead Viking had been laid in his boat, as the most glorious of tombs; with its prow pointing seawards, for would not the first thoughts of the chief when he awoke in another life be of the sea which had witnessed his triumphs? The sides of the boat, which was more than sixty-six feet long and fifteen ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... old Roman tile discovered during the excavations at Silchester, and cut upon the steps of the Acropolis at Athens. When visiting the Christiania Museum a few years ago I was shown the great Viking ship that was discovered at Gokstad in 1880. On the oak planks forming the deck of the vessel were found boles and lines marking out the game, the holes being made to receive pegs. While inspecting the ancient oak furniture in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam I became interested ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... and has been twice reprinted in America. Bayard Taylor edited an American edition of a translation by Rev. William L. Blackley of Dublin, and published it about ten years ago. Professor R. B. Anderson has just published in his "Viking Tales," a translation made by Professor George Stephens of Copenhagen, and which received the ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... the Museums of Stockholm and Copenhagen, where the collection of antique woodwork of native production is very large and interesting, and proves how wood carving, as an industrial art, has flourished in Scandinavia from the early Viking times. One can still see in the old churches of Borgund and Hitterdal much of the carved woodwork of the seventh and eighth centuries; and lintels and porches full of national character are to ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... colours from the last of the colour guard. He was tall and strong and he swung them high. The glare from an exploding shell showed him and the battle flag. Gone was the quiet school-teacher, gone even the scout and woodsman. He stood a great Viking, with yellow hair, and the battle rage had come to him. He began to chant, unconscious as a harp through which strikes a strong wind. "Come on!" he chanted. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... OF BEOWULF.—The poem contains six thousand lines, in which are told the wonderful adventures of the valiant viking Beowulf, who is supposed to have fallen in Jutland in the year 340. The Danish king Hrothgar, in whose great hall banquet, song, and dance are ever going on, is subjected to the stated visits of a giant, Grendel, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... powerful, terrible "ice-giants" of the legends, out of whose ferocity, courage, vigor, and irresistible energy have been evolved the dominant races of the west of Europe—the land-grasping, conquering, colonizing races; the men of whom it was said by a Roman poet, in the Viking Age: "The sea is their school of war and the storm their friend they are sea-wolves that prey on the pillage of ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... pearls have claimed the lives of the best among them. The health and figure of the friend who beguiled many an evening were sacrificed to the lustrous gem so prized of women. A model of stalwart manhood of the Viking strain, he died early, worn out with the stress with which he sought the most serene of personal adornments. There may have been some slight exaggeration in the popular belief that he had walked along the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... They paused a moment and looked round; they saw that Louisita was not in error when she had told them that the Norsemen were at one time on the island, for there was every evidence of the mound being the tomb of a Viking. Among the bones of the horse lay the remains of a bridle and saddle of leather and wood, the mountings of which were in bronze and silver. Near that of the man lay some ring-armor, a shield-buckle, two stones of a hand-mill for grinding ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... literature, at times realistic, whose excellence is clearly seen in their descriptions of events and character, their dialogue and structure. Most of them are in fact in the nature of historical novels. The Viking view of life pervading them is characteristically heroic, but with frequent traces of the influence of ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... viking, who, though he loved me passing well, was ever on the sea, roving and fighting ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... "It's my Viking they want," laughed she: "they take his mouse in for the sake of securing him. He's such ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... lived in modern days he would undoubtedly have been a man of peace. But he lived "long long ago"—therefore he was a man of war. Being unusually fearless, his companions of the valley called him Erling the Bold. He was, moreover, extremely fond of the sea, and often went on viking cruises in his own ships, whence he was also styled Erling the Sea-king, although he did not at that time possess a foot of land over ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... relating the adventures of a Viking, Orvar Odd in Aquitaine, describes how he saw some of the natives taking refuge in an underground retreat, and how he pursued and killed them all. [Footnote: Fornmanna Soegwr, Copenhagen, 1829, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... to whom Viking chieftains bowed their heads, and whom the modern and palatial steamship defies with impunity seven times a week. And yet it is but defiance, not victory. The magnificent barbarian sits enthroned in a mantle of gold-lined clouds looking from ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... enemy Norway had, and even in the schoolrooms and school-books their (Swedish) hereditary enemy was spoken of with curses. Simultaneously the "Norwegians of the Future" buried themselves deeper and deeper in the study of "Ancient Glorious Norway". Imagination was fed on Norwegian heroic Sagas and Viking exploits, and the ancient National Saint of Norway, Olaf the Holy, was unearthed from his long-forgotten hiding place ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... turned toward me from the group about the spring were European, either by recent heredity or tribal nature. I could see the Saxon, the Latin, and the Viking, and one girl was all Japanese, a reference to which caused her to weep. "Iapona" was to her pretty ears the meanest word in Vait-hua's vocabulary, and her playmates held it in ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... like a face that belonged to a race, something that had been handed down with the inherent love of blue water. It is probable that many centuries ago, a man with features such as these, with eyes such as these, and crisp, closely curling hair, had leaped ashore from his open Viking boat, shouting ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... Viking," and I think that I may be proud of that name; for surely to be trusted by such a king is honour enough for any man, whether freeman or thrall, noble or churl. Maybe I had rather be called by that name than by that which was mine ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... A great blond Viking of a German in the uniform of a captain shouldered heavily through the doorway and, acknowledging the salute of the rat-faced subaltern with a bare nod, stood looking down at Lanyard in taciturn silence, hostility in his blood-shot ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... Messrs. Inman and Walmsley's kennel, there were such admirable dogs as the rough-coated Wolfram—from whom were bred Tannhauser, Narcissus, Leontes and Klingsor—the smooth-coated dogs, the King's Son and The Viking; the rough-coated bitch, Judith Inman, and the smooth Viola, the last-named the finest specimen of her sex that has probably ever been seen. These dogs and bitches, with several others, were dispersed all over England, ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... Denmark, taking the outer way, nor came they to land oftener than for men to get knowledge of their goings, while they also got knowledge of the public banquets given to King Hacon. They had ships well-found in men and weapons; and in their company was a mighty viking named Eyvind Skreyja; he was a brother ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... be criticised as too consciously "posing" in his well-known apostrophe to the ocean; nevertheless it contains a tang of the Viking spirit: ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... Bull, as if of some grand old viking stepped out of his armor and dressed in modern garb, made a most picturesque personality. Those who have seen him can never forget him. The great stature, the massive, stalwart form, as upright as a pine, the white floating locks ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... soul. It has the subtle fragrance of the heaven that is our own if we walk bravely in the world, desiring truth. Under its influence we discover ourselves. We build ships for new voyages, and burst into unknown waters with our Viking shields of victory ablaze in the morning sun. The air is sharp and keen, not foetid with poisonous lies; the waters are blue and beautiful; there are shining shores about us, and marvels of a new nature ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... siege of battle He fixed the frontier at Fifeldore Against the host of the Myrgings, which was held thenceforth By Angles and Swabians as Offa had marked it. 45 Hrothwulf and Hrothgar held for a long time A neighborly compact, the nephew and uncle, After they had vanquished the Viking races And Ingeld's array was overridden, Hewed down at Heorot the Heathobard troop. 50 So forth I fared in foreign lands All over the earth; of evil and good There I made trial, torn from my people; Far from my folk I have followed my travels. Therefore I sing the song of my wanderings, 55 ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... they had stolen. Such was the now vanished town of Jomsborg which Palnatoki, the Jarl of Fjon, founded about 950 in the country of the Wends, near the mouth of the Oder. This town was intended to be an abode of peace, where not only could the merchants reside in safety, but to which the Viking Jarls, fighting elsewhere between themselves, might resort to exchange the results of their raids. And this city gradually became not only the market for the goods which the sea-rovers gathered from sacked ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... the disaster of Sigvald, Earl of Jomsborg, a celebrated viking or pirate, who, according to tradition, was repulsed from the coast of Norway by Hakon Jarl, with the assistance of Thorgerd, a female demon, to whom Hakon sacrificed his youngest ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... couple of burghers who had been in the melee when Dowling was gathered in. One of them was a handsome Swede, with a long blonde moustache, that fell with a glorious sweep on to his chest, as the Viking's did of old. He was an adventurer, who knew how to take his gruel like a man. He had joined the Boers because he thought they were the weaker side, and had done his best for them. He saw Dowling talking to me one day, and asked me if I ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... never wearied of. The two would lean across the table towards each other, McTeague folding his arms under his breast. Then Trina, resting on her elbows, would part his mustache-the great blond mustache of a viking—with her two hands, pushing it up from his lips, causing his face to assume the appearance of a Greek mask. She would curl it around either forefinger, drawing it to a fine end. Then all at once McTeague would make a fearful ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... school myself not to start at the sound of it when I speak. And most of all, what most impresses me when I try to consider myself fairly—candidly—critically—is the appearance of strength, of health, of unbounded power and deathless youth—as if the blood of generations of athletic girls and free, Viking men ran in my veins. I am, I believe, the only perfectly healthy ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... they will fence their fields with mahogany, and, after a decent grace, sup claret to their porridge. It is not wickedness: it is scarce evil; it is only, in its highest power, the sense of isolation and the wise disinterestedness of feeble and poor races. Think how many viking ships had sailed by these islands in the past, how many vikings had landed, and raised turmoil, and broken up the barrows of the dead, and carried off the wines of the living; and blame them, if you are able, for that belief (which may be called one ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hanging gables, past dim little shops and markets, often unintentionally crowding pedestrians into doorways or against the walls. One among those so inconvenienced was a youth dressed as a vintner. He was tall, pliantly built, blond as a Viking, possessing a singular beauty of the masculine order. He was forced to flatten himself against the wall of a house, his arms extended on either side, in a kind of temporary crucifixion. Even then the stirrup of the ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... Brown Viking of the fishing-smack! Fair toast of all the town!— The skipper's jerkin ill beseems The lady's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... uniformity in the burial customs. In some of the barrows in central France, and in the wolds of Yorkshire, the interments include the arms and accoutrements of a charioteer, with his chariot, harness and horses. In Scandinavia a custom, alluded to in the sagas, of burying the viking in his ship, drawn up on land, and raising a barrow over it, is exemplified by the ship-burials discovered in Norway. The ship found in the Gokstad mound was 78 ft. long, and had a mast and sixteen pairs of oars. In a chamber abaft the mast the viking had been laid, with his weapons, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... ever any necessity for real heart-to-heart encounters. One could break away into irony—as indeed he often had to. But the real trouble with June was that she had never appealed to his aesthetic sense, though she might well have, with her red-gold hair and her viking-coloured eyes, and that touch of the Berserker in her spirit. It was very different with Holly, soft and quiet, shy and affectionate, with a playful imp in her somewhere. He watched this younger daughter ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was a magnificent swimmer. Its neck cut through the water like the stem of a Viking ship, and it left a frothing wake behind. Every once in a while it would plunge its head into the water and come up with a fish, which ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... whipcol, the venerable and famous Yule breakfast beverage. I do not know the origin or etymology of the name whipcol. I do not think it is to be found in any of the dictionaries. I do not know if it was a Yule drink of our Viking ancestors in the days of paganism. I do not know if there was any truth in the tradition that it was the favourite drink of the dwellers in Valhalla, gods and heroes, when they kept their high Yule festival. But this I know, there never was, ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... peculiar "bashlyk"-like caps of reincalf-skin, beneath which strongly marked bearded faces showed forth, such as might well have belonged to old Norwegian Vikings. The whole scene, indeed, called up in my mind a picture of the Viking Age, of expeditions to Gardarike and Bjarmeland. They were fine, stalwart-looking fellows, these Russian traders, who barter with the natives, giving them brandy in exchange for bearskins, sealskins, and other ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... made me itch like sin, just to get my fingers on a trigger, with a full moose-yard in view. I can feel it now—the bound in the blood as I caught at Malbrouck's arm and said: 'By George, I must kill moose; that's sport for Vikings, and I was meant to be a Viking—or a gladiator.' Malbrouck at once replied that he would give me some moose- hunting in December if I would come up to Marigold Lake. I couldn't exactly reply on the instant, because, you see, there wasn't much chance for board and lodging thereabouts, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... another Viking, Gardar, bound for the west coast of Scotland, was likewise blown by a storm on to the coast of Snow-land. He sailed right round and found it to be an island. Considering that it was unsafe to navigate the icy northern seas in winter, he built himself ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... Apparently, it was the only exercise he ever got. "You're aware that Viking Spacecraft is one of the corporations under the management of ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... face, and was little comforted, on rising, by the assurance that much snow had fallen. The mercury had risen to zero, and the wind still blew, although not so furiously as on the previous day. We therefore determined to set out, and try to reach Pitea. The landlady's son, a tall young Viking, with yellow locks hanging on his shoulders, acted as postilion, and took the lead. We started at nine, and found it heavy enough at first. It was barely light enough to see our way, and we floundered slowly along through deep drifts for a mile, when we met the ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... looting where they pleased, from the Elbe to the Rhone. They carried their raids as far south as Sicily and the Mediterranean coast of Africa, and as far north and west as Iceland, Greenland, and the American continent. In the east, by establishing a Viking colony at Nishni Novgorod, they laid the foundations of the Russian empire, and their leader, Rus, gave it his name. Following river courses, others penetrated inland as far as Constantinople, where, being bought off by the emperor, they took ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... pain. We wilt at a bayonet charge, we shudder at the thought of wounds. Bah!" he continued, "what does it matter if a few hundred thousands of human beings are cut to pieces. We need to get back again to the old Viking standard, the old pagan ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... and they understood, also, the significant gesture when he patted the barrel of the rifles. The hearts of both Butler and Wyatt were for the moment afraid, and their boat dropped back to third place. Henry laughed aloud when he saw. The Viking rage was still upon him. This was the primeval wilderness, and these ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... with the native race [21]. And to this day, the gentry, traders, and farmers of more than one-third of England, and in those counties most confessed to be in the van of improvement, descend from Saxon mothers indeed, but from Viking fathers. There was in reality little difference in race between the Norman knight of the time of Henry I. and the Saxon franklin of Norfolk and York. Both on the mother's side would most probably have been Saxon, both on the father's would have ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... distance he could see little of her face; but the new-wakened wind blew the long dark hair about her head, while round her, falling almost to her naked feet, was wrapped a full red cloak. Had Morris wished to draw the picture of a Viking's daughter guiding her father's ship into the fray, there, down to the red cloak, bare feet, and flying tresses, ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... names of British seamen show the composite origin of their nation. As the Danes after the day of Copenhagen, to them both glorious and disastrous, claimed that in Nelson they had been vanquished by a man of their own blood, descended from their Viking forefathers; as Collingwood and Troubridge indicate the English descent of the two closest associates of the victor of Trafalgar; so Saumarez and the hero of this sketch, whose family name was Pellew, represent that conquering Norman race which from the shores of the Northern ocean carried ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... who in any company would have seemed striking. In complexion fair, and with blue or gray eyes, he was tall as any Viking, as broad in the shoulder. He was smooth-faced, and his fresh skin and well-developed figure bespoke the man in good physical condition through active exercise, yet well content with the world's apportionment. His limbs were ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... have looked when the beaked Viking ships nosed along the fretted shores of Rhode Island, when Columbus took the sea in his high-pooped caravals, when the Pilgrims saw the rocks and naked boughs of the New England coast. So it had been for centuries, roamed by wild men who had perished from its ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... of land necessary for the German people, or useful in the real sense of the word, could France or even Russia vacate for us in Europe? To be "unassailable"—to exchange the soul of a Viking for that of a New Yorker, that of the quick pike for that of the lazy carp whose fat back grows moss covered in a dangerless pond—that must never become the wish of a German. And for the securing of more comfortable frontier protection only a madman would risk the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... than history; it is a picture of a life and a world that once had real existence. Of that vanished life, that world of ancient Englishmen, only a few material fragments remain: a bit of linked armor, a rusted sword with runic inscriptions, the oaken ribs of a war galley buried with the Viking who had sailed it on stormy seas, and who was entombed in it because he loved it. All these are silent witnesses; they have no speech or language. But this old poem is a living voice, speaking with truth and sincerity of the daily habit of the fathers of ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... age When girls are athletes, not the men, And toughness dwindles from the stage!— When purblind poet cannot see That in the games he wishes barred, Eager, and hungry to be free As when it triumphed on the sea, The Viking spirit ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... Sigurd is important to English people not only for its wondrous beauty, but also on account of its great age, and of what it tells us about our own Viking ancestors, who ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... William was born—before he, the Conqueror, rode in his turn through the green lanes to consecrate the church to One greater than he. From Tancrede to Boileau, what a succession of bishops, each in their turn, have had their eye on the great cathedral. There was a sort of viking bishop, one Geoffrey de Montbray, of the Conqueror's day, who, having a greater taste for men's blood than their purification, found Coutances a dull city; there was more war of the kind his stout arm rejoiced in across the Channel; and so he travelled a bit to do a little ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... glimpse of Cousin Robert, and said what a splendid-looking fellow he was—a regular Viking; but when we agreed, he appeared depressed. "Oh, my prophetic soul!" he murmured. "The cousin will want his mother to go with you, and my ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... break apart, McVickar," cut in the other, setting his jaw with a peculiar hardening of the facial muscles that gave him the appearance of a fierce old viking attacking at the head of his squadrons. "I'm telling you over again that a new day has dawned in American politics; I and my kind recognize it, and you and your kind don't seem to be big enough to recognize it. That is the difference between us. In the present instance it comes down ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... inherited the wand of the departed wizards, and has touched with her talisman the gate of sepulchres; the tombs have opened and the dead have spoken. What countries did thy war-ship visit? she inquired of the Scandinavian viking. And in answer the dead man, asleep for centuries among the rocks of the Isle of Skye, showed golden coins of the caliphs in his skeleton hand. These coins are not a figure of speech; they are real, and may be seen at the Edinburgh Museum. ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... of Olaf the Glorious, King of Norway, opens with the incident of his being found by his uncle living as a bond-slave in Esthonia; then come his adventures as a Viking and his raids upon the coasts of Scotland and England, his victorious battle against the English at Maldon in Essex, his being bought off by Ethelred the Unready, and his conversion to Christianity. He then returns to Pagan Norway, is accepted ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... past." The Old Stone Mill, with its contradictory histories, is more fascinating than the Casino. I could get quite hot and angry arguing with any one who disputes the fact—fact, I say!—that this extraordinary gray-stone tower draped with creepers and backed with trees is the memorial of a Viking's wife. Longfellow's "The Skeleton in Armour" was one of those poems which Lady Brighthelmston's knee taught to Jack. "Speak, speak, thou fearful guest!" I had forgotten, I'm ashamed to say, but Jack has reminded me about the figure in "rude armour drest" which appeared when they took ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... personage who had treated them with such scant courtesy. They saw before them a man somewhat above the middle height, who might have served an aspiring sculptor as a perfect model for a chieftain of old Gaul, or a dauntless Viking. His frame was firmly and powerfully built, and seemed to be exceptionally strong and muscular; yet an air of almost courtly grace pervaded his movements, making each attitude he assumed more or less picturesque. He was broad-shouldered and deep-chested; his face was ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... Gods have foreknowledge of their own doom, Ragnaroek, the great fight when they shall meet Loki's children, the Wolf and the Snake; both sides will fall and the world be destroyed. An episode in the story is the death of Baldr. This we may assume to be the religion of the Viking age (800-1000 A.D.), a compound of the beliefs of various ages ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... perhaps, even the people who produced these wonders, were separated by a thin and precarious interval from the savage. Scratch a civilized Russian, they say, and you find a wild Tartar. Scratch an ancient Greek, and you hit, no doubt, on a very primitive and formidable being, somewhere between a Viking and a Polynesian. ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... in the two years, and his manners were gratefully improved. Also, she was constrained to admit—frank glances of the slate-blue eyes appraising him—that he was developing hopefully in the matter of good looks. The dust-colored hair of boyhood had become a sort of viking yellow, and the gray eyes, so they should not be overcast by trouble shadows, were ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... was considered before Christianity. But when I speak of Christianity I am only referring to an historical date. Before Christianity the Northern races also thought about love very much in the same way that their best poets do at this day. The ancient Scandinavian literature would show this. The Viking, the old sea-pirate, felt very much as Tennyson or as Meredith would feel upon this subject; he thought of only one kind of love as real—that which ends in marriage, the affection between husband and wife. Anything else was to him mere folly and weakness. ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... eyes looked into hers and there was a Viking glare behind them, suggestive of the wintry fjords whence one of ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... tenth century, at the period when the Northmen sought with warlike Viking hosts the south, and the Christianity with the Gospel of Peace made its way towards the North, there lived in Iceland a man of consequence, named Herjulf. His son was called Bjarne, and was a courageous young man. His mind was early ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... old stones of "The Bloody Corner," where the retreating Danes, cut off from their ships, made their last fruitless stand against the Saxon sheriff and the valiant men of Devon. Within that charmed rock, so Torridge boatmen tell, sleeps now the old Norse Viking in his leaden coffin, with all his fairy treasure and his crown of gold; and as the boy looks at the spot, he fancies, and almost hopes, that the day may come when he shall have to do his duty against the invader as boldly as the men of ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... his business, with psychological ingenuity painted across the broad front of his building in big black letters this challenge to God, man, and the devil: The Road to Ruin. Down this road, with swift and eager footsteps, has trod many a pioneer viking of the West. Quick to resent an insult real or fancied, inflamed by unaccustomed drink, the ready pistol always at his side, the tricks of the professional gambler to provoke his sense of fair play, and finally his own wild recklessness to ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... big, bluff Captain himself, with his unfathomable sea-craft and his autocratic power, a regular old Viking such as you might read of in your history books, but would hardly expect to meet with in the flesh? And was there not a real Italian Count, elderly but impressive, who had dealings with no one but his valet, the latter being a nimble personage with a wicked eye who seemed ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... later, very early on Midsummer Day, that Rufus the Red, looking like a Viking in the crystal atmosphere of sky and sea, rowed the stranger with great, swinging strokes through the fishing fleet right out into the burning splendour of the sun. Knight had entered the boat in the belief that he was going to ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... The Viking, tenax propositi, if he planned an expedition, carried it out, through all obstacles, or died ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... shoulders the less broad for it, his cheeks the less ruddy for it? He wore his flaxen hair of the same length that every one now wears theirs, instead of letting it hang half-way to his waist in essenced curls; but was he therefore the less of a true Viking's son, bold-hearted as his sea- roving ancestors who won the Danelagh by Canute's side, and settled there on Thoresby Rise, to grow wheat and breed horses, generation succeeding generation, in the old moated grange? He carried a Bible in his jack-boot: ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... these and more express the emotions which we know are true in our own lives. In his longer narrative poems he makes the legends of Puritan life real to us; he takes English folk-lore and makes us see Othere talking to Arthur, and the Viking stealing his bride. His short poems are even better known than his longer narratives. In them he expressed his gentle, sincere love of the young, the suffering, and the sorrowful. In the Sonnets he showed; that deep appreciation of European literature ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... recall that Eric the Red, that fearless Viking, is reported to have landed on the coast several centuries before the English heard of the bold promontory of "Hither Manomet." It is well worth your time to saunter along some of the old trails to be found ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... Holmes's Brahmin caste, who might have come from Harvard or Yale. But as he grew animated I thought, as others have thought, and as one would suspect from his name, that he must have Scandinavian blood in his veins—that he was of the heroic, restless, strong and tender Viking strain, and certainly from that day his works and wanderings have not belied the surmise. He told me that he was the author of that charming book of gipsying in the Cevennes which just then had gained for him some attentions ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... of the Lowlands, in which ancient viking tales of bride-stealing and sea-fighting have been worked over under the influence of Christianity and chivalry. Although the only extant manuscript dates from the early years of the 16th century, the poem was probably composed about 1200,—not long after the Nibelungenlied, ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... the town mix their midnight toddy, more is heard of the deed, magnified. They grow bigger in their rocking-chairs; they swell in their sofa corners; they are all heroes. What force is slumbering in that little town of mighty memories! Thou formidable inheritance, thou old Viking blood! ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... flags and gay streamers which were already being put up along the streets and quays, as the first signs of the city's welcome to the Crown Prince and his bride, who were expected to arrive home somewhere within the next ten days. Eager crowds watched the unique ceremony, unknown save in old Viking days, of sending forth a dead voyager to sail the pitiless seas; and countless numbers of small boats attended the funeral vessel in a long flotilla,—escorting it out to that verge where the ocean opened widely to the wider horizon, and spread its high road ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... in height, two hundred and fifty pounds in weight, he looked the viking. He had carried to the verge of middle age the habits of an athletic youth. It was said that half his popularity in his university world was due to the respect he commanded from the students because of his extraordinary ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... took her in tow, she sent her own tow-lines to the "North Star," and for three days in this procession of so wild and weird a name, they three forged on westward toward Greenland,—a train which would have startled any old Viking had he fallen in with it, with a fresh gale blowing all the time and "a nasty sea." On the fourth day all the tow-lines broke or were cast off however, Neptune and the winds claimed their own, and the "Resolute" tried her own resources. The towing steamers were sent home in a ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... crowd, They trample the shingle at Lhane, And hungry for slaughter they clamour aloud For the Viking, for Orry the Dane! And swift has he flown at the foe— For the clustering clans are here,— But light is the club and weak is the bow To the ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... under the name of the Maud, for her proper name was the Viking; but Captain Ringgold ran into her and smashed a big ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... axe of Odin, and hammer of Thor, And by all the gods of the Viking's war, I swear we have quitted our homes in vain: We have nothing to look to, glory nor gain. Will our galley return to Norway's shore With heavier gold, or with costlier store? Will our exploits furnish ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... Clara take care of you at night, and I'll do so by day.—And then, when you are stronger, you must come away with me, up north, to Ormiston. You have not been there for years, and its gray towers are rather splendid overlooking that strong, uneasy, northern sea. It stirs the Viking blood in one, and makes that which was hard seem of less moment. Roger and Mary are there, too—will be all this summer. And you know it refreshed you to see them last year. And if we go pretty soon the boys will be at school, so they won't tire you with their racketing. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... nature, in adventure, in the clamor of fighting men. To this period belong his "Riddles" [Footnote: These riddles are ancient conundrums, in which some familiar object, such as a bow, a ship, a storm lashing the shore, the moon riding the clouds like a Viking's boat, is described in poetic language, and the last line usually calls on the hearer to name the object described. See Cook and Tinker, Translations from Old English Poetry.] and his vigorous descriptions ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... the panic of their approach spread like the cholera. The three suspicious crafts had so long lain off and on, that none doubted they were led by the audacious viking, Paul Jones. At five o'clock, on the following morning, they were distinctly seen from the capital of Scotland, quietly sailing up the bay. Batteries were hastily thrown up at Leith, arms were obtained from the castle at Edinburgh, alarm fires were kindled in all directions. Yet ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... thus to you about him, for such young men belong to you; he was of your kind. I wish you could have known him. He had the sweetness of a child, and the strength and courage and readiness of a young Viking. His mother and father are poor; they have a rough, hard farm. His mother works in the field with her husband when the work presses. She has had ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Northwood strode forward until he was within three feet of Adam. They stood thus, eyeing each other, two splendid beings, one blond as a Viking, the other dark ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... upon one's point of view," he replied. "He's always been a sort of a—well, Viking," ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... splendid specimens of fighting humanity than the Montenegrin borderer. Brave, reckless to a fault, with absolutely no fear of death, inured to every hardship, and able to live and thrive on the barest fare, they are typical of the old Viking, chivalrous and courteous, with the purest blood of the Balkans ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... narrowest part of the channel, and fight his vessel till she sank. "I have taken the depth of the water," added he, "and when the Venerable goes down my flag will still fly." And you observe this is no naked Viking in a pre-historic period; but a Scottish member of Parliament, with a smattering of the classics, a telescope, a cocked hat of great size, and flannel underclothing. In the same spirit, Nelson went into Aboukir with six colours flying; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Saga composition. It traces Odin and his followers from the East, from Asaland and Asgard, its chief city, to their settlement in Scandinavia. It narrates the contests of the kings, the establishment of the kingdoms of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, the Viking expeditions, the discovery and settlement of Iceland and Greenland, the discovery of America, and the conquests of England and Normandy. The stories are told with a life and freshness that belong only to true genius, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... the quiet and reserved manner of the good northern did not conceal a certain kindness of which he soon gave us hospitable proof; for, on acceding to his offer of a little coffee, we were surprised to see a nice tidy lady—his wife, as he informed us—spread a breakfast fit for a Viking, and then with gentle grace she ably did the honours of her board. Hang me, when I looked at the snow-white linen, the home-made cleanly cheer, the sweet wife all kindness and anxiety, I half envied the worthy Dane the peace and contentment of his secluded lot, and it ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn |
