crack the backbones, smash the skulls, and sometimes to drink
with fiendish glee the blood of unwary travellers or
loiterers. These fits of madness were usually followed by
periods of utter exhaustion and nervous depression.[77]

[77] See Dasent, Burnt Njai, Vol. I. p. xxii.; Grettis Saga,
by Magnusson and Morris, chap. xix.; Viga Glum's Saga, by Sir
Edmund Head, p. 13, note, where the Berserkers are said to
have maddened themselves with drugs. Dasent compares them with
the Malays, who work themselves into a frenzy by means of
arrack, or hasheesh, and run amuck.

Such, according to the unanimous testimony of historians, was
the celebrated "Berserker rage," not peculiar to the
Northland, although there most conspicuously manifested.
Taking now a step in advance, we find that in comparatively
civilized countries there have been many cases of monstrous
homicidal insanity. The two most celebrated cases, among those
collected by Mr. Baring-Gould, are those of the Marechal de
Retz, in 1440, and of Elizabeth, a Hungarian countess, in the
seventeenth century. The Countess Elizabeth enticed young
girls into her palace on divers pretexts, and then coolly
murdered them, for the purpose of bathing in their blood. The
spectacle of human suffering became at last such a delight to
her, that she would apply with her own hands the most
excruciating tortures, relishing the shrieks of her victims as
the epicure relishes each sip of his old Chateau Margaux. In
this way she is said to have murdered six hundred and fifty
persons before her evil career was brought to an end; though,
when one recollects the famous men in buckram and the