It is doubtless very savage that kind of valor of the old Northmen. Snorro
tells us they thought it a shame and misery not to die in battle; and if
natural death seemed to be coming on, they would cut wounds in their flesh,
that Odin might receive them as warriors slain. Old kings, about to die,
had their body laid into a ship; the ship sent forth, with sails set and
slow fire burning it; that, once out at sea, it might blaze up in flame,
and in such manner bury worthily the old hero, at once in the sky and in
the ocean! Wild bloody valor; yet valor of its kind; better, I say, than
none. In the old Sea-kings too, what an indomitable rugged energy!
Silent, with closed lips, as I fancy them, unconscious that they were
specially brave; defying the wild ocean with its monsters, and all men and
things;--progenitors of our own Blakes and Nelsons! No Homer sang these
Norse Sea-kings; but Agamemnon's was a small audacity, and of small fruit
in the world, to some of them;--to Hrolf's of Normandy, for instance!
Hrolf, or Rollo Duke of Normandy, the wild Sea-king, has a share in
governing England at this hour.

Nor was it altogether nothing, even that wild sea-roving and battling,
through so many generations. It needed to be ascertained which was the
_strongest_ kind of men; who were to be ruler over whom. Among the
Northland Sovereigns, too, I find some who got the title _Wood-cutter_;
Forest-felling Kings. Much lies in that. I suppose at bottom many of them
were forest-fellers as well as fighters, though the Skalds talk mainly of
the latter,--misleading certain critics not a little; for no nation of men
could ever live by fighting alone; there could not produce enough come out
of that! I suppose the right good fighter was oftenest also the right good
forest-feller,--the right good improver, discerner, doer and worker in
every kind; for true valor, different enough from ferocity, is the basis of
all. A more legitimate kind of valor that; showing itself against the
untamed Forests and dark brute Powers of Nature, to conquer Nature for us.