race in no idle resignation. On the contrary, the Northman went boldly
to meet the doom which he felt sure no effort of his could turn aside,
but which he knew, if he met it like a man, would secure him the only
lasting thing on earth--a name famous in sons and story. Fate must be
met then, but the way in which it was met, that rested with a man
himself, that, at least, was in his own power; there he might show his
free will; and thus this principle, which might seem at first to be
calculated to blunt his energies and weaken his strength of mind, really
sharpened and hardened them in a wonderful way, for it left it still
worth everything to a man to fight this stern battle of life well and
bravely, while its blind inexorable nature allowed no room for any
careful weighing of chances or probabilities, or for any anxious prying
into the nature of things doomed once for all to come to pass. To do
things like a man, without looking to the right or left, as Kari acted
when he smote off Gunnar's head in Earl Sigurd's hall, was the
Northman's pride. He must do them openly too, and show no shame for what
he had done. To kill a man and say that you had killed him, was
manslaughter; to kill him and not to take it on your hand was murder. To
kill men at dead of night was also looked on as murder. To kill a foe
and not bestow the rights of burial on his body by throwing sand or
gravel over him, was also looked on as murder. Even the wicked Thiostolf
throws gravel over Glum in our Saga, and Thord Freedmanson's complaint
against Brynjolf the unruly was that he had buried Atli's body badly.
Even in killing a foe there was an open gentlemanlike way of doing it,
to fail in which was shocking to the free and outspoken spirit of the
age. Thorgeir Craggeir and the gallant Kari wake their foes and give
them time to arm themselves before they fall upon them; and Hrapp, too,
the thorough Icelander of the common stamp, "the friend of his friends
and the foe of his foes," stalks before Gudbrand and tells him to his
face the crimes which he has committed. Robbery and piracy in a good