a second "Conqueror" of us, still weightier of structure, and under
improved auspices, became possible, and was needed here! To
appearance, Knut himself was capable of being a Charlemagne of England
and the North (as has been already said or quoted), had he only lived
twice as long as he did. But his whole sum of years seems not to have
exceeded forty. His father Svein of the Forkbeard is reckoned to have
been fifty to sixty when St. Edmund finished him at Gainsborough. We
now return to Norway, ashamed of this long circuit which has been a
truancy more or less.



CHAPTER IX.

KING OLAF THE THICK-SET'S VIKING DAYS,

King Harald Graenske, who, with another from Russia accidentally
lodging beside him, got burned to death in Sweden, courting that
unspeakable Sigrid the Proud,--was third cousin or so to Tryggve,
father of our heroic Olaf. Accurately counted, he is great-grandson
of Bjorn the Chapman, first of Haarfagr's sons whom Eric Bloodaxe made
away with. His little "kingdom," as he called it, was a district
named the Greenland (_Graeneland_); he himself was one of those little
Haarfagr kinglets whom Hakon Jarl, much more Olaf Tryggveson, was
content to leave reigning, since they would keep the peace with him.
Harald had a loving wife of his own, Aasta the name of her, soon
expecting the birth of her and his pretty babe, named Olaf,--at the
time he went on that deplorable Swedish adventure, the foolish, fated
creature, and ended self and kingdom altogether. Aasta was greatly
shocked; composed herself however; married a new husband, Sigurd Syr,