separated off from the cows by balks of rough timber. I used to watch
them being milked through a crack between two of the balks where a
knot had fallen out, leaving a convenient eyehole about the height of a
walking-stick from the floor.

One day my elder and only brother, Ragnar, who had very red hair, came
and pulled me away from this eyehole because he wanted to look through
it himself at a cow that always kicked the girl who milked it. I howled,
and Steinar, my foster-brother, who had light-coloured hair and blue
eyes, and was much bigger and stronger than I, came to my help, because
we always loved each other. He fought Ragnar and made his nose bleed,
after which my mother, the Lady Thora, who was very beautiful, boxed
his ears. Then we all cried, and my father, Thorvald, a tall man, rather
loosely made, who had come in from hunting, for he carried the skin of
some animal of which the blood had run down on to his leggings, scolded
us and told my mother to keep us quiet as he was tired and wanted to
eat.

That is the only scene which returns to me of my infancy.

The next of which a vision has come to me is one of a somewhat similar
house to our own in Aar, upon an island called Lesso, where we were all
visiting a chief of the name of Athalbrand. He was a fierce-looking
man with a great forked beard, from which he was called Athalbrand
Fork-beard. One of his nostrils was larger than the other, and he had a
droop in his left eye, both of which peculiarities came to him from some
wound or wounds that he had received in war. In those days everybody was
at war with everybody else, and it was quite uncommon for anyone to live
until his hair turned grey.