IDUNA WEARS THE NECKLACE

I lay sleeping in my bed at Aar, the sword of the Wanderer by my side
and his necklace beneath my pillow. In my sleep there came to me a very
strange and vivid dream. I dreamed that I was the Wanderer, no other
man, and here I, who write this history in these modern days, will say
that the dream was true.

Once in the far past I, who afterwards was born as Olaf, and who am
now--well, never mind my name--lived in the shape of that man who in
Olaf's time was by tradition known as the Wanderer. Of that Wanderer
life, however, for some reason which I cannot explain, I am able to
recover but few memories. Other earlier lives come back to me much more
clearly, but at present the details of this particular existence escape
me. For the purpose of the history which I am setting down this matters
little, since, although I know enough to be sure that the persons
concerned in the Olaf life were for the most part the same as those
concerned in the Wanderer life, their stories remain quite distinct.

Therefore, I propose to leave that of the Wanderer, so far as I know
it, untold, wild and romantic as it seems to have been. For he must have
been a great man, this Wanderer, who in the early ages of the northern
world, drawn by the magnet of some previous Egyptian incarnation, broke
back to those southern lands with which his informing spirit was already
so familiar, and thence won home again to the place where he was born,
only to die. In considering this dream which Olaf dreamed, let it be
remembered, then, that although a thousand, or maybe fifteen hundred, of
our earthly years separated us from each other, the Wanderer, into whose
tomb I broke at the goading of Iduna, and I, Olaf, were really the same