in token of its brief existence.

Ten more years as a crusader and a wanderer over the face of
the earth pass by before we meet with Sigurd again in the
third section of the trilogy. But his resolution is taken.
He has returned to his native land, and will claim his own.
The land is now ruled by Harald Gille, who is, like Sigurd
Slembe, an illegitimate son of Magnus Barfod, and who, during
the last senile years of Sigurd Jorsalfar's life, had won the
recognition that Sigurd Slembe might have won had he not missed
the chance, and been acknowledged as the king's brother. When
the king died, he left a son named Magnus, who should have been
his successor, but whom Harald Gille seized, blinded, and
imprisoned that he might himself occupy the throne. The five
acts of this third section of the trilogy cover the last two
years of Sigurd Slembe's life, years during which he seeks to
gain his end, first by conciliation, and afterwards, maddened
by the base treachery of the king and his followers, by
assassination and violence. He has become a hard man, but,
however wild his schemes of revenge, and however desperate
his measures, he retains our sympathy to the end because we
feel that circumstances have made him the ravager of his country,
and that his underlying motive all along has not been a merely
personal ambition, but an immense longing to serve his people,
and to rule them with justice and wisdom. The final scene
of all has a strange and solemn beauty. It is on the eve of
the battle in which Sigurd is to be captured and put to death
by his enemies. The actual manner of his death was too horrible
even for the purposes of tragedy; and the poet has chosen the
better part in ending the play with a foreshadowing of the outcome.