"Thine answer," said Tostig, with a bitter sneer, "is not what I
expected from an uncle and warrior. But other chiefs may be found
less afraid of the luck of high deeds."

"So," saith the Norwegian chronicler, "not just the best friends, the
Earl left the King," and went on in haste to Harold Hardrada of
Norway.

True Hero of the North, true darling of War and of Song, was Harold
Hardrada! At the terrible battle of Stiklestad, at which his brother,
St. Olave, had fallen, he was but fifteen years of age, but his body
was covered with the wounds of a veteran. Escaping from the field, he
lay concealed in the house of a Bonder peasant, remote in deep
forests, till his wounds were healed. Thence, chaunting by the way,
(for a poet's soul burned bright in Hardrada,) "That a day would come
when his name would be great in the land he now left," he went on into
Sweden, thence into Russia, and after wild adventures in the East,
joined, with the bold troop he had collected around him, that famous
body-guard of the Greek emperors [223], called the Vaeringers, and of
these he became the chief. Jealousies between himself and the Greek
General of the Imperial forces, (whom the Norwegian chronicler calls
Gyrger,) ended in Harold's retirement with his Vaeringers into the
Saracen land of Africa. Eighty castles stormed and taken, vast
plunder in gold and in jewels, and nobler meed in the song of the
Scald and the praise of the brave, attested the prowess of the great
Scandinavian. New laurels, blood-stained, new treasures, sword-won,
awaited him in Sicily; and thence, rough foretype of the coming
crusader, he passed on to Jerusalem. His sword swept before him
Moslem and robber. He bathed in Jordan, and knelt at the Holy Cross.