“When his turn came, all sat watching with interest. But his knife fell from his nerveless grasp, and there was no trace of consciousness. One of the vikings on the log seemed in particularly excellent spirits. He laughed and sang as he saw the bloody heads of his comrades rolling about his feet.”
The next cracked a clever pun at the executioner’s expense, and Erik, who was superintending the job, was so pleased at his audacity that he pardoned him. The next of the doomed men had long flaxen hair, and humorously requested the executioner not to soil his hair with the blood. Accordingly an assistant was delegated to hold out of harm’s way the glorious flaxen locks. Just as the ax was descending, the Jomsviking jerked his head in such a way that the hands of the assistant were struck off at the wrists. He laughed derisively, and Erik, who was particularly partial to such cleverness, pardoned him.
At this point Gissur the White was suddenly shot dead by an arrow coming from nowhere in particular. It seemed that Haavard the Hewer, whom everybody had forgotten, was still alive and still standing on the bloody stumps of his knees. With his last dying gasp of strength he had shot this arrow.
During the battle King Haakon sacrificed one of his sons, and this horrible action did much to hasten the king’s overthrow. His name became a nightmare to his subjects. It was a name to scare bad boys with. In the most abominable manner he insulted several of his most powerful nobles, and finally they rose in revolt. In terror Haakon fled with a single thrall, named Kark, to Rimul, the home of his mistress Thora. She hid the two in a pigsty, and there they spent a horrible night. A searching party, under the leadership of Olaf Tryggvesson, who had lately returned to Norway from Russia, where he had spent his youth, walked all about, within hearing of the miserable king in his hiding place. Olaf mounted a stone close to the sty and said in a loud tone, which the two miserable men could hear, that he offered a great reward to whoever should find Haakon. This of course added to Haakon’s terrors the fear of treachery on the part of his thrall.
All night king and thrall sat in their noisome den, eyeing each other in awful, mutual distrust. Toward morning the king was overpowered by sleep. “But the terrors of his vigil pursued him sleeping. His soul seemed to be tossed on a sea of anguish. He screamed in wild distress, rolled about, rose upon his knees and elbows, and his face was horrible to behold.” Kark then stabbed his master, cut off his head, and took it to Olaf, claiming his reward. Olaf, on the dead king’s account, took vengeance on the traitor by killing him.
Longfellow has immortalized this event, and I lately came across these lines of his, commemorating Olaf’s celebration:
“At Nidarholm the monks are all singing,
Two ghastly heads on the gallows are swinging;
One is Earl Haakon’s and one is his thrall’s,
While the people are shouting from windows and walls,