The legend is given in the Niala[36] as follows:—"On Friday it happened in Caithness that a man called Dorruthr went out of his house and saw that twelve men together rode to a certain bower, where they all disappeared. He went to the bower, and looked in through a window, and saw that within there were women, who had set up a web. They sang the poem, calling on the listener, Dorruthr, to learn the song, and to tell it to others. When the song was over, they tore down the web, each one retaining what she held in her hand of it. And now Dorruthr went away from the window and returned home, while they mounted their horses, riding six to the north and six to the south. A similar vision appeared to Brand, the son of Gneisti, in the Faroes. At Swinefell in Iceland blood fell on the cope of a priest on Good Friday, so that he had to take it off. At Thvatta a priest saw on Good Friday deep sea before the altar and many terrible wonders therein, and for long he was unable to sing the Hours."[37]
This strange legend of early telepathy may be explained by the fact that Thorstein, son of the Icelander Hall o' Side, fought for Sigurd at Clontarf, and afterwards returned to Iceland and told the story of the battle, which the Saga preserved; and the English poet, Thomas Gray, used it as the theme of his well-known poem intituled The Fatal Sisters. The old Norse ballad referred to Sigurd's death at Clontarf in 1014. It is known as Darratha-Liod or The Javelin-Song, and is translated by the late Eirikr Magnusson and printed in the Miscellany of the Viking Society with the Old Norse original[38] and the translator's scholarly notes and explanations. It is said that it was often sung in Old Norse in North Ronaldsay until the middle of the eighteenth century.
As translated it is as follows:—
DARRATHA-LIOD.
I.
Widely's warped
To warn of slaughter
The back-beam's rug—
Lo, blood is raining!