As we go on with this story of the Normans, you [Pg028] will watch these followers of the sea-kings keeping always some trace of their old habits and customs. Indeed you may know them yet. The Northmen were vikings, always restless and on the move, stealing and fighting their way as best they might, daring, adventurous. The Norman of the twelfth century was a crusader. A madness to go crusading against the Saracen possessed him, not alone for religion's sake or for the holy city of Jerusalem, and so in all the ages since one excuse after another has set the same wild blood leaping and made the Northern blue eyes shine. Look where you may, you find Englishmen of the same stamp—Sir Walter Raleigh and Lord Nelson, Stanley and Dr. Livingstone and General Gordon, show the old sea-kings' courage and recklessness. Snorro Sturleson's best saga has been followed by Drayton's "Battle of Agincourt" and Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" and "Ballad of Sir Richard Grenville." I venture to say that there is not an English-speaking boy or girl who can hear that sea-king's ballad this very day in peaceful England or America without a great thrill of sympathy.
"At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay,
And a pinnace, like a fluttered bird, came flying from far away:
'Spanish ships of war at sea! We have sighted fifty-three.'"—
Go and read that; the whole of the spirited story; but there is one thing I ask you to remember first in all this long story of the Normans: that however much it seems to you a long chapter of bloody wars and miseries and treacheries that get to be almost [Pg029] tiresome in their folly and brutality; however little profit it may seem sometimes to read about the Norman wars, yet everywhere you will catch a gleam of the glorious courage and steadfastness that have won not only the petty principalities and dukedoms of those early days, but the great English and American discoveries and inventions and noble advancement of all the centuries since.
On the island of Vigr, in the Folden-fiord, the peasants still show some rude hollows in the shore where the ships of Rolf-Ganger were drawn up in winter, and whence he launched them to sail away to the Hebrides and France—the beginning of as great changes as one man's voyage ever wrought.
II.
ROLF THE GANGER.
"Far had I wandered from this northern shore,
Far from the bare heights and the wintry seas,
Dreaming of these
No more." —A. F.