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seeks an instance from life showing the falseness of riches, he says: “They did not believe, Unnar and Sævaldi, that luck could fail them, but they became naked and bereft of all;” and the thought of its own speed tears him headlong into the concluding line: “and they ran as wolves to the forest.”

We can hardly wonder, then, at the restless eagerness with which Earl Hakon the Younger thrusts aside the thought of lucklessness when Olaf spiritually follows up his victory over him by saying: “It is no lie that you kinsmen are handsome men, but there is an end of your luck (hamingja).” “Nay,” answers Hakon, “nay, this is no unluck (unhamingja) that is come upon us, it has long been so, that chieftains have taken victory by turns; I am as yet hardly grown beyond child's years, and we were not prepared to have to stand on the defence; we did not look for strife, and it may yet come about that we prove more fortunate another time.” The feverish breathlessness of these words betrays a lurking fear, which the experiences of the past have stamped down into the soul. And on the other hand, if the wreck of life were not so unmistakable a fact, there would have been no room for the paradox that men at times lost their freedom and yet seemed to retain something of their luck. “She was the queen's washing maid — or slave woman — and yet not altogether luckless,” says a Norse version referring to Alfhild, Olaf's mistress and mother of Magnus the Good.

Or the fall might come stealthily, as when powers and fortune in some inexplicable fashion withered away, and a man felt his leap and his blow fall ever wide of their mark. In the Beowulf's description of King Heremod we feel the growing uneasiness of the body-guard, as they watch the niding grimace day by day showing through the features of the prince: “He did not grow up for the joy of the Scyldings, but for slaughter and bitter death to the Danes. Swollen with ire he caused the undoing of his board-fellows, his shoulder-companions, till he passed, the proud king, lonely from this joyful world. And yet the mighty God had raised him high above all men and strengthened him with power and blissful command, but in his breast grew blood-fierce thoughts. He gave no rings to his Danes, as

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was due. Joyless he bided the time when he gathered the harvest of his deeds: long-lasting war in the land,” — when he, as it is actually stated, “fell among giants”, the rabble of Utgard, and ended his life as a niding.

From Iceland, we have, in the Grettir saga, the story of a man in whom barrenness grew from early times. He was strong and quick-witted enough to all appearance, fearless and active, but his counsels and his actions always went apart, so that the results recoiled upon himself. It would seem as if his great struggle with the monster Glam formed the commencement of his unluck, and this is also a good old thought, which naturally finds expression in the curse of the dying creature, when he declares that his conqueror's every plan shall from thenceforward turn to misfortune and dishonour. But even before this fateful event the marks were visible in Grettir. There is a record of the words his uncle spoke before the combat with the monster: “It is truly said that luck is one thing, quickness another,” and again: “There are men who see a little way ahead, but cannot guard against what they see.” And far earlier even yet, wise men such as Thorarin the Wise had seen enough to beware of the wild fellow with his iron strength; when his foster-son Bardi has engaged Grettir's help for his great expedition of vengeance, Thorarin earnestly protests: “True enough, Grettir is a man far beyond others, and weapons will be slow to bite on him if his luck holds, but I have no faith in that luck; and it were well for you not to have only men of ill luck in your following.” And it was settled as Thorarin advised.

As Glam had prophesied, so it came about. When Grettir once, at a critical moment, saved the life and health of his companions by swimming across to the mainland of Norway and bringing back fire to the outlying rocks where they were near to perishing, he brought about, against his will, a misfortune that gained him many bitter enemies in Iceland. When he came rushing into the house, covered with ice, the people thought him a monster, and laid about with sticks and brands from the hearth, so that he barely managed to escape with the glowing embers he had taken, but the sparks had caught the straw on

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the floor, and in the morning nothing remained of the place but a heap of ashes. And among those burned to death were two sons of Thorir Skeggjason of Adaldal, a powerful Icelandic yeoman. Grettir obtains permission from King Olaf to clear himself of suspicion by the ordeal of fire, but in the carrying out of the test, his “unluck” runs away with him, and he strikes a boy who jeers at him, knocking him down, and this in God's house. Again the melancholy word is spoken of him: “You are a man of sore ill luck, Grettir, and it will not be easy to amend it.” And now he drifts irresistibly into endless outlawry, farther and farther into nidinghood, till he ends as the miserable victim of witchcraft.

This showing of the growth of nidinghood in Grettir is one of the greatest and most poignant pieces of evidence as to the power of mortal fear upon men's minds. One might go so far as to admire the freebooter, but one could not wrest the thoughts and words in which admiration must be clothed up out of the deep soil of uncanny gloom in which they were rooted.

Typical too, of northern modes of thought is the disinclination to stop at a certain deed as the starting point of nidinghood; men felt constrained to hark back and find the symptoms in earlier acts. Thus when Sigurd Slembi, the Norwegian pretender of the 12th century, came to claim the crown to which he considered himself sole heir after the killing of his brother, his unlucky deed at once sets folk thinking of his birth: “If you are really a son of Magnus and Thora, then your birth was unlucky, and so also it has fallen out, if you have slain your brother.” True enough, the single act, or refraining from action — a murder, cowardly behaviour, breach of oath, unavenged killing, stealing — form an absolute beginning, giving birth to nidinghood in the life of the person concerned; it is the source of his unluck, as men say in Norway. The Northman would thoroughly understand, and heartily agree with, the utterance of the Anglo-Saxon anent those retainers of the king's who by their base flight brought shame upon their race; when he says: “No more shall any of their clan now grasp joyously at the gold”, this “now” would strike the Northman's ear with all its fateful weight. But

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the “source” sets thoughts on the look-out for earlier symptoms. It was the man's misfortune that he failed to take vengeance, but why was no vengeance taken? Well, there is not time to ask for an answer, for all remember at once something that happened long ago. The niding's whole past is raised up to witness against him, because nidinghood, when all is said and done, is but the outcome of an inner flaw in luck. He would never have committed this first villainy of his, if he had not been inwardly marked by his constitution. What the Northmen mean by source is really this: at this moment the villainy that lay hid in him came to light in this act, and from this act his whole life was infected.

Moreover, death can just as easily strike from behind upon the doer of quite harmless acts. If the clan have not strength to carry through their kinsman's cause by force of arms, or at worst by a fine, and therefore buys peace by sacrificing the culprit, then he becomes a hopeless niding and a wolf-man for such honourable acts of aggression as homicide or open violent attack upon his neighbour's goods. And the peril lies in wait for a man beyond the grave as well as here. A hero who prefers death to a life in shame, and buries himself under his honour and his luck, has not by any means ensured his existence for ever. If he be given up by his kinsmen, or fall as the last of his “people”, so that none is left to take up the inheritance, then there is every danger of his turning evil, and haunting men and beasts as a demon the more terrible in proportion to his might in the days of his life. It is not only the thoughts of the living that are bewildered by pain when the clan is obliged to leave one of its members unavenged — when they must let him lie unholy, as the Northmen said, with a word intimating that the unavenged is deprived of his dignity and worth.

The dead man sickens and pines away with the living, and the future before him when life stops is so horrible, that the fear of the family's dying out can throughout many centuries compete with all the terrors of hell and deprive them of their power over men's souls. And the danger will at all times be equally great, however many happy years the dead man may have

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behind him. There are nidings yonder, out in the world of night, who were once honest dead; they have not found reincarnation, because the clan declined and became extinct; they have not been kept alive by clever and careful kinsmen, and then comes the time when men learn who it was that lived on the place in former days.

There is no terror in the dweller of a barrow when he can be proved to be a kinsman. In the saga, Hervor goes out confidently to her father Angantyr's barrow and greets him as one of her own; and the dead warrior has not forgotten his frith and his honour; he gives friendly warnings and hands out his wonderful sword as a free gift. If, on the other hand, there lay strangers in the barrow, whom none living could reckon as kin, then the place was simply unsafe and unheore. In the dragon stories, we find, under the somewhat foreign dress, homely experiences of the fact that every lonely or forgotten hero takes on habits of ferocity. The cruel dragon that proved the death of Beowulf lay brooding on the remains of an extinct clan. The last man of the tribe hid his treasure in the cave with a lament for the noble heroes whom death in battle had carried off to the last man but one; there he ended his life, and the old enemy, the walker in the twilight, lay down upon the gold guarding the treasure that was no use to himself. We can safely conclude that at first, the hider of the treasure himself, or those nearest to him, once so noble and bold, filled the place of the monster. The Northmen are quite familiar with the idea of a dead man turning into a troll over his goods, and jealously guarding the gold with his niding's venom.

The simple separation from family and land is enough to imperil life itself; no man could live more than a certain time upon the store of soul in himself. “It is ill to live in unland,” said the men of the north, and the word carries with it more than an indication of the character of unease. The ancients had no doubt their homesickness, but such a popular word is not calculated to give any idea as to what it was that rose and fell in the mind of an exile when he sat, like Hengest — in the Beowulf — far from his ancestral seat “and thought of home”.

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The Icelanders said that landmunr was at play in the guest, and with this word, the longing for home is at once drawn in upon a definite cultural background; for this munr (Anglo-Saxon myn) contains in itself not only the meanings of love and will, it denotes a whole which these qualities fit: soul, life. And we are brought still nearer to the reality by the Anglo-Saxon use of feasceaft of an exile. The joylessness that lies in this word is not of the gentle melancholy type that inspires poets, it is a sickness of the hugr, which makes loneliness a thing simply ugly and nothing else. Feasceaft is a word that fits equally well applied to the outlaw, and to the monster Grendel himself, the dweller in Utgard.

Banishment was an amputation, only the worse in that it was not a limb, but the whole man that was amputated; and a man from one of the Germanic tribes taken by force from the circle of his kin and set down in some civilized inland town as the guest of the Roman people — as the Sigambrian chiefs were by Augustus — might well arrive at the point of preferring death. Or did he perhaps take his own life for fear of death, because he saw no other way of slipping back into life again, than by letting his soul return to its proper environment? The southern peoples understood but little of the feelings of a couple of native chiefs, and did not care to understand more; they knew that the barbarians could not endure the state and killed themselves “from disgust of life”, as Dio Cassius says. But their sufferings become more acute when we have the sentence translated into the language of those cast out.

Outlawry, then, is a terrible weapon in the hands of society against criminals who will not do right. The weapon hits so hard because it strikes the very nerve of life itself. The outlaw is thrust out, not from society, but from life. But then again, the effect of the sentence depends entirely upon the condemned man's kin, whether they will execute the curse by severing his vital artery. For though the whole known world excommunicate a man and declare him given over to all the evil spirits, it has not the slightest effect upon his spiritual welfare as long as his kinsmen maintain him and suffer him to drink of their source