ged their own good
short swords, hammered their own armour, ploughed their own fields. In
short, they lived like Odysseus, the hero of Homer, and were equally
skilled in the arts of war and peace. They were mighty lawyers, too, and
had a most curious and minute system of laws on all subjects--land,
marriage, murder, trade, and so forth. These laws were not written,
though the people had a kind of letters called runes. But they did not
use them much for documents, but merely for carving a name on a sword-
blade, or a tombstone, or on great gold rings such as they wore on their
arms. Thus the laws existed in the memory and judgment of the oldest and
wisest and most righteous men of the country. The most important was the
law of murder. If one man slew another, he was not tried by a jury, but
any relation of the dead killed him "at sight," wherever he found him.
Even in an Earl's hall, Kari struck the head off one of his friend Njal's
Burners, and the head bounded on the board, among the trenchers of meat
and the cups of mead or ale. But it was possible, if the relations of a
slain man consented, for the slayer to pay his price--every man was
valued at so much--and then revenge was not taken. But, as a rule, one
revenge called for another. Say Hrut slew Hrap, then Atli slew Hrut, and
Gisli slew Atli, and Kari slew Gisli, and so on till perhaps two whole
families were extinct and there was peace. The gods were not offended by
manslaughter openly done, but were angry with treachery, cowardice,
meanness, theft, perjury, and every kind of shabbiness.

This was the state of affairs in Norway when a king arose, Harold Fair-
Hair, who tried to bring all these proud people under him, and to make
them pay taxes and live more regularly and quietly. They revolted at
this, and when they were too weak to defy the king they set sail and fled
to Iceland. There in the lonely north, between the snow and fire, the
hot-water springs, the volcano of Hecla, the great rivers full of salmon
that rush down such falls as Golden Foot, there they lived their
old-fashioned life, cruising as pirates and merchants, taking foreign
service at Mickle Garth, or in England or Egypt, filling the world with
the sound of their swords and the sky with the smoke of their burnings.
For they feared neither God nor man nor ghost, and were no less cruel
than brave; the best of soldiers, laughing at death and torture, like the
Zulus, who are a kind of bla