stern and
Southern countries, most of all in England; till the name of Olaf
Haraldson became quite famous in the Viking and strategic world. He
seems really to have learned the secrets of his trade, and to have been,
then and afterwards, for vigilance, contrivance, valor, and promptitude
of execution, a superior fighter. Several exploits recorded of him
betoken, in simple forms, what may be called a military genius.

The principal, and to us the alone interesting, of his exploits seem
to have lain in England, and, what is further notable, always on the
anti-Svein side. English books do not mention him at all that I can
find; but it is fairly credible that, as the Norse records report,
in the end of Ethelred's reign, he was the ally or hired general of
Ethelred, and did a great deal of sea-fighting, watching, sailing, and
sieging for this miserable king and Edmund Ironside, his son. Snorro
says expressly, London, the impregnable city, had to be besieged again
for Ethelred's behoof (in the interval between Svein's death and young
Knut's getting back from Denmark), and that our Olaf Haraldson was
the great engineer and victorious captor of London on that singular
occasion,--London captured for the first time. The Bridge, as usual,
Snorro says, offered almost insuperable obstacles. But the engineering
genius of Olaf contrived huge "platforms of wainscoting [old walls
of wooden houses, in fact], bound together by withes;" these, carried
steadily aloft above the ships, will (thinks Olaf) considerably secure
them and us from the destructive missiles, big boulder stones, and
other, mischief profusely showered down on us, till we get under the
Bridge with axes and cables, and do some good upon it. Olaf's plan
was tried; most of the other ships, in spite of their wainscoting and
withes, recoiled on reaching the Bridge, so destructive were the boulder
and other missile showers. But Olaf's ships and self got actually under
the Bridge; fixed all manner of cables there; and then, with the river
current in their favor, and the frightened ships rallying to help in
this safer part of the enterprise, tore out the important piles and
props, and fairly broke the poor Bridge, wholly or partly, down into
the river, and its Danish defenders into immediate surrender. That is
Snorro's account.

On a previous occasion, Olaf had been deep in a hopeful combination with
Ethelred's two younger sons, Alfred and Edward, afterwards King Edward
the C