oast of France with his sea-robbers, got infestment by the poor
King of France in the fruitful, shaggy desert which is since called
Normandy, land of the Northmen; and there, gradually felling the
forests, banking the rivers, tilling the fields, became, during the next
two centuries, Wilhelmus Conquaestor, the man famous to England, and
momentous at this day, not to England alone, but to all speakers of the
English tongue, now spread from side to side of the world in a wonderful
degree. Tancred of Hauteville and his Italian Normans, though important
too, in Italy, are not worth naming in comparison. This is a feracious
earth, and the grain of mustard-seed will grow to miraculous extent in
some cases.

Harald's chief helper, counsellor, and lieutenant was the
above-mentioned Jarl Rognwald of More, who had the honor to cut Harald's
dreadful head of hair. This Rognwald was father of Turf-Einar, who first
invented peat in the Orkneys, finding the wood all gone there; and
is remembered to this day. Einar, being come to these islands by King
Harald's permission, to see what he could do in them,--islands
inhabited by what miscellany of Picts, Scots, Norse squatters we do not
know,--found the indispensable fuel all wasted. Turf-Einar too may be
regarded as a benefactor to his kind. He was, it appears, a bastard;
and got no coddling from his father, who disliked him, partly perhaps,
because "he was ugly and blind of an eye,"--got no flattering even on
his conquest of the Orkneys and invention of peat. Here is the parting
speech his father made to him on fitting him out with a "long-ship"
(ship of war, "dragon-ship," ancient seventy-four), and sending him
forth to make a living for himself in the world: "It were best if thou
never camest back, for I have small hope that thy people will have honor
by thee; thy mother's kin throughout is slavish."

Harald Haarfagr had a good many sons and daughters; the daughters he
married mostly to jarls of due merit who were loyal to him; with the
sons, as remarked above, he had a great deal of trouble. They were
ambitious, stirring fellows, and grudged at their finding so little
promotion from a father so kind to his jarls; sea-robbery by no means
an adequate career for the sons of a great king, two of them, Halfdan
Haaleg (Long-leg), and Gudrod Ljome (Gleam), jealous of the favors won
by the great Jarl Rognwald, surrounded him in his house one night, and
burnt him and sixty men to death there