een heroic Olaf Tryggveson and Ethelred the forever
Unready, was not perhaps seen in the terrestrial Planet that day.
Olaf or "Olaus," or "Anlaf," as they name him, did "engage on oath to
Ethelred not to invade England any more," and kept his promise, they
farther say. Essentially a truth, as we already know, though the
circumstances were all different; and the promise was to a devout High
Priest, not to a crowned Blockhead and cowardly Do-nothing. One other
"Olaus" I find mentioned in our Books, two or three centuries before,
at a time when there existed no such individual; not to speak of several
Anlafs, who sometimes seem to mean Olaf and still oftener to mean nobody
possible. Which occasions not a little obscurity in our early History,
says the learned Selden. A thing remediable, too, in which, if any
Englishman of due genius (or even capacity for standing labor), who
understood the Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon languages, would engage in
it, he might do a great deal of good, and bring the matter into a
comparatively lucid state. Vain aspirations,--or perhaps not altogether
vain.

At the time of Olaf Tryggveson's death, and indeed long before, King
Svein Double-Beard had always for chief enterprise the Conquest of
England, and followed it by fits with extreme violence and impetus;
often advancing largely towards a successful conclusion; but never, for
thirteen years yet, getting it concluded. He possessed long since all
England north of Watling Street. That is to say, Northumberland, East
Anglia (naturally full of Danish settlers by this time), were fixedly
his; Mercia, his oftener than not; Wessex itself, with all the coasts,
he was free to visit, and to burn and rob in at discretion. There or
elsewhere, Ethelred the Unready had no battle in him whatever; and,
for a forty years after the beginning of his reign, England excelled in
anarchic stupidity, murderous devastation, utter misery, platitude, and
sluggish contemptibility, all the countries one has read of. Apparently
a very opulent country, too; a ready skill in such arts and fine arts
as there were; Svein's very ships, they say, had their gold dragons,
top-mast pennons, and other metallic splendors generally wrought for
them in England. "Unexampled prosperity" in the manufacture way not
unknown there, it would seem! But co-existing with such spiritual
bankruptcy as was also unexampled, one would hope. Read Lupus
(Wulfstan), Archbishop of York's amazing _Sermon_ o