forthright to bear him away;
So I took him up behind me, and we rode till late in the day,
Toward the cover of the wild-wood, and as swiftly as we might.
But when yet aloof was the thicket and it now was moonless night,
We stayed perforce for a little, and he told me all the tale:
How the aliens came against them, and they fought without avail
Till the Roof o'er their heads was burning and they burst forth on the
foe,
And were hewn down there together; nor yet was the slaughter slow.
But some they saved for thralldom, yea, e'en of the fighting men,
Or to quell them with pains; so they stripped them; and this man
espying just then
Some chance, I mind not whatwise, from the garth fled out and away.

"Now many a thing noteworthy of these aliens did he say,
But this I bid you hearken, lest I wear the time for nought,
That still upon the Markmen and the Mark they set their thought;
For they questioned this man and others through a go-between in words
Of us, and our lands and our chattels, and the number of our swords;
Of the way and the wild-wood passes and the winter and his ways.
Now look to see them shortly; for worn are fifteen days
Since in the garth of the Hundings I saw them dight for war,
And a hardy folk and ready and a swift-foot host they are."

Therewith Geirmund went down clattering from the Hill and stood with his
company. But a man came forth from the other side of the ring, and clomb
the Hill: he was a red-haired man, rather big, clad in a skin coat, and
bearing a bow in his hand and a quiver of arrows at his back, and a
little axe hung by his side. He said:

"I dwell in the House of the Hrossings of the Mid-mark, and I am now made
a man of the kindred: howbeit I was not born into it; for I am the son of
a fair and mighty woman of a folk of the Kymry, who was taken in war
while she went big with me; I am called Fox the Red.

"These Romans have I seen, and have not died: so hearken! for my tale
shall be short for what there is in it.

"I am, as many know, a hunter of Mirkwood, and I know all its ways and
the passes through the thicket somewhat better than most.

"A moon ago I fared afoot from Mid-mark through Upper-mark into the
thicket of the south, and through it into the heath country; and I went
over a neck and came in the early dawn into a little dale when somewhat
of mist still hung over it. At the dale's end I saw a man lying asle