ls to the Orient, takes part in
many wars, and gains experience and martial renown.

The second part of the trilogy deals with Sigurd's sojourn at the
Orkneys, where he interferes in the quarrel between the Earls Harold
and Paul. The atmosphere of suspicion, insecurity, and gloom which hangs
like a portentous cloud over these scenes is the very same which blows
toward us from the pages of the sagas. Bjoernson has gazed deeply into
the heart of Northern paganism, and has here reproduced the heroic
anarchy which was a necessary result of the code permitting the
individual to avenge his own wrongs. The two awful women, Helga and
Frakark, the mother and the aunt of the earls, are types which are
constantly met with in the saga. It is a long-recognized fact that
women, under lawless conditions, develop the wildest extremes of
ambition, avarice, and blood-thirstiness, and taunt the men with their
weak scruples. These two furies of the Orkneys plot murder with an
infernal coolness, which makes Lady Macbeth a kind-hearted woman by
comparison. They recognize in Sigurd a man born for leadership;
determine to use him for the furtherance of their plans, and to get rid
of him, by fair means or foul, when he shall have accomplished his task.
But Sigurd is too experienced a chieftain to walk into this trap. While
appearing to acquiesce, he plays for stakes of his own, but in the end
abandons all in disgust at the death of Earl Harold, who intentionally
puts on the poisoned shirt, prepared for his brother. There is no great
and monumental scene in this part which engraves itself deeply upon the
memory. The love scenes with Audhild, the young cousin of the earls,
are incidental and episodical, and exert no considerable influence
either upon Sigurd's character or upon the development of the intrigue.
Historically they are well and realistically conceived; but dramatically
they are not strong. Another criticism, which has already been made by
the Danish critic, Georg Brandes, refers to an offence against this very
historical sense which is usually so vivid in Bjoernson. When Frakark,
the Lady Macbeth of the play, remarks, "I am far from feeling sure of
the individual mortality so much preached of; but there is an
immortality of which I am sure; it is that of the race," she makes an
intellectual somersault from the twelfth century into the nineteenth,
and never gets back firmly on her pagan feet again. As Brandes wittily
observes: "People