of their bodies, vouchsafed the power of being now near, now far,
and of appearing and vanishing in turn. The approach to this desert is
beset with perils of a fearful kind, and has seldom granted to those
who attempted it an unscathed return. Now I will let my pen pass to my
theme.

ENDNOTES:
(1) Waldemar the Second (1203-42); Saxo does not reach his
history.

BOOK ONE.

Now Dan and Angul, with whom the stock of the Danes begins, were
begotten of Humble, their father, and were the governors and not
only the founders of our race. (Yet Dudo, the historian of Normandy,
considers that the Danes are sprung and named from the Danai.) And these
two men, though by the wish and favour of their country they gained
the lordship of the realm, and, owing to the wondrous deserts of
their bravery, got the supreme power by the consenting voice of their
countrymen, yet lived without the name of king: the usage whereof was
not then commonly resorted to by any authority among our people.

Of these two, Angul, the fountain, so runs the tradition, of the
beginnings of the Anglian race, caused his name to be applied to the
district which he ruled. This was an easy kind of memorial wherewith
to immortalise his fame: for his successors a little later, when they
gained possession of Britain, changed the original name of the island
for a fresh title, that of their own land. This action was much thought
of by the ancients: witness Bede, no mean figure among the writers of
the Church, who was a native of England, and made it his care to embody
the doings of his country in the most hallowed treasury of his pages;
deeming it equally a religious duty to glorify in writing the deeds of
his land, and to chronicle the history of the Church.

From Dan, however, so saith antiquity; the pedigrees of our kings
have flowed in glorious series, like channels from some parent spring.
Grytha, a matron most highly revered among the Teutons, bore him two
sons, HUMBLE and LOTHER.

The ancients, when they were to choose a king, were wont to stand on
stones planted in the ground, and to proclaim their votes, in order to
foreshadow from the steadfastness of the stones that the deed would be
lasting. By this ceremony Humble was elected king at his father's death,
thus winning a novel favour from his country; but by the malice of
ensuing fate he fell from a king into a common man. For he was taken by
Lother in war, and bought his life