n squalls might well make the fiord
inaccessible to Olaf's fleet. Raud sat late feasting and drinking, and in
the early morning he still lay in a drunken sleep when the "Crane" slipped
into the fiord despite mist and storm, and Olaf seized the dragon ship and
made Raud a prisoner almost without striking a blow.

When the King returned to Trondhjem he had the two finest ships of the
north, the "Crane" and the "Serpent," the latter the largest, the former
the swiftest vessel that had yet been launched on the northern seas. Proud
of such weapons, he wondered if he could not build a warship longer than
the "Serpent" and swifter than the "Crane," and he consulted his best
shipbuilder, Thorberg Haarklover, i.e. the "Hair-splitter," so named from
his deftness with the sharp adze, the shipwright's characteristic tool in
the days of wooden walls. Thorberg was given a free hand, and promised to
build a ship that would be famous for centuries. This was the "Lang Ormen,"
or "Long Serpent," a "Dreadnought" of those old Viking days. She was 150
feet long, and her sides rose high out of the water, but she had also a
deep draught. The bow, strengthened with a cut-water of steel, was
fashioned like the head of a huge dragon, the stern carved into a dragon's
tail, and bow and stern were covered with scales of gold. She had sixty
oars, and her crew was made up of no less than six hundred picked men,
among them warriors whose names live in history.

For a while Olaf, with his great ships, reigned victoriously over Norway,
defeating more than one effort of the old pagan Vikings to shake his power.
One of these defeated rivals, Erik Jarl (Earl Erik), took refuge in Sweden,
gathered there a number of adherents who had like himself fled from Norway
to avoid Olaf's strong-handed methods of reform and conversion, and with
them sailed the Baltic, plundering its coasts in the old Viking fashion.
King Svend of Denmark was jealous of the power of Norway, welcomed Erik at
his Court, and gave him his daughter's hand. Svend's queen, Sigrid, was a
Swedish princess, and Erik set to work to form a triple league against
Norway of which the three branches would be his own following of Norwegian
malcontents and the Swedes and Danes.

Olaf had spent the summer of the year 1000, with a fleet of sixty ships, in
the South-Eastern Baltic. Autumn was coming, and the King was preparing to
return home before the wintry weather began, when news arrived that
hastened