e dismal darkness of the north
into the light of Roman civilization; and all the history they have are a
few scraps of saga.

At last they take a king of the family of the Gungings, Agilmund, son of
Ayo, like the rest of the nations, says Jornandes; for they will be no
more under duces, elective war-kings. And then follows a fresh saga
(which repeats itself in the myths of several nations), how a woman has
seven children at a birth, and throws them for shame into a pond; and
Agilmund the king, riding by, stops to see, and turns them over with his
lance; and one of the babes lays hold thereof; and the king says, 'This
will be a great man;' and takes him out of the pond, and calls him
Lamissohn, 'the son of the fishpond,' (so it is interpreted;) who grows
to be a mighty Kemper-man, and slays an Amazon. For when they come to a
certain river, the Amazons forbid them to pass, unless they will fight
their she-champion; and Lamissohn swims over and fights the war-maiden,
and slays her; and they go on and come into a large land and quiet,
somewhere about Silesia, it would seem, and abode there a long while.

Then down on them come the savage Bulgars by night, and slay king
Agilmund, and carry off his daughter; and Lamissohn follows them, and
defeats them with a great slaughter, and is made king; and so forth: till
at last they have got--how we shall never know--near history and historic
lands. For when Odoacer and his Turklings and other confederates went up
into Rugiland, the country north of Vienna, and destroyed the Rugians,
and Fava their king, then the Lombards went down into the waste land of
the Rugians, because it was fertile, and abode there certain years.

Then they moved on again, we know not why, and dwelt in the open plains,
which are called feld. One says 'Moravia;' but that they had surely left
behind. Rather it is the western plain of Hungary about Comorn. Be that
as it may, they quarrelled there with the Heruli. Eutropius says that
they paid the Herules tribute for the land, and offered to pay more, if
the Herules would not attack them. Paul tells a wild saga, or story, of
the Lombard king's daughter insulting a Herule prince, because he was
short of stature: he answered by some counter-insult; and she, furious,
had him stabbed from behind through a window as he sat with his back to
it. Then war came. The Herules, old and practised warriors, trained in
the Roman armies, despised the wild Lombards, an