And out of doors nine wives he thrust,—
The mothers of the princes first,
Who in Holmryger hold command,
And those who rule in Horder land.
And then he packed from out the place
The children born of Holge's race."
Chapter XXI.
Of King Harald's children and marriages.
King Harald's children were all fostered and brought up by their relations on the mother's side. Guttorm the-Duke had poured water over King Harald's eldest son[1], and had given him his own name. He set the child upon his knee[2], and was his foster-father, and took him with himself eastward to Viken, and there he was brought up in the house of Guttorm. Guttorm ruled the whole land in Yiken, and the Uplands, when King Harald was absent.
Chapter XXII.
King Harald's voyage to the west.
King Harald heard that the vikings, who were in the West sea in winter, plundered far and wide in the middle part of Norway; and therefore every summer he made an expedition to search the isles and out-skerries[3] on the coast. Wheresoever the vikings heard of him they all took to flight, and most of them out into the open ocean. At last the king grew weary of this work, and therefore one summer he sailed with his fleet right out into the West sea. First he came to Shetland, and he slew all the vikings who could not save themselves by flight. Then King Harald sailed southwards, to the Orkney Islands, and cleared them all of vikings. Thereafter he proceeded
- ↑ This pouring water over a child, and giving it a name, could scarcely have been an original coincidence between the Odin worship and Christianity. In Odinism it betokens nothing, and if really used has probably been borrowed from the Christian ceremony; or more probably, in the age when Christianity was considered to consist altogether in the ceremony of baptism, the scalds have thought it decorous to represent the ancestors to whom great families traced themselves as baptized Christians, not unbaptized heathens. It is only of such personages that we hear of this Odin-baptism, and not of the other sons who had no royal descendants.
- ↑ This appears to have been a generally used symbol of adoption of a child.
- ↑ Skerries are the uninhabited dry or half-tide rocks of a coast.
