"Norse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Perrault. But there are good stories enough left, and it is hoped that some in the Red Fairy Book may have the attraction of being less familiar than many of the old friends. The tales have been translated, or, in the case of those from Madame d'Aulnoy's long stories, adapted, by Mrs. Hunt from the Norse, by Miss Minnie Wright from Madame d'Aulnoy, by Mrs. Lang and Miss Bruce from other French sources, by Miss May Sellar, Miss Farquharson, and Miss Blackley from the German, while the story of 'Sigurd' ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... boys were aroused at seven o'clock by a servant, who brought a tray with the most fragrant coffee and hot rolls. It was in honor of the guest that, in accordance with Norse custom, this early meal was served; and all the boys, carrying pillows and blankets, gathered on Albert's and Ralph's bed and feasted right royally. So it seemed to them, at least; for any break in the ordinary ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... in London in Hereford Square, where his wife died in 1869. He died himself at Oulton in August 1881, leaving behind him, so it is frequently asserted, many manuscript volumes, including treatises on Celtic poetry, on Welsh and Cornish and Manx literature, as well as translations from the Norse and Russ and the jest-books of Turkey. Some, at all events, of these works were advertised as 'ready for ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... the elf's injunction was observed; but one day, in a fit of curiosity, the peasant looked into the bottom of the flask, and there sat a horrid toad! The toad disappeared, and so did the liquor; and the man in a short time fell miserably sick. In a Norse tale, a man whose bride is about to be carried off by Huldre-folk, rescues her by shooting over her head a pistol loaded with a silver bullet. This has the effect of dissolving the witchery; and he is forthwith enabled to seize her and gallop off, not unpursued. One ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... and flickering from the ruined crags, alone disturb the silence and the sunshine. One such place has impressed itself on my memory beyond all others. On a rock by the water's edge, old fighting men of the Norse breed had planted a double castle; the two stood wall to wall like semi-detached villas; and yet feud had run so high between their owners, that one, from out of a window, shot the other as he stood ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... us from old Europe between its waking and the age of Pericles? Some poetry, legends, and unimportant history from Greece; some legends from Rome; the spirit or substance of the Norse sagas; the spirit or substance of the Welsh Mabinogi and the Arthurian atmosphere; and of the Irish tales of the Red Branch and Fenian cycles. The actual tales as we get them were no doubt retold in much later times; and it is these late recensions that we have. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... infusion of Norse blood and certain traditions anent "usquebae" and "barley bree" it would—with so large a liberty—be naturally expected, a liberal proportion of drouthy souls, but with an abundance of what cheers and distinctly ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... youth came to his father, he found Erik the Red directing the building of one of the great Norse galleys, nearly eighty feet long and seventeen wide and only six feet deep. The boat had twenty ribs, and the frame was fastened together by withes made of roots, while the oaken planks were held by iron rivets. The oars were twenty feet long, ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... his disregard of death for himself led to a certain callousness with regard to human life, and to a certain enjoyment in inflicting physical anguish. There was an element of Red Indian ruthlessness in the Viking, which looms large in the story of the years of Norse ascendancy over Western Europe. Yet there was also a power of bold and daring action, of reckless valour, of rapid conception and execution, which contrasted strongly with the slower and more placid temperament of the Anglo-Saxon, ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... tree (including, no doubt, tile beech; cp. book, German Buch, and Buchstabe, a letter of the alphabet); the slips were thrown down promiscuously on a white cloth. whence the expert picked them up at random and by them interpreted fate. In these slips we have the origin of the Norse kefli, the Scots kaivel, which were and are still used as lots. The fishermen of north-east Scotland, when they return after a successful haul, divide the spoil into as many shares as there are men ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Joseph Cook's theory of Solar Light. Why didn't his parents give him my "Mathematical Exposition of Orthodoxy for Children," or my "The Theology of Euclid," on his birthdays, instead of Hans Andersen's "Fairy Tales" and the "Tales from the Norse?" It was very remiss ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... Isaac Taylor has shown, of the necessary connection between salt and the sea. The earliest known way of producing salt was of course in shallow pans on the sea-shore, at the bottom of a shoal bay, called in Norse and Early English a wick or wich; and the material so produced is still known in trade as bay-salt. By-and-by, when people came to discover the inland brine-pits and salt mines, they transferred to them the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... who does his best. Seneca observes that "no one saith the three hundred Fabii were defeated, but that they were slain," and if you have done your best, you will, in the words of an old Norse ballad, have gained ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... most curious proofs of the actual British origin of the legend is in the statement that the death of Havelok's father occurred as the result of a British invasion of Denmark for King Arthur, by a force under a leader with the distinctly Norse name of Hodulf. The claim for conquest of the north by Arthur is very old, and is repeated by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and may well have originated in the remembrance of some successful raid on the Danish coasts by the Norse settlers in the Gower district of Pembrokeshire, in company ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... meaningless sensation to know nobody and to discover myself equally unknown amid that matchless companionship. We were like a mixed bunch of gods, Greek, Norse, Hindu, Hottentot—all gathered on Olympus, having never heard of each other but taking it for granted that we were all gods together and ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... Nibelungen lay. Videl of days of chivalry. Bow fashioned like sword. Hagen of Tronje. Wilhelm Jordan, in "Sigfridsage." Henrietta Sontag and the coming Paganini. Wagner's Volker-Wilhelmj at Bayreuth. Magic fiddles and wonderworking fiddlers. Grimm's Fairy Tales. Norse folk-lore. English nursery rhymes. Crickets as fiddlers. Progenitors of violin. The violin of Queen Elizabeth and her age. Shakespeare in Twelfth Night. Household of Charles II. Butler, in Hudibras. Viola d'amore in Milwaukee, Wis. ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... views about the agents and the completeness of these periodical destructions. In the Norse mythology and in the doctrine of Buddhism, not one of the gods can survive the fire of the last day. Among the Greeks, great Jove alone will await the appearance of the virgin world after the icy winter and ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... with the junipers for a foothold along the slopes, and low black firs, whose seed had been wind-blown or bird-carried from the mainland, climbed the rugged crest of each island. Few men visited them, and almost none inhabited them. Since the first long Norse galley swung by to the tune of the singing rowers, the number of passing ships had increased and their character had changed, but the isles were rarely touched at except by mishap—a shipwreck—or a crew in need of water. The Indians, too, left the outer ones alone, for there ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... who have done most, by untiring, laborious search among old parish registers, etc., and dusty old records, to bring to light interesting social ordinances, details of ancient parish government, and gems of Norse literature and archaeological research, there have been none in the last century who have by patient work attained more knowledge of their country's inner ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... inventing one, is not lost. He is characteristic of a fine, bold race. Long may he wave! It is true that we cannot lie as gloriously as our ancestors did about him. When the great news-dealer of Norse times had no home-news he took his lyre, and either spun a yarn about Vinland such as would smash the "Telegraph," or else sung about "that sea-snake tremendous curled, whose girth encircles half the world." It is wonderful, it is awful, ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... the older states immigration from foreign lands has not greatly affected the country community. In Wisconsin, Minnesota and other states of the Northwest substantial sections of the community are invaded by people of sturdy Germanic and Norse extraction. In New England the Poles, French, Portuguese and some Jews are settling in the country. But throughout the states of the Union as a whole the population, both the newcomers and older ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... old Norse legends we are sure to find the inevitable three brothers, to the youngest of whom, Grimmel, fall all the adventures, the dealings with the Devil, and the pot of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... A series of Norse ballads tell much the same tale, but in none is the 'friends' will' a crucial point. Chansons from Burgundy, Bretagne, Provence, and northern ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... somewhat in this vein I looked upon a dingy skilling species, with its rudely crossed hammers—a rough coin, bold, sturdy, and rigid as the old Norse character itself which formed the initial of my cabinet—a cabinet which has given to me new ideas of the low-browed Roman and elegant Greek; has admitted me to the arcana of their fascinating mythology; has whispered strange tales of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Norse myths for reading, they had been the subject of many conversations, queries and illustrations. Some were even dramatized—in a childlike way, of course. Detailed descriptions of Mt. Ida, Asgard, and some of the principal ...
— A Primary Reader - Old-time Stories, Fairy Tales and Myths Retold by Children • E. Louise Smythe
... time. This circumstance Mr. Seidl accentuated by two bold excisions. One of the things for which Wagner has been faulted is that in his treatment of the Siegfried legend he has sacrificed historical elements in order to bring it into closer relationship with Norse mythology; has, in fact, made the fate of the gods and goddesses of our ancestors the chief concern of the prologue and succeeding dramas. Except for those who prefer to see only ethical symbols in the characters ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... certain month of the year. The Hindoos had twelve primal gods, "the Aditya." Moses erected twelve pillars at Sinai. The Mandan Indians celebrated the Flood with twelve typical characters, who danced around the ark. The Scandinavians believed in the twelve gods, the Aesir, who dwelt on Asgard, the Norse Olympus. Diligent investigation may yet reveal that the number of a modern jury, twelve, is a survival of the ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... expected. It touched not only his feelings but his pride; for was he not a lineal descendant of that Fergus McKay who had been a chief in one of the Western Isles of Scotland—he could not tell which, but no matter—at that celebrated period of Scottish history when the great Norse king, Harold Fairhair, had made a descent on the Scottish coast and received one of the few thorough thrashings that ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... of King Olaf recorded in this story of his kinsman are therefore from the Norse "Saga of King Olaf the Holy," and the various incidents are assigned as nearly as may be to their place in the sequence of events given from the death of Swein to the accession of Cnut, in the contemporary Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... in her tribal fights, notwithstanding the rubbish she talked about the chief, Rezu, who according to her account of him, must resemble one of the fabulous "trolls," half-human and half-ghostly evil creatures, of whom I have read in the Norse Sagas, who could only be slain by some particular hero ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... that, in sundry dialects of the north of Europe, the preposition at has been preferred for the governing of the infinitive: "The use of at for to, as the sign of the infinitive mode, is Norse, not Saxon. It is the regular prefix in Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, and Feroic. It is also found in the northern dialects of the Old English, and in the particular dialect of Westmoreland at the present day."—Fowler, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Barrett, secure in her father's home, there was little possibility of the hardships and privations on the material side not unfrequently incidental to the pursuit of letters, but to every serious worker life prefigures itself as something not unlike the Norse heaven with its seven floors, each of ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... myself. At the early age of ten I had the tales of the ingenious Mr. Edgar Poe and of Charlotte Bronte "put into my hands" by a cousin who had served as a Bashi Bazouk, and knew not the meaning of fear. But I DID, and perhaps even Nelson would have found out "what fear was," or the boy in the Norse tale would have "learned to shiver," if he had been left alone to peruse 'Jane Eyre,' and the 'Black Cat,' and the 'Fall of the House of Usher,' as I was. Every night I expected to wake up in my coffin, having ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... strawberry (the Frasers have a strawberry in their coat-of-arms); Chisholm is English and means "gravel-holm,"—the Anglo-Saxon ceosol (pebble) is preserved in Chesil Beach and Chiselhurst; MacLeod signifies "son of Ljot"; and ljotr is the Norse word for "ugly." Campbell is probably Norman-French, though Dr. Macbain suggests cam-beul, Gaelic for "crooked mouth." In olden times an external conqueror would sometimes subdue a district, and call the natives after his ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... woman's face was as baffling, as inexplicable, in its way, as was Mona Lisa's. One wasn't sure that she was beautiful; one was only sure that she was unforgetable, and that after other faces had faded from the memory, hers remained to haunt the heart. And that red hair of hers, like the hair of a Norse sun-goddess! ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... on a farm; and there were "averia lanata" likewise. Similar apparently whimsical adaptations of words will not shock those who are aware that "pig" in England properly means a little fellow of the swine species, and that "pige" in Norse signifies ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... be something like a rival, a man from Barra to be more than half a foreigner. Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection joins us on the instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one Celtic, and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have it not among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English, or Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other's errors. And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us, ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... may serve as a text for my whole lecture. Not only does it smack of the sea-breeze and the salt water, like all the finest old Norse sagas, but it gives a glimpse at least of the nobleness which underlay the grim and often cruel nature of the Norseman. It belongs, too, to the culminating epoch, to the beginning of that era when the Scandinavian peoples had their great times; when ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... recite that part of Beowulf which tells of the monster Grendel. Again, he named Sigard the Volsung (the Siegfrid of the Niebelungenlied and of Wagner's opera), and this would recall the slaying of the dragon Fafnir, or some other story of the old Norse saga. So every name or place which Widsith mentioned was an invitation. When he came to a hall and "unlocked his word-hoard," he offered his hearers a variety of poems and legends from which they made their own selection. Looked at in this way, the old poem becomes ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... now you follow the polar star To the seat of the old Norse Kings, Past the death-white halls of Valhalla, Where the Norn to the tempest sings— Follow the steady needle That cleaves to its steady star To the uttermost realms of Odin And the warlike ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... her sister into a simply furnished, pine-boarded room with a big stove at one end of it, where a middle-aged woman set food and coffee before them. She spoke English haltingly, but her lined face lighted up when Muriel thanked her in Norse. Then there followed a flow of eager words, a few of which the girl caught, until the woman broke off when their host came in. He was silent, for the most part, during the meal, and shortly afterward Muriel was shown into ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... interesting to know that King Olaf Tryggvasson, on one of his early Viking expeditions, was baptized in the Scilly Isles, that as his second wife he married an Irish Princess, and that for some time he lived in Dublin. To the Norwegians he is a Norse hero of the greatest renown, who during his short reign of barely five years never ceased to force Christianity on the heathen population, and who, at the age of thirty-one, came to an untimely end. His ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... long list, filling 80 columns, the dialectal words are marked with a dagger {*}. But the list of these is by no means exhaustive, and it will require a careful search through the pages of the English Dialect Dictionary to do justice to the wealth of this Old Norse element. There is an excellent article on this subject by Arnold Wall, entitled "A Contribution towards the Study of the Scandinavian element in the English Dialects," printed in the German periodical entitled Anglia, Neue Folge, Band ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... there were more light-haired and blue-eyed men by this name in the place than any one, having the popular idea of what an Italian looks like, would believe could be found in a town of the same size in America. Trying to account for the Norse look of many of the Segnians, and the Oriental look of many others, Caper climbed up to the top of the mountain above the town, and seating himself in the shadow of the old Cyclopean wall, looked down the mountain side to the broad ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the young Oehlenschlaeger against Baggesen, Romanticism against Rationalism; Oehlenschlaeger as the Northern poet of human nature against a certain Bjoernson, who, it was said, claimed to be more truly Norse than he. In Mr. Driebein's presentment, no recognised great name was ever attacked. And in his course, as in Thortsen's History of Literature, literature which might be regarded as historic stopped ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... the things that the Ministry of Transport has, so to say, up its sleeve, and is alone a sufficient answer to those who suggest that this Ministry has outlived its hour. There is a grim Norse spirit amongst its officials, inspired perhaps by their chieftain's name, and already the plans for a first-class Pullman galley are under way. As ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... knife of the same material at his right. Altogether King Hudibras, being broad and strong in proportion to his height, presented a very regal appearance indeed, and bore himself with becoming dignity. He had married the daughter of a Norse Jarl; and his two children, Bladud and Hafrydda, had taken after their gentle mother in complexion and disposition, though they were not altogether destitute of a sub-current of ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... de place whar dey [the characters] make der disappear'nce." It will say what it has to say and lose no time in saying it; and often it will attempt to say only one thing. It will be remarkable as well for what it omits as for what it tells. The Norse Doll i' the Grass well illustrates this unity. Boots set out to find a wife and found a charming little lassie who could spin and weave a shirt in one day, though of course the shirt was tiny. He took her home and then celebrated his wedding with the pleasure of the king. This unity, which ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... in her missionary efforts amongst the heathen hordes of Northern Europe. "Do you renounce the devils, and all their words and works; Thonar, Wodin, and Saxenote?" was part of the form of recantation administered to the Scandinavian converts;[1] and at the present day "Odin take you" is the Norse equivalent of "the devil take you." On the other hand, an attempt was made to identify Balda "the beautiful" with Christ—a confusion of character that may go far towards accounting for a custom joyously observed by our forefathers at Christmastide but which the false modesty of modern ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... a peasant," said the girl, with a flavour of discontent, as though a more apparent rusticity would have lent special magnanimity to Madame Okraska's benevolence. But the massive lady assured her: "Oh yes, it is the true Norse type; their peasantry has its patrician quality. I have been to Norway. Sir Alliston looks very much moved, doesn't he? He has been in love with Madame Okraska for years." And she added with a deep sigh ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... of course no other than the roar of Curly's gun in the act of bursting and vanishing; for neither stock, lock, nor barrel was ever seen again. It left the world like a Norse king on his fire-ship. But, at the moment, Alec was too busy in the depths of his snow-vault to hear or see ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... following: A gentleman called at the White House one day, and introduced to him two officers serving in the army, one a Swede and the other a Norwegian. Immediately he repeated, to their delight, a poem of some eight or ten verses descriptive of Scandinavian scenery, and an old Norse legend. He said he had read the poem in a newspaper some years before, and liked it, but it had passed out of his memory until their visit had recalled it. The two books which he read most were the Bible and ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... Celtic-speaking peoples are of differing types—short and dark as well as tall and fairer Highlanders or Welshmen, short, broad-headed Bretons, various types of Irishmen. Men with Norse names and Norse aspect "have the Gaelic." But all alike have the same character and temperament, a striking witness to the influence which the character as well as the language of the Celts, whoever they were, made on all with whom they mingled. Ethnologically there ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... sixteen other cayuses of every variety of color and character, the most notable of all being a white pony called Tinker. At some remote and unidentified period of her life she had bucked and killed a tradesman who bestrode her against her will, and thereby, as in the old Norse legends, she has inherited his strength, his wickedness, and his name. And when, after many adventures, I came back from this strange land and told the story of its fishes other men were sent out from Washington with nets and buckets. ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... things come in her place; and when Tom comes he will see the fishing-smacks anchored there in hundreds, from Scotland, and from Ireland, and from the Orkneys, and the Shetlands, and from all the Northern ports, full of the children of the old Norse Vikings, the masters of the sea. And the men will be hauling in the great cod by thousands, till their hands are sore from the lines; and they will be making cod-liver oil and guano, and salting down the fish; ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... earlier Greek statues the head remains lifeless, abstract, whilst the limbs are full of expression. In a contrary spirit, more akin to modern ideas, the Norse myth relates that Skadi, having her choice of a husband from among all the gods, but having to choose by the feet alone, meaning to take Baldur, got by mistake Niordr, an inferior deity. This does not seem so strange ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... in the bards of Wales and in the Scalds of the Sagas did he seem to find his kindred spirits, though it has been suggested that his complex nature took this means of informing the world that he could read both Cymric and Norse. But we must not be unkind behind the magic door—and yet to be charitable to the uncharitable is surely the crown ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... descends into weakness. Triumphant in humour, he is eminently a master of the plaintive; his tender pieces breathe a deep-toned cadence, and his sacred lyrics are replete with devotional fervour. His Norse ballads are resonant with the echoes of his birth-land, and his songs are to be remarked for their deep pathos and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Carlyle effected by his book on Heroes we must put ourselves at the point of view of the time when it was written, the days of Wellington and Melbourne, Brougham and Macaulay, Southey and Coleridge. None of these men understood the heroic in Norse mythology, or the grandeur of Oliver Cromwell, or the supreme importance of the Divina Commedia as the embodiment of Catholic Feudalism. All this Carlyle felt as no Englishman before him had felt, and ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... are to be found in our vulgar sayings, Jasper; for example—in that particularly vulgar saying of ours, 'Your mother is up,' {289} there's a noble Norse word; mother, there, meaning not the female who bore us, but rage and choler, as I discovered by ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... exclaimed indignantly. "The fame of Harold's bravery, wisdom, and courtesy to all men is known in every court in Europe, and that the duke's vassal should have dared to imprison and chain him will excite universal indignation. Why, the rudest of our own Norse ancestors would not have so foully treated one so noble whom fate had cast into his hands. Had we been at war with England it would be shameful, but being at peace there are no words that can fitly ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... literature, the inhabitants of ancient Lothian are known as Saix-Brit, i.e. Saxo-Britons, because they were a Cymric people, governed by the Saxons of Northumbria".[31] A further non-Celtic influence was that of the Norse invaders, who attacked the country from the ninth to the eighteenth century, and profoundly modified the racial character of the population on the south and west coasts, in the islands, and along the east coast as far south as ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... all to which the sable bird was put was to guide the roving pirates on their expeditions. Before a start was made a raven was let loose, and the direction of his flight gave the viking ships their course. In this manner, according to the old Norse legends, did Floki discover Iceland; and many other extraordinary things happened under the influence ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... glorious heroism of plunging, crashing bodies and aching limbs. For those minutes courage flowed like wine out of the November dusk, and he was the eternal hero, one with the sea-rover on the prow of a Norse galley, one with Roland and Horatius, Sir Nigel and Ted Coy, scraped and stripped into trim and then flung by his own will into the breach, beating back the tide, hearing from afar the thunder of cheers... finally ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... steeple-chimney yet got on end from sea to sea! North of the Humber, a stern Willelmus Conquaestor burnt the Country, finding it unruly, into very stern repose. Wild fowl scream in those ancient silences, wild cattle roam in those ancient solitudes; the scanty sulky Norse-bred population all coerced into silence,—feeling that, under these new Norman Governors, their history has probably as good as ended. Men and Northumbrian Norse populations know little what has ended, what is but beginning! The Ribble and the Aire roll down, as yet unpolluted ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Bald Grim seemed born again in his son Egil. A man of great size, swarthy face, harsh of aspect, and of fierce temper, in him was the old, tameless spirit of the Norse sea-kings, turbulent, passionate, owning no man master, he bent his strong soul to no man's rule. Rash and adventurous, he had a long and stormy career, while nature had endowed him with a rich gift of song, which added to his fame. Such ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... surprise some that so anomalous a system of government should have persisted as late as the eleventh century, in other words for a period of over 500 years. But we must take account of the Danish—or as we should rather call it, the Norse—invasion of Ireland. Danish ships first appeared off the Irish coasts about the year 800. From that time for two centuries Ireland was to a large extent cut off from intercourse with the rest of Europe. The aim of the northern ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... cruel to the cunning phase of piratical life. These villains had at that time been about six months on their cruise. They had made the entire circuit of Borneo, murdering, and plundering, and striking terror and desolation wherever they went. The scenes enacted by Norse pirates in the tenth century were repeated in the middle of the nineteenth by a people who, unlike the Norsemen, had no regard whatever for law; and now they were returning ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... boat being paddled by fourteen men and steered with paddles by three more on the right-hand side of the stern as you look toward the bow. Thus the "steer-board" (or steering side) was no new thing when its present name of "starboard" was used by our Norse ancestors a good many hundred years ago. The Egyptians, steering on the right-hand side, probably took in cargo on the left side or "larboard", that is, the "load" or "lading" side, now called the "port" side, as "larboard" and "starboard" sounded ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... of the Ganges is Welsh; for what is the difference between Dhur, a name of that river, and dwr, the common Welsh word for water? How is it that aequor, a Latin word for the sea, so much resembles AEgir, the name of the Norse God of the sea? and how is it that Asaer, the appellative of the Northern Gods, is so like Asura, the family name of certain Hindu demons? Why does the scanty Gailk, the language of the Isle of Man, possess more Sanscrit words than the mighty Arabic, the richest of all ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... favorable averted misfortune. Some were medicinal, others employed to win love, etc. In later times they were frequently used for inscriptions, of which more than a thousand have been found. The language is a dialect of the Gothic, called Norse, still in use in Iceland. The inscriptions may therefore be read with certainty, but hitherto very few have been found which throw the least light on history. They are mostly ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... between Charles the Simple and Rollo, the chief of the Norse barbarians, gives Rollo's name followed by all his titles, among which we read that of Master of the ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... had slight knowledge, though he was always interested in the northern literatures. In a review of the Poems of William Herbert, of which the part most interesting to the reviewer consisted of translations from the Icelandic, Scott says: "We do not pretend any great knowledge of Norse; but we have so far traced the 'Runic rhyme' as to be sensible how much more easy it is to give a just translation of that poetry into English than into Latin." In the same review we find him saying, after a slight discussion ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... roughly, Cape Cod Bay in their southern areas and the Bay of Fundy in the northern. On these maps the cape itself was shown on the "Promontory of Vinland" and was given the name Kialarnes, or the Ship's Nose, from its resemblance in form to the high upturned prow of the old Norse ships. To the entire area of the gulf was given the title ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe. lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked. In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... walls of the Moot-Hall of the Hammersmith of Nowhere. It was by tales such as these that he first won a hearing from all lovers of English literature. The story of Jason is but a Greek setting of a folk-tale known among the Gaels as the Battle of the Birds, and in Norse as the Master Maid. Many of the tales which the travellers told one another in the Earthly Paradise, such as The Man Born to be King (itself derived from the first of our stories), The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and The Ring given to Venus, are, on the face of them, folk-tales. ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... to the popular poetry of Denmark and other countries across the North Sea, than to that of our neighbours across the Tweed. There are a score of ballads that agree so closely in plot and structure, and even in names and phrases, with Norse or German versions, that it is impossible to doubt that they have been drawn directly from the same source. Either they have been transplanted thither in the many descents which the Northmen made on Scotland, as is witnessed not ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... in sight, their dusty and sweaty shirts grew biting as the poisoned shirt of the Norse myth, their bare feet in the brown dirt grew distressingly flat and hoof-like, and their huge, dirty, brown, chapped, and swollen hands grew so repulsive that the mere remote possibility of some time in the far future "standing a chance" of having an introduction to her, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... she always spoke French; he begged her to talk Norse at least now and then, but all ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... only since A. D. 1830, one year before I was born, that the old Norse life has been changed in Orkney. Up to that date agriculture could hardly be said to exist. The sheep and cattle of all towns, or communities, grazed together; but this plan, though it saved the labour of herding, was at the ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... footing and a slender hand-rail. Here the bottom of the cave seemed to have dropped out, and the roof to have gone in search of it; and but for the dim glimpse of the rock on the other side one might have suspected that this bridge would launch him into that ungeographical locality called, in the old Norse mythology, "Ginnunga Gap,"—a place where there was neither side, edge, nor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... junction; and the Great Northern, Great Eastern and Great Central lines also afford communications. The land is extremely fertile. The name, properly Axeyholm (cf. Haxey), is hybrid, Ax being the Celtic uisg, water; ey the Anglo-Saxon for island; and holm the Norse word ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... open, and thither came the bards and gleemen, who used to delight the company with their songs and stories of the gallant deeds of their ancestors, the weird legends of their gods Woden and Thor, their Viking lays and Norse sagas, and the acrobats and dancers astonished them with their ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... in his youth with English songs, and most probably knew the old Norse sagas; but he had to learn Latin in his later life. We must remember that most of the literature which Alfred could get at was locked up in Latin; even the invaluable Church History of St Bede needed a translator's key; and it was Alfred who first ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... The Norse conception of death as a vast, cloudy presence, darkly sweeping on its victims, and bearing them away wrapped in its sable folds, is evidently a free product of imagination brooding not so much on the distinct ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... conquered the Firbolgs by that means.' (Mr B. somewhat out of countenance), 'Oh! Aye! Keatinge is THE authority; a most extraordinary writer.' 'Well, I should call him the Geoffrey of Monmouth of Ireland.' (Mr B. changing the VENUE), 'I delight in Norse-stories; they are far grander than the Greek. There is the story of Olaf the Saint of Norway. Can anything be grander? What a noble character!' 'But,' I said, 'what do YOU think of his putting all those poor Druids on the Skerry of Shrieks, ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... A.D. 875 that Ingolf, a jarl of Norway, came to Iceland with Norse settlers. They built their habitation at first where a pleasant headland seemed attractive, the present Ingolfshofdi, and later founded Reikjavik, where the signs directed them; for certain carved posts, which they had thrown overboard as they approached the island, were found to have drifted ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... long interval between devoted himself actively to intellectual culture and literary pursuits. He began his career as an author by translating the "Numancia" of Cervantes, but his admiration of the ancient Norse sagas and the old German legends led him into the composition of exquisitely beautiful and tender, though exceedingly fantastic, romances which speedily gained immense popularity. In these productions ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... agreement between them, that, if they slew Olaf Tryggvason, he of them who should be nearest at the time should own the ship and all the share of booty taken in the battle; but of the realm of the Norse king they should each have ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... compliment, but a disparagement, to consult a man only on horses, or on steam, or on theatres, or on eating, or on books, and, whenever he appears, considerately to turn the conversation to the bantling he is known to fondle. In the Norse heaven of our forefathers, Thor's house had five hundred and forty floors: and Man's house has five hundred and forty floors. His excellence is facility of adaptation, and of transition through many related points to wide contrasts and extremes. Culture kills his exaggeration, his conceit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... of places, with the pleasant wholesome smack of the soil in them,— Weathersfield, Thaxted, Shalford,—are to the Celtic names of places, with their penetrating, lofty beauty,—Velindra, Tyntagel, Caernarvon,— so is the homely realism of German and Norse nature to the fairy-like loveliness of Celtic nature. Gwydion wants a wife for his pupil: "Well," says Math, "we will seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him out of flowers. So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... any considerable English writer then living. It is true that he criticises, more or less disparagingly, all his own works, from Sartor, of which he remarks that "only some ten pages are fused and harmonious," to his self-entitled "rigmarole on the Norse Kings": but he would not let his enemy say so; nor his friend. Mill's just strictures on the "Nigger Pamphlet" he treats as the impertinence of a boy, and only to Emerson would he grant the privilege to hold his own. Per contra, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... laid her hand on his arm, her beautiful face fixed in its firm resolve like that of one of those fair Norse Valas, from whose rigid lips flowed the bode of defeat or victory, when the Vikings went forth to the Feast ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... the Oriental literature is treated as a sacred animal. "The clouds are cows and the rain milk." I remember what Herodotus says of the Egyptians' worship of heifers and steers; and in the traditions of the Celtic nations the cow is regarded as a divinity. In Norse mythology the milk of the cow Andhumbla afforded nourishment to the Frost giants, and it was she that licked into being and into shape a god, the father of Odin. If anything could lick a god into shape, certainly the cow could do it. You may see her perform this office for ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... and spoke Celtic; when they were conquered by the Romans, Latin words crept into the tongue; and as Romans gave place to the Saxons, and the Saxons to the Danes, words from the German and Norse tongues were added to the language. Finally, came the Norman Conquest, and with it a flood of French words. The English we speak to-day is a mixture of Celtic, Latin, ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 58, December 16, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... is the story of supposed Norse sea-rovers hither, derived from certain Icelandic manuscripts of the fourteenth century. It is a pleasing narrative, that of Lief Ericson's sail in 1000-1001 to Helluland, Markland, and at last to Vineland, and of the subsequent tours by Thorwald Ericson in 1002, Thorfinn Karlsefne, ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Science Monthly." This and the "Geographic" and "Current Events" were regularly taken by her and most thoroughly digested. She read with keen intelligence; her comments were as shrewd as a knife-edge. The chair she sat in was made from elk-horns and looked like the throne of some Norse chieftain. Behind her on the wall hung the stuffed head of a huge walrus, his tusks gleaming, the gift of that exploring brother who seemed to be her only living relative. There were other tokens of ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Norse maiden in Horlingdal. The father of the maid favoured the elder warrior; the maid herself ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... arose a hissing as though within it raged Babylonian Tiamat, Mother of Chaos, serpent dweller in the void; Midgard-snake of the ancient Norse holding in her coils ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... settlers were of the Norse race; two men who, banished from their country, fitted out a ship and sailed to Iceland, where in 874 they made a settlement in the ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... charming insolence. "Meryl and I both have Norse blood in us. If you go far enough back we probably are Norse. But where would be the sense in our professing to love our country by talking her tongue, when it served every reasonable purpose in the world better to talk English? You're so one idea'd, you Dutch folk, at least some of you," ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... there. Conditions the world over have changed much since the day of the Vikings, but still today he who comes to Nantucket must emulate them, and ride the same white horses of the shoals, for they surround the island and prance for the modern steamer as they did for the long Norse ships with the weird figure-heads and the bulwarks of shields. Blown down from New Bedford by a rough nor'wester we plunged through the green rollers south of Hedge Fence shoals, wallowed among ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... listening, and looking at a spot where the Norsemen are supposed to be making a landing, off stage. With one hand he shields his eyes. With the other he holds his bow. The tableau should suggest the wild freedom of an untamed spirit. For music, some bars of Grieg's Norse airs. ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... of the Icelandic and Scandinavian poets are here recounted in a cohesive and lucid style suitable for boys and girls, thus in an easy way introducing the famous and fantastic heroes and heroines of Norse Mythology. The beautiful colour pictures, with the black and white drawings, are full of poetry and interest. Printed on rough art paper. 12 full-page colour plates. 144 pp. ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... was probably as great in one case as in the other. The modern Englishman is descended from a Low-Dutch stock, which, when it went to Britain, received into itself an enormous infusion of Celtic, a much smaller infusion of Norse and Danish, and also a certain infusion of Norman-French blood. When this new English stock came to America it mingled with and absorbed into itself immigrants from many European lands, and the process has gone on ever ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Commissioner watched the bullet head; the points of that Norse rover's moustache, falling below the line of the heavy jaw; the whole full and pale physiognomy, whose determined character was marred by too much flesh; at the cunning wrinkles radiating from the outer corners of the eyes—and in that purposeful contemplation of the valuable and trusted officer ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... was before the king of their land, Norse or Dane, whichever he was, learned what had befallen his host, and how their bones lay on the Wessex shore and islands, for not one of all that had sailed that spring returned to give the news, or to tell how his comrades died on Stert fighting to the last, and on the ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... the sea seemed to cling about him as he swung down the narrow trail in advance of the dogs; and he brought the butt of his dog whip against Malemute Kid's door as a Norse sea rover, on southern foray, might thunder for admittance ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... Glasgow, and Clan MacLean Association of Glasgow; Corresponding Member Davenport Academy of Sciences, and Western Reserve Historical Society; Author of History of Clan MacLean, Antiquity of Man, The Mound Builders, Mastodon, Mammoth and Man, Norse Discovery of America, Fingal's Cave, Introduction Study St. John's Gospel, ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... is of no great value. Balder is interesting, though not extremely good. Its subject is connected with that of Gray's Descent of Odin, but handled much more fully, and in blank-verse narrative instead of ballad form. The story, like most of those in Norse mythology, has great capabilities; but it may be questioned whether the Greek-Miltonic chastened style which the poet affects is well calculated to bring them out. The death of Nanna, and the blind fratricide Hoder, are ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... Anglorum Vuffingus appellant"[196]). In some one or other of his forms, Woden (observes Mr. Kemble) "is the eponymus of tribes and races. Thus, as Geat, or through Geat, he was the founder of the Geatas; through Gewis, of the Gewissas; through Scyld, of the Scyldingas, the Norse Skjoldungar; through Brand, of the Brodingas; perhaps, through Baetwa, of the Batavians."[197] It could therefore scarcely be regarded as very exceptional at least, if Vetta, one of the grandsons of Woden, should have given, in the same way, his name to a combined tribe of Saxons and Picts, ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... classic treatment, and his ornament, which gave a distinct cachet to Punch up to 1878, was not founded on a mere grotesque treatment of classical subjects, but was the fruit of a close study of and easy familiarity with heathen mythology, classical, Egyptian, and, in particular, Norse. The fun was not particularly broad, but Tom Taylor was especially tickled by his attempts to find amusement in the extraordinary head-dresses worn by ladies of Ancient Egypt—such as that in the cut (July 11th, 1874) learnedly inscribed "Oos ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... another, are mentioned in the record itself. The not exterminated germs of the nature-worship (with the adoration of fire) spring up again, but the moral life remained. (1.) Therefore the Veda language is to me the precipitate of the Old Bactrian (as the Edda language of the Old Norse). (2.) The Zend language is the second step from the Northern Old Bactrian. (3.) The Sanskrit is one still further advanced from the Southern Old Bactrian, or from the Veda language. (4.) All Indian literature, except the Vedas, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... to be found in our vulgar sayings, Jasper; for example—in that particularly vulgar saying of ours, "Your mother is up," {62b} there's a noble Norse word; mother, there, meaning not the female who bore us, but rage and choler, as I discovered by reading ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... than she did. Saul was piling wood into the big oven, and Sophie paused a moment on the threshold to look at him, for she always enjoyed the sight of this stalwart cousin, whom she likened to a Norse viking, with his fair hair and beard, keen blue eyes, and six feet of manly height, with shoulders that looked broad and strong enough to ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... a Norwegian: coming in she saw our first gauge-pole, standing at point E. Norse skipper thought it was a sunk smack, and dropped his anchor in full drift of sea: chain broke: schooner came ashore. Insured: laden with wood: skipper owner of vessel and cargo: ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by his name. Fergunna and Virgunia, two names of mountains in Germany, are relics of the name. The name of the god, if preserved in the Gothic, would have been Fairguneis; and indeed in the Old Norse language Fioergynn is the father of Frigg, the wife of Odin, and Fioergynnior, the Earth-goddess, is mother of Thor. Professor Zimmer takes the same view. Grimm thinks that the Greeks and Romans, by changing f into ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Dodd, Mead & Co., and the Macmillan Company, by means of which they have been enabled to reprint stories from Hawthorne's "Wonder Book" and "Tanglewood Tales," from "In the Days of Giants," from "Norse Stories," from Church's "Stories from Homer," and ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... Ushas; water nymph, wood nymph; Yama, Varuna, Zeus; Vishnu[Hindu deities], Siva, Shiva, Krishna, Juggernath[obs3], Buddha; Isis[Egyptian deities], Osiris, Ra; Belus, Bel, Baal[obs3], Asteroth &c.[obs3]; Thor[Norse deities], Odin; Mumbo Jumbo; good genius, tutelary genius; demiurge, familiar; sibyl; fairy, fay; sylph,, sylphid; Ariel[obs3], peri, nymph, nereid, dryad, seamaid, banshee, benshie[obs3], Ormuzd; Oberon, Mab, hamadryad[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... knowledge of the richness, fertility, and beauty of the island had fully spread throughout Denmark and Norway, a large fleet gathered in the harbors of the Baltic and put to sea. The famous Turgesius or Turgeis—Thorgyl in the Norse—was the leader. The Edda and Sagas of Norway and Denmark have been examined with a view to elucidate this passage in Irish history, but thus far fruitlessly. It is known, however, that many Sagas have been lost which might ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... less of the exquisite stories of Bjornsen, tells how two swains of Ulvik, Lars the hunter and Per the fisher, quarrel for love of Brita, and at a public wrestling decide the question by a combat, fighting with knives, in Norse fashion, while hooked to each other at the belt. They strip, a la Heenan and Sayers. Mr. Taylor, who does not often come behind the occasion when he can get a human figure to describe statue-wise or under a studio light, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... watching the fine carriages as they dashed past him; he saw the handsome women in brilliant costumes laughing and chatting gayly; the apathetic policemen promenading in stoic dignity up and down upon the smooth pavements; the jauntily attired nurses, whom in his Norse innocence he took for mothers or aunts of the children, wheeling baby-carriages which to Norse eyes seemed miracles of dainty ingenuity, under the shady crowns of the elm-trees. He did not know how long he had been sitting there, when a little bright-eyed girl with light kid gloves, ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... luck to have a drunken, superstitious pilot. Twatt, that Norse blood i' thy veins is o'er full o' freets. Fear God, an' mind thy wark, an' thou needna speir o' the sun what ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... for a life-time. When the historian fully realizes his ignorance — which sometimes happens to Americans — he becomes even more tiresome to himself than to others, because his naivete is irrepressible. Adams could not get over his astonishment, though he had preached the Norse doctrine all his life against the stupid and beer-swilling Saxon boors whom Freeman loved, and who, to the despair of science, produced Shakespeare. Mere contact with Norway started voyages of thought, and, under their illusions, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Conqueror. The Crusades were still undreamed of. Art, science, letters, were in custody in the East. These armed children ran riot,—passionate, intense, uncontrolled, loving fight and finery as the Trojans, or the Norse heroes of the Sagas. ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... Entering, he called for a pot of beer. It was not a huge draught for a man of his size. As he drained it the memory of grand old jovial sea-kings crossed his mind, and he called for another pot. As he was about to apply it to his lips, and shook back his flaxen curls, the remembrance of, a Norse drinking-cup in his possession—an heirloom, which could not stand on its bottom, and had therefore to be emptied before being set down,— induced him to chuckle ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... in conferring upon them titles of endearment and affection. The brothers Grimm write—"In Scotland they [The Fairies] are called The Good People, Good Neighbours, Men of Peace; in Wales—The Family, The Blessing of their Mothers, The Dear Ladies; in the old Norse, and to this day in the Faroe islands, Huldufolk (The Gracious People;) in Norway, Huldre;[23] and, in conformity with these denominations, discover a striving to be in the proximity of men, and to keep up ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... than are, for example, the thoroughly anglicized Welsh of Cornwall. Otherwise, the infusion of new blood into the English race on this side of the Atlantic has been chiefly from three sources—German, Irish, and Norse; and these three sources represent the elemental parts of the composite English stock in about the same proportions in which they were originally combined,—mainly Teutonic, largely Celtic, and with a Scandinavian admixture. The descendant of the German ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... helper. "Traill," it seems to me, would be meaning in the English, "lazy, useless, bedraggled"; but there is no word in English that would be giving the contempt of that word, which I am thinking would have some connection with the Norse word "troll," but I am not sure of it. But there was no end to her ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... entered Britain, it began its work of destruction. Before it has disappeared the real British, the Cymric or Welsh, Erse or Irish, the Gaelic of Scotland, and the Manx of the Isle of Man. The British Keltic is entirely gone; the rest are entirely local. Beside these it ousted from the island the Norse, the Norman-French, and several other tongues that tried to transplant themselves on English soil. It is at work in every part of the globe, planting itself and displacing others. A few years ago French was the language best suited for a traveller on the Continent. But this has changed. Now the ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... we took train from Calcutta to Benares. Flat fields of white poppies were on either side, and English park-like scenes, without the mansions, and we thanked our stars we had not to live in what the Norse call ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... undisturbed and isolated as Finland, fantastic mythology took firm root, and we certainly find the most romantic and weird verses in connection with the chief heroes of the Kalevala, namely, Winminen and Ilmarinen, who broadly resemble the Norse demigods Odin ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie |
