And how the boldest heroes ever willingly enter his service.
And how year by year his warlike expeditions are crowned with victory.
And of Gunnlôdh, his wonderfully beautiful golden-haired daughter, who pledges the bravest heroes and the best skalds in the horn.
Since then, my inclination no longer turns towards psalm-singing and vigils.
But certainly they will not easily let me leave the monastery.
For because I can write Latin and Greek well, Aaron, the new Abbot, the Italian, who has succeeded the good peace-loving Aelfrik, makes me unceasingly write out manuscripts, which they then sell for a great price, in Britain, and even in Germany.
And Aaron is very sharp upon my track, because I seem to him to lack true Christian zeal.
And did he know that upon these parchment sheets, whereupon I ought to have written out, for the seventeenth time, the treatise of Lactantius "de mortibus persecutorum," I have, by night, written out the history of my dear father--it would not pass without many days' fasting, and some score of penitential psalms.
Lately he actually threatened me to have "some one" scourged, who ever again came too late for the Hora.
That "someone" was I. For I had just begun to write about the battle on the Singing Swan, and could not tear myself away from it when the Hora bell called.
But ere the son of Halfred the Sigskald endures scourging on the back,--rather will I slay Aaron and all his Italian monks.
But for slaying I need something different from this copying style.
For a long while could I not contrive to write further. For the hatred, jealousy, and mistrust of Aaron and his hangers-on--there are many of his Italian countrymen come with him from Rumaberg--grow constantly greater. He has forbidden me to write by night.
Only by day, and in the library, no longer in my cell, may I write. And the transcript of Lactantius I am to deliver to him on the appointed parchment by Whitsuntide, on pain of seven days' fasting.
My resentment increases against this priestly tyranny.
Only rarely, and by stealth, can I get at these pages. Also I can only with great difficulty reach my dear father's hill. They track my lonely wanderings.
It will soon come to open war. At any rate I will provide myself with a sure weapon.