‘To wake war.’ This was the object of the Viking’s existence. His gods, ‘Odin’ and ‘Thor’, were battle heroes who struck one another in the flash of lightning and with the rumble of thunder as they moved their shields. Not for the man who lived long and comfortably and died at last in his bed were either the glory of this world or the joys of the next. The Scandinavian ‘Valhalla’ was no such ‘paradise’ as the faithful Moslems conceived, where, in sunlit gardens gay with fruit and flowers, he should rest from his labours, attended by ‘houris’, or maidens of celestial beauty. The Viking asked for no rest, only for unfailing strength and a foe to kill. In the halls of his paradise reigned perpetual battle all the day long, and, in the evening, feasts where the warrior, miraculously cured of his wounds, could boast of his prowess and rise again on the morrow to fresh deeds of heroic slaughter. [Sidenote: Northmen Raids] In their dragon-ships, the huge prows fashioned into the heads of fierce animals or monsters, the Viking ‘Earls’, weary of dicing and throwing the javelin at home, or exiled by their kings for some misdeeds, would sweep in fleets across the North Sea, some to explore Iceland and the far-off shores of Greenland and North America, some to burn the monasteries along the Irish coast, others to raid North Germany, France, or England. At first their only object was plunder, for unlike the Huns they did not despise the luxuries of civilization--only those who allowed its influence to make them ‘soft’. At a later date, when they met with little resistance, they began to build homes, and thus the east coast of England became settled with Danish colonies. ‘In this year’, says the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, writing under the date 855, ‘the heathen men for the first time remained over winter in Sheppey.’ [Sidenote: Alfred the Great]