It was St. Olaf's half-brother, Harald the Hard, who fell, as we have said, at Stamford Bridge, when attempting the invasion of England in 1066. But all this is history nearly a thousand years old, and the stirring tales of the Vikings are fully recorded, and may be read in the Sagas. Ten centuries have changed the order of things. To-day we have, in our turn, become the invaders, albeit full of peace and good-will; and over the same seas upon which once danced Long Ship, Serpent, and Dragon, our great ugly, smoky steamers now plough their way. CHAPTER II MODERN NORWAY "Norroway over the Foam," as it used to be called, is a good land to go to and a beautiful land to look upon. It lies less than two days' journey from our shores, so it is easy enough to reach. Away from the towns--and they are not many--everything is picturesque, grand, and majestic, and the country indeed looks (as the people firmly believed of it long ago) as if it might have been the playground of countless giants, who amused themselves by pulling up acres of land, letting the sea into the valleys, and pelting each other with mountains and islands. Thank goodness the giants have disappeared! But if they really did have a hand in fashioning Norway, they are to be congratulated on the result. One of the first things one likes to know about a foreign country is its size. Well, Norway is just a little larger than the British Isles, and that part of it which forms the usual holiday touring ground of British and other people--_i.e._, from Trondhjem to the south--is no larger than England. The remainder of the country consists of a long, narrow strip running up into the Arctic Circle, and ending in Lapland in the Far North. On three sides Norway is washed by the sea; on the other side she has two neighbours--Sweden from the south right away up to Lapland, and then Russia. Now let us see what sort of a land it is. First, there are the fjords, stretching often a hundred miles or more inland from the sea-coast, sometimes with delightful fertile shores, at other times hemmed in on either hand by rocky cliffs rising two or three thousand feet sheer from the water. Then there are the mountains, which are everywhere; for, with the exception of Spain, Norway is the most mountainous country in Europe. And on their summits lie vast fields of eternal snow, with glaciers pushing down into the green valleys, or even into the ocean itself. Again, from these mountains flow down rivers and streams, now forming magnificent waterfalls as they leap over the edge of the lofty plateau, now rushing wildly over their rock-strewn torrent beds, until they reach the lake, which, thus gathering the waters, send them on again in one wide river to the fjord.