It happened one morning at sunrise that as Hervˆr was standing on the summit of a tower over the gate of the fortress, she looked southwards towards the forest and saw clouds of dust, arising from a great body of horse, by which the sun was hidden for a long time. Next she saw a gleam beneath the dust, as though she were gazing on a mass of gold--fair shields overlaid with gold, gilded helmets and white corslets. The motif of a chief or his lady standing on the pinnacle of a tower of the fort and looking out over the surrounding country for an approaching army is a very common one in ballads. The motif of the above passage from _Hervarar Saga_, including the armour of the foe and the shining shields, occurs in the opening stanzas of the Danish Ballad _De vare syv og syvsindstyve_[8], which probably dates from the fourteenth century (though it may possibly be later[9]) and which derives its material ultimately from old heroic lays[10]. To the same period approximately as the poem on the battle with the Huns belong the two pieces from the _Older Edda_ contained in the _Th·ttr[11] of Nornagest_. The _Reginsm·l_ indeed, of which only about half is quoted, may be even earlier than the former (in the form in which it appears in _Hervarar Saga_), while the _Hellride of Brynhild_ can hardly be later than the early part of the eleventh century. A second stage in the literary history of the North is represented by the 'episodic' poems _Hjalmar's Death Song_ and the _Waking of Angantyr_, both of which are attributed to the twelfth century by Heusler and Ranisch[12]. Unlike the poem on the battle between the Goths and the Huns, neither of these forms a story complete in itself. They presuppose the existence of a saga in some form or other, presumably oral, dealing at least with the fight at Sams¯; and the existence of such a saga in the twelfth century is confirmed by the account of the same event given by Saxo[13].