Then she gave him some of the seaweed. He chewed it, and naturally both became very thirsty. Presently Thorgerthr said she must taste a drop of water. She rose, went to the door, and called for water. Her mother brought a drinking horn. Thorgerthr took a slender draught, and offered the horn to her father. “Certainly,” said he, “that weed has parched my throat with thirst.” So he lifted the horn with both hands, and drained it. “Father,” said Thorgerthr, “we have both been deceived; we have been drinking milk.” As she spoke, the old man clenched his teeth in the horn, and tore a great shred from it, then flung the vessel wrathfully on the ground. “Our scheme has failed,” said Thorgerthr, “and we cannot now continue it. I have a better plan to propose. Compose a death-lay on your son, Bödvar, and I will carve it in runes on oaken staves.” Then the spirit of song came on the old man, and he composed the long Wake-song of Bödvar that goes by the name of the Sonartorrek, and in singing it his grief was assuaged. The invasion of the Northmen, of Dane and Viking of Norway, that made the Saxons tremble, was an invasion of something more than marauders--it was one of four-post beds. They did not, indeed, bring their press beds with them in their “Long Serpents,” but no sooner did they establish themselves in the land--Ragnar Lodbrog’s sons in Northumbria, and King Knut in England--than they set up their four-posters, and made themselves both secure and comfortable. They shut themselves in for the night, pulled the bolt, and were safe till next morning. We do not half understand the horrors of St. Brice’s Day, 1002, when the Danes were massacred throughout the dominions of Æthelred, unless we introduce these closed beds into the picture. We must imagine the Saxons storming the closed and bolted boxes, and the Danes within, unable to escape, as the axes and crowbars crashed against the oak doors and hinges of their _lokhvilur_. They could but muffle themselves in their feather beds, and endeavour to burst forth when the entrance was forced. The cairn, or tumulus, that covered a dead Norseman was heaped over a sort of wooden or stone bed made after the fashion of a _lokhvila_. In the Grettis saga we have the story of the hero breaking into the cairn of an old king, and he found him enclosed in a box of boards--stout oak planks--very much as he had been shut in every night when he retired to sleep. The _kistvaens_ of stone, oblong boxes of stones set on end, and covered over with great slabs, to contain the dead, are nothing other than stone four-posters. And the modern coffin is nought else but the wooden enclosed _lokhvila_--the Scandinavian close bed reduced to the smallest possible dimensions. There is no particular sense in the coffin, but it is a reminiscence of what the beds of our Scandinavian forefathers were, and will continue to be used long after the four-poster is banished from our bedrooms.