Another of the methods by which the rite of blood-friendship was observed in the Norseland, was by causing the blood of the two covenanting persons to inter-flow from their pierced hands, while they lay together underneath a lifted sod. The idea involved seems to have been, the burial of the two individuals, in their separate personal lives, and the intermingling of those lives--by the intermingling of their blood--while in their temporary grave; in order to their rising again with a common life[71]--one life, one soul, in two bodies. Thus it is told, in one of the Icelandic Sagas, of Thorstein, the heroic son of Viking, proffering “foster-brotherhood,” or blood-friendship, to the valiant Angantyr, Jarl of the Orkneys. “Then this was resolved upon, and secured by firm pledges on both sides. They opened a vein in the hollow of their hands, crept beneath the sod, and there [with clasped hands inter-blood-flowing] they solemnly swore that each of them should avenge the other if any one of them should be slain by weapons.” This was, in fact, a three-fold covenant of blood; for King Bele, who had just been in combat with Angantyr, was already in blood-friendship with Thorstein.[72] The rite of blood-friendship, in one form and another finds frequent mention in the Norseland Sagas. Thus, in the Saga of Fridthjof the Bold, the son of Thorstein: “Champions twelve, too, had he--gray-haired, and princes in exploits,-- Comrades his father had loved, steel-breasted and scarred o’er the forehead. Last on the champions’ bench, equal-aged with Fridthjof, a stripling Sat, like a rose among withered leaves; Bjorn called they the hero-- Glad as a child, but firm like a man, and yet wise as a graybeard; Up with Fridthjof he’d grown; they had mingled blood with each other, Foster-brothers in Northman wise; and they swore to continue Steadfast in weal and woe, each other revenging in battle.”[73] A vestige of this primitive rite, coming down to us through European channels, is found, as are so many other traces of primitive rites, in the inherited folk-lore of English-speaking children on both sides of the Atlantic. An American clergyman’s wife said recently, on this point: “I remember, that while I was a school-girl, it was the custom, when one of our companions pricked her finger, so that the blood came, for one or another of us to say ‘Oh, let me suck the blood; then we shall be friends.’” And that is but an illustration of the outreaching after this indissoluble bond, on the part of thirty generations of children of Norseland and Anglo-Saxon stock, since the days of Fridthjof and Bjorn; as that same yearning had been felt by those of a hundred generations before that time. 5. WORLD-WIDE SWEEP OF THE RITE.