=B.= Solfot looks at her face in the water. ‘God help me for my beauty!’ she exclaims, ‘surely I shall come to a strange land.’ Her husband, the Danish king, tells her that he shall write a cross in her right hand, by which he shall find her again. While Solfot is combing her hair out of doors, the Ormeking asks her if she has a golden crown to put on it; she has four and five, all the gift of the king of the Danes. Ormeking gives her a drink which turns her black and blue; Solfot is laid in the ground; Ormeking knows well where, takes her up, carries her off to his own place, and gives her seven drinks; she stands up as good as ever. Daneking dons pilgrim’s clothes and goes to Ormeking’s. Solfot, as northern ladies wont, is combing her hair out of doors. Daneking asks for a pilgrim’s house; there is one on the premises, where poor pilgrims use (like King Claudius) to take their rouse. The pilgrims stand in a ring; Solfot is to dispense mead to them in turn. Daneking dashes his gloves on the board: ‘Is it not the way here that ladies deal mead with bare hands?’ Ormeking dashes his gloves on the board: ‘That was a bold word for a pilgrim!’ ‘If that was a bold word for a pilgrim,’ says Daneking, ‘it was bolder yet to dig Solfot out of the ground.’ Then he puts Solfot on his horse and rides away. There are also two unprinted nineteenth-century copies in Professor G. Stephens’s collection. =Norwegian.= ‘Sólfager og Ormekongin,’ Landstad, p. 503, No 56, from a woman’s singing. They stamp a gold cross on (or into? the process is not clear) Sólfager’s hand, that she may be recognized in a strange country. The Ormeking (or King Orm) comes riding while Sólfager is sunning her hair. ‘Trick King David,’ he says, ‘and bind yourself to me.’ ‘Never shall it be,’ she replies, ‘that I give myself to two brothers.’ He administers to her three potions, she swoons; word comes to King David that she is dead; they bury her. Ormeking does not fail to carry off the body. King David goes to Ormeking’s land in pilgrim’s garb, with pilgrim’s staff; as he enters the court Sólfager is undoing her hair. [Then there is a gap, which may be easily filled up from the Swedish story.] ‘Is it the custom here to cut bread with gloved hand?’ She takes off his pilgrim’s hat, and takes his yellow locks in her hand. ‘When you say you are a pilgrim, you must be lying to me.’ ‘Even so,’ he answers, ‘but I am your dear husband, as you easily may see. Will you go home with me?’ ‘Gladly,’ she says, ‘but I am afraid of Ormeking.’ King David takes Ormeking’s horse and rides home with his wife. When Ormeking comes back, Sólfager is away. (A final stanza does not belong to the story.) There are other unprinted copies which will appear in a contemplated edition of Norwegian ballads by Sophus Bugge and Moltke Moe.