The House of the Wolfings: A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in VerseMorris, William
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The House of the Wolfings: A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse
Morris, William
Fantasy fiction
So none gave back a foot, and fierce was the fight about the wedge-array;
and the men of Otter--but there was no Otter there, and many another man
was gone, and Arinbiorn the Old led them--these stormed on so fiercely
that they cleft their way through all and joined themselves to their
kindred, and the battle was renewed in the Wolfing meadow. But the
Romans had this gain, that Thiodolf's men had let go their occasion for
falling on the Romans with their line spread out so that every man might
use his weapons; yet were the Goths strong both in valiancy and in
numbers, nor might the Romans break into their array, and as aforesaid
the Romans were the fewer, for it was less than half of their host that
had pursued the Goths when they had been thrust back from their fierce
onset: nor did more than the half seem needed, so many of them had fallen
along with Otter the War-duke and Sweinbiorn of the Bearings, that they
seemed to the Romans but a feeble band easy to overcome.
So fought they in the Wolfing meadow in the fifth hour after high-noon,
and neither yielded to the other: but while these things were a-doing,
men laid Thiodolf adown aloof from the battle under a doddered oak half a
furlong from where the fight was a-doing, round whose bole clung flocks
of wool from the sheep that drew around it in the hot summer-tide and
rubbed themselves against it, and the ground was trodden bare of grass
round the bole, and close to the trunk was worn into a kind of trench.
There then they laid Thiodolf, and they wondered that no blood came from
him, and that there was no sign of a shot-weapon in his body.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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