The King's Mirror (Speculum regale-Konungs skuggsjá)
Philosophy
The King's Mirror (Speculum regale-Konungs skuggsjá)
Education of princes; Encyclopedias and dictionaries -- Early works to 1600; Scandinavia -- Civilization
Now as to the time that you asked about, it seems to me most correct to
say that one should hardly venture over-seas later than the beginning of
October. For at that time the sea begins to grow very restless, and the
tempests always increase in violence as autumn passes and winter
approaches. And about the time when we date the sixteenth of October,
the east wind begins to look sorrowful and thinks himself disgraced, now
that his headgear, the golden crown, is taken away. He puts a
cloud-covered hat on his head and breathes heavily and violently, as if
mourning a recent loss. But when the southeast wind sees how vexed his
neighbor is, he is stricken with a double grief: the one sorrow is that
he fears the same deprivation as the east wind has suffered; the other
is grief over the misfortunes of his good and estimable neighbor.
Stirred by the distress of a resentful mind, he knits his brows under
the hiding clouds and blows the froth violently about him. When the
south wind sees the wrath of his near neighbors, he wraps himself in a
cloud-lined mantle in which he conceals his treasures and his wealth of
warm rays and blows vigorously as if in terrifying defence. And when the
southwest wind observes how friendship has cooled, now that the truce is
broken, he sobs forth his soul’s grief in heavy showers, rolls his eyes
above his tear-moistened beard, puffs his cheeks under the cloudy
helmet, blows the chilling scud violently forward, leads forth huge
billows, wide-breasted waves, and breakers that yearn for ships, and
orders all the tempests to dash forward in angry contest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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