War and Sword-clasher, Sangrid and Swipple, are weaving with drawn swords. The shaft shall sing, the shield shall ring, the helm-hound [axe] shall fall on the target.[16] And those who met their death in battle had reserved for them a similar existence in the life to come, not doomed like the ‘straw-dead’ to tread wet and chill and dusky ways to the land of Hel, but--I am quoting Gummere[17]--as weapon-dead faring “straightway to Odin, unwasted by sickness, in the full strength of manhood,” to spend their days in glorious battle and their nights in equally glorious feasting in the courts of Valhalla. In his cradle the young Viking was lulled by such songs as this:-- My mother said they should buy me a boat and fair oars, and that I should go abroad with the Vikings, should stand forward in the bows and steer a dear bark, and so wend to the haven and cut down man after man there. When he grows up the earl’s daughter scorns him as a boy who “has never given a warm meal to the wolf,” “seen the raven in autumn scream over the carrion draft,” or “been where the shell-thin edges” of the blades crossed; whereupon he wins a place by her side by replying:-- I have walked with bloody brand and with whistling spear, with the wound-bird following me. The Vikings made a fierce attack; we raised a furious storm, the flame ran over the dwellings of men, we laid the bleeding corses to rest in the gates of the city.[18] And at the end, like Ragnar Lodbrok captured and dying in the pit of serpents, he can tell his tale of feeding the eagle and the she-wolf since he first reddened the sword at the age of twenty, and end his life undaunted to the ever-recurring refrain, “We hewed with the sword”: Death has no terrors. I am willing to depart. They are calling me home, the Fays whom Woden the Lord of Hosts has sent me from his hall. Merrily shall I drink ale in my high-seat with the Anses. My life days are done. Laughing will I die.[19]