Then without another word Hauk marched out of the hall, his men following him in order; they went straight down to the ship and put out to sea, for all was ready for their departure, and back they went to King Harald. Harald was highly pleased when they told him what they had done, for it made Athelstan, in the opinion of many people, subject to him; but in truth neither was subject to the other, or less than the other, for each was supreme in his own kingdom till his dying day. When Athelstan began to talk to the boy, and found him a brave, manly child, well brought up and open in his ways, he took a liking to him, and had him baptized with Christian baptism, and brought up in the Christian faith and in good habits, and made him skilful in all sorts of exercises; and the end of it was that he loved Hakon above all his own relatives; and Hakon was beloved of all men. King Athelstan gave the lad a gold-hilted sword, with the best of blades. It was called “Quernbiter,” because to try it Hakon cut through a quern or mill-stone to the centre. Never came better blade into Norway, and Hakon kept it to the end, and it was with that sword he was fighting on the day when he got the wound that brought him to his death. Chapter XI King Hakon the Good When he was fifteen years old news came to Hakon in England that his father Harald Fairhair had died. He had resigned his crown three years before his death, for he had become feeble and heavy and unable to travel through the country or carry out the duties of a king. So he had parted the kingdom between his sons and lived in retirement on one of his great farms. He was eighty-three years of age when he died, and he was buried under a mound in Kormsund with a gravestone thirteen and a half feet high over his grave. The stone and the mound are still to be seen at Gar, in the parish of Kormsund. No sooner was Harald dead than dissensions broke out between his sons, and they went to war with each other, each one desiring to be sole king, as their father had been. The chief of these sons was King Eric Bloodaxe, whose after-history is much mixed up with that of England. He fought his brothers, and two of them fell in battle; but the country was disturbed because of these quarrels. Eric was a stout and fortunate man of war, but bad-minded, gruff, unfriendly, and morose. Gunhild, his wife, was a most beautiful woman, clever and lively; but she had a false and cruel disposition. They had many children, who played their part in English history.