The same contrast meets us when we consider the position of women among them. The chroniclers make many references to their lust after women. We hear in an English chronicler how they combed their hair, indulged in sabbath baths, often changed their clothes and in various ways cultivated bodily beauty 'in order that they might the more readily overcome the chastity of the matrons, and make concubines even of the daughters of the nobility.' Wandering from country to country they often had wives in each, and polygamy would seem to have been the rule, at least among the leaders. In Ireland we hear of what seem to have been veritable harems, while in Russia we are told of the great grandson of Rurik, the founder of the Russian kingdom, that he had more than 800 concubines, though we may perhaps suspect the influence of Oriental custom in this case. Yet, side by side with all this, the legitimate wife was esteemed and honoured, and attained a position and took a part in national life which was quite unusual in those days. In the account of an Arabic embassy to the Vikings of the west (_v. supra_, p. 20) we have a vivid picture of the freedom of their married life. Auðr, the widow of Olaf the White, after the fall of her son Thorstein, took charge of the fortunes of her family and is one of the figures that stand out most clearly in the early settlement of Iceland. We have only to turn to the Icelandic sagas to see before us a whole gallery of portraits, dark and fair alike, of women cast in heroic mould, while the stone at Dyrna in Hadeland, bearing the runic inscription, 'Gunvor, daughter of Thirek, built a bridge to commemorate her daughter Astrid, she was the most gracious maiden in Hadeland,' gives us one of the most attractive pictures of womanhood left to us from the Viking age. It must be added however that beside the runic inscription, the stone bears carvings of the Christ-child, the star in the east and the three kings, and this may serve to remind us that the age was one in which the peoples of the North passed from heathenism to Christianity, though the passage was a slow one and by no means complete even at the close of the period.