Strange forms and mixtures of belief arose in the passage from one faith to the other. Helgi the Lean was a Christian, but called on Thor in the hour of need. The Christian saints with their wonder-working powers were readily adopted into the Norse Pantheon, and Vikings by their prayers and offerings secured the help of St Patrick in Ireland and of St Germanus in France in times of defeat and pestilence, while we hear of a family of settlers in Iceland who gave up all faith except a belief in the power of St Columba. On sculptured stones in the west may be found pictures of Ragnarök, of Balder and of Loki together with the sign of the cross. Some of the heathen myths themselves show Christian influence; the Balder story with its echoes of the lamentations for the suffering Christ belongs to the last stage of Norse heathendom, while a heathen skald makes Christ sit by the Fountain of Fate as the mighty destroyer of the giants. When the virtue had gone out of their old beliefs many fell a prey to the grossest superstition, worshipping the rocks and groves and rivers once thought to be the dwelling place of the gods. Others renounced faith in Christian and heathen gods alike, and the nickname 'godless' is by no means rare among the settlers in Iceland. Of such it is often said that they believed in themselves, or had no faith in aught except their own strength and power, while in the saga of Friþjof we hear how the hero paid little heed to the sanctity of the temple of Balder and that the love of Ingibjorg meant more to him than the wrath of the gods. For a parallel to such audacious scepticism as that of Friþjof we must turn to southern lands and later times with Aucassin's 'In Paradise what have I to win? Therein I seek not to enter, but only to have my Nicolete, my sweet lady that I love so well.' For some the way of escape came not by superstition or by scepticism, but in mystic speculation, in pure worship of the powers of nature. Thus we hear of the Icelander Thorkell Mani, whom all praised for the excellence of his way of life, that in his last illness he was carried out into the sunshine, so that he might commend himself into the hands of the god who made the sun, or of the _goði_ Askell who, even in the hour of famine, deemed it was more fitting to honour the creator by caring for the aged and the children, than to relieve distress by putting these helpless ones to death. One other illustration of the declining force of heathenism must be mentioned. It is to the Viking age that we owe the poems of the older Edda, that storehouse of Norse mythology and cosmogony. They are almost purely heathen in sentiment, and yet one feels that it could only be in an age when belief in the old gods was passing away that the authors of these poems could have struck those notes of detachment, irony, and even of burlesque, which characterise so many of them.