University of Virginia Library

1. I.

IT was right up under the steel mountain wall where the farm of Kværk lay. How any man of common sense could have hit upon the idea of building a house there, where none but the goat and the hawk had easy access, had been, and I am afraid would ever be, a matter of wonder to the parish people. However, it was not Lage Kværk who had built the house, so he could hardly be made responsible for its situation. Moreover, to move from a place where one's life has once struck deep root, even if it be in the chinks and crevices of stones and rocks, is about the same as to destroy it. An old tree grows but poorly in a new soil. So Lage Kværk thought, and so he said, too, whenever his wife Elsie spoke of her sunny home at the river.

Gloomy as Lage usually was, he had his

brighter moments, and people noticed that these were most likely to occur when Aasa, his daughter, was near. Lage was probably also the only being whom Aasa's presence could cheer; on other people it seemed to have the very opposite effect; for Aasa was—according to the testimony of those who knew her—the most peculiar creature that ever was born. But perhaps no one did know her; if her father was right, no one really did—at least no one but himself.

Aasa was all to her father; she was his past and she was his future, his hope and his life; and withal it must be admitted that those who judged her without knowing her had at least in one respect as just an opinion of her as he; for there was no denying that she was strange, very strange. She spoke when she ought to be silent, and was silent when it was proper to speak; wept when she ought to laugh, and laughed when it was proper to weep; but her laughter as well as her tears, her speech like her silence, seemed to have their source from within her own soul, to be occasioned, as it were, by something which no one else could see or hear. It made little difference where she was; if the tears came, she yielded to them as if they were something she had long desired in vain. Few

could weep like her, and “weep like Aasa Kværk,” was soon also added to the stock of parish proverbs. And then her laugh! Tears may be inopportune enough, when they come out of time, but laughter is far worse; and when poor Aasa once burst out into a ringing laughter in church, and that while the minister was pronouncing the benediction, it was only with the greatest difficulty that her father could prevent the indignant congregation from seizing her and carrying her before the sheriff for violation of the church-peace. Had she been poor and homely, then of course nothing could have saved her; but she happened to be both rich and beautiful, and to wealth and beauty much is pardoned. Aasa's beauty, however, was also of a very unusual kind; not the tame sweetness so common in her sex, but something of the beauty of the falcon, when it swoops down upon the unwatchful sparrow or soars round the lonely crags; something of the mystic depth of the dark tarn, when with bodeful trembling you gaze down into it, and see its weird traditions rise from its depth and hover over the pine-tops in the morning fog. Yet, Aasa was not dark; her hair was as fair and yellow as a wheat-field in August, her forehead high and clear, and her mouth and chin as if cut with a chisel; only her eyes were perhaps somewhat deeper than is common in the North, and the longer you looked at them the deeper they grew, just like the tarn, which, if you stare long enough into it, you will find is as deep as the heavens above, that is, whose depth only faith and fancy can fathom. But however long you looked at Aasa, you could never be quite sure that she looked at you; she seemed but to half notice whatever went on around her; the look of her eye was always more than half inward, and when it shone the brightest, it might well happen that she could not have told you how many years she had lived, or the name her father gave her in baptism.

Now Aasa was eighteen years old, and could knit, weave, and spin, and it was full time that wooers should come. “But that is the consequence of living in such an out-of-the-way place,” said her mother; “who will risk his limbs to climb that neck-breaking rock? and the round-about way over the forest is rather too long for a wooer.” Besides handling the loom and the spinning-wheel, Aasa had also learned to churn and make cheese to perfection, and whenever Elsie grieved at her strange behavior

she always in the end consoled herself with the reflection that after all Aasa would make the man who should get her an excellent housewife.

The farm of Kværk was indeed most singularly situated. About a hundred feet from the house the rough wall of the mountain rose steep and threatening; and the most remarkable part of it was that the rock itself caved inward and formed a lofty arch overhead, which looked like a huge door leading into the mountain. Some short distance below, the slope of the fields ended in an abrupt precipice; far underneath lay the other farm-houses of the valley, scattered like small red or gray dots, and the river wound onward like a white silver stripe in the shelter of the dusky forest. There was a path down along the rock, which a goat or a brisk lad might be induced to climb, if the prize of the experiment were great enough to justify the hazard. The common road to Kværk made a large circuit around the forest, and reached the valley far up at its northern end.

It was difficult to get anything to grow at Kværk. In the spring all the valley lay bare and green, before the snow had begun to think of melting up there; and the night-frost would be sure to make a visit there, while the fields

along the river lay silently drinking the summer dew. On such occasions the whole family at Kværk would have to stay up during all the night and walk back and forth on either side of the wheat-fields, carrying a long rope between them and dragging it slowly over the heads of the rye, to prevent the frost from settling; for as long as the ears could be kept in motion, they could not freeze. But what did thrive at Kværk in spite of both snow and night-frost was legends, and they throve perhaps the better for the very sterility of its material soil. Aasa of course had heard them all and knew them by heart; they had been her friends from childhood, and her only companions. All the servants, however, also knew them and many others besides, and if they were asked how the mansion of Kværk happened to be built like an eagle's nest on the brink of a precipice, they would tell you the following:

Saint Olaf, Norway's holy king, in the time of his youth had sailed as a Viking over the wide ocean, and in foreign lands had learned the doctrine of Christ the White. When he came home to claim the throne of his hereditary kingdom, he brought with him tapers and black priests, and commanded the people to overthrow

the altars of Odin and Thor and to believe alone in Christ the White. If any still dared to slaughter a horse to the old gods, he cut off their ears, burned their farms, and drove them houseless from the smoking ruins. Here in the valley old Thor, or, as they called him, Asathor, had always helped us to vengeance and victory, and gentle Frey for many years had given us fair and fertile summers. Therefore the peasants paid little heed to King Olaf's god, and continued to bring their offerings to Odin and Asathor. This reached the king's ear, and he summoned his bishop and five black priests, and set out to visit our valley. Having arrived here, he called the peasants together, stood up on the Ting-stone, told them of the great things that the White Christ had done, and bade them choose between him and the old gods. Some were scared, and received baptism from the king's priests; others bit their lips and were silent; others again stood forth and told Saint Olaf that Odin and Asathor had always served them well, and that they were not going to give them up for Christ the White, whom they had never seen and of whom they knew nothing. The next night the red cock crew9 over ten farms in the valley, and it happened to he theirs who had spoken against King Olaf's god. Then the peasants flocked to the Ting-stone and received the baptism of Christ the White. Some few, who had mighty kinsmen in the North, fled and spread the evil tidings. Only one neither fled nor was baptized, and that one was Lage Ulfson Kværk, the ancestor of the present Lage. He slew his best steed before Asathor's altar, and promised to give him whatever he should ask, even to his own life, if he would save him from the vengeance of the king. Asathor heard his prayer. As the sun set, a storm sprung up with thick darkness and gloom, the earth shook, Asathor drove his chariot over the heavens with deafening thunder and swung his hammer right and left, and the crackling lightning flew through the air like a hail-storm of fire. Then the peasants trembled, for they knew that Asathor was wroth. Only the king sat calm and fearless with his bishop and priests, quaffing the nut-brown mead. The tempest raged until morn. When the sun rose, Saint Olaf called his hundred swains, sprang into the saddle and rode down toward the river. Few men who saw the angry fire in his eye, and the frown on his royal brow, doubted whither he was bound. But having reached the ford, a wondrous sight met his eye. Where on the day before the highway had wound itself up the slope toward Lage Kværk's mansion, lay now a wild ravine; the rock was shattered into a thousand pieces, and a deep gorge, as if made by a single stroke of a huge hammer, separated the king from his enemy. Then Saint Olaf made the sign of the cross, and mumbled the name of Christ the White; but his hundred swains made the sign of the hammer under their cloaks, and thought, Still is Asathor alive.

That same night Lage Ulfson Kværk slew a black ram, and thanked Asathor for his deliverance; and the Saga tells that while he was sprinkling the blood on the altar, the thundering god himself appeared to him, and wilder he looked than the fiercest wild Turk. Rams, said he, were every-day fare; they could redeem no promise. Brynhild, his daughter, was the reward Asathor demanded. Lage prayed and besought him to ask for something else. He would gladly give him one of his sons; for he had three sons, but only one daughter. Asathor was immovable; but so long Lage continued to beg, that at last he consented to come back in a year, when Lage perchance would be better reconciled to the thought of Brynhild's loss.

In the mean time King Olaf built a church to Christ the White on the headland at the river, where it stands until this day. Every evening, when the huge bell rumbled between the mountains, the parishioners thought they heard heavy, half-choked sighs over in the rocks at Kværk; and on Sunday mornings, when the clear-voiced chimes called them to high-mass, a suppressed moan would mingle with the sound of the bells, and die away with the last echo. Lage Ulfson was not the man to be afraid; yet the church-bells many a time drove the blood from his cheeks; for he also heard the moan from the mountain.

The year went, and Asathor returned. If he had not told his name, however, Lage would not have recognized him. That a year could work so great a change in a god, he would hardly have believed, if his own eyes had not testified to it. Asathor's cheeks were pale and bloodless, the lustre of his eye more than half quenched, and his gray hair hung in disorder down over his forehead.

“Methinks thou lookest rather poorly to-day,” said Lage.

“It is only those cursed church-bells,” answered the god; “they leave me no rest day or night.”

“Aha,” thought Lage, “if the king's bells are mightier than thou, then there is still hope of safety for my daughter.”

“Where is Brynhild, thy daughter?” asked Asathor.

“I know not where she is,” answered the father; and straightway he turned his eyes toward the golden cross that shone over the valley from Saint Olaf's steeple, and he called aloud on the White Christ's name. Then the god gave a fearful roar, fell on the ground, writhed and foamed and vanished into the mountain. In the next moment Lage heard a hoarse voice crying from within, “I shall return, Lage Ulfson, when thou shalt least expect me!”

Lage Ulfson then set to work clearing a way through the forest; and when that was done, he called all his household together, and told them of the power of Christ the White. Not long after he took his sons and his daughter, and hastened with them southward, until he found King Olaf. And, so the Saga relates, they all fell down on their knees before him, prayed for his forgiveness, and received baptism from the king's own bishop.

So ends the Saga of Lage Ulfson Kværk.