ABSTRACT
1 LATER, Odin, one of the greater and older wizards, used his I magical illusions to make a shameful mock of one Hading, king of Denmark, snatching him far away from his friends and kindred, and then returning with him on horseback to his own country and people over the empty expanses of the sea. When Hading was being brought back, with intense amazement he kept casting keen glances through the slits in the mantle under which he hid trembling, and observed that the waters lay stretched out beneath the horse’s hoofs; when he was forbidden to look at what was not permitted, he turned his astonished gaze away from the terrifying view of his journey. I shall speak next of Håkon, a prince of Norway; when he was about to fight against the Danes, he raised a pelting storm by magic and so beat upon the heads of his enemies with a freak bombardment of hailstones that their eyes were assailed, as it were, by sharp arrows from the clouds and utterly deprived of the power of sight, with the result that they felt that they were having a harder fight with the elements than with the enemy. Moreover, when the men of Biarmia, who are near neighbours to the Arctic Pole, intended to fight in the North against that most powerful king, Ragnar, they assailed the heavens with charms and impelled the clouds they had stirred up to a tempest of the utmost violence. Then the storm suddenly abated and the Danes were scorched by a furnace of raging heat. These two wicked extremes of weather following one upon the other broke the men’s constitutions and robbed them of victory. 1 But this strife and others like it among the men of Biarmia, Finnmark, and Scricfinnia has been described above at greater length, in the first and following chapters of Bk I.
King Hading deceived
King Hàkon
Hail
Harder fight with the elements
Ragnar
King is deprived of health and victory
