
"Make way for the kings. Chop, chop off the woman's
head."
-- King of Hearts, directed by Philippe de Broca
***
"The Scando-Gothic peoples who poured
southward and westward over Europe, to shake empires and found kingdoms, to meet Greek and Roman in conflict, and levy
tribute everywhere, had kept up their constantly-recruited waves of
incursion, until they had raised a barrier of their own blood. It was
their own kin, the sons of earlier invaders, who stayed the landward
march of the Northmen in the time of
Charlemagne. To the Southlands their road by land was henceforth closed.
Then begins the day of the Vikings, who, for two hundred years and more,
"held the world at ransom.""
--
The
Story of the Volsungs, by Anonymous |