1 64 Norway and the Norivegians 



But he never reached his homestead. "When the 

 rowers had reached the island of Asko (it lies just to the 

 north of Bergen, and many people visit it by about one 

 hour's steam from that town, for the sake of the fine 

 view which may be had from its upper ridge of the 

 islands and the fjords round about), the rowers put into 

 the mainland, for the king was almost lifeless. Strange 

 to say, they had reached a spot to which some forty, or 

 two-and-forty, years before a girl, who had been a sort 

 of servant of Harald Fairhair, and was with child by 

 him, had been carried on her way to seek the father of 

 her coming child in a farm where Harald was staying. 

 Like Hakon now, this girl — Thora by name — was sail- 

 ing northward ; taken suddenly by the pangs of child- 

 birth, she had been carried ashore to the very place to 

 which Hakon was now carried. There, lifted from her 

 boat, but lying only on the bare rock by the sea, she 

 had given birth to her child, none other than this very 

 Hakon, who had now come to suffer on the same spot, a 

 death as untimely as his birth had been. {Girc. a.d. 961.) 



Thus ended the long and prosperous reign of this 

 king, whose name was preserved in tradition as Hakon 

 the Good. ' During his reign,' says the Saga, ' the 

 country had nearly always good harvests.' 



It went very differently with ]^[orway during the 

 reigns of Hakon's successors, the children of the witch 

 Gunhild. Not but that in many ways they seemed 

 likely men enough. Many of the brothers had been 

 slain during the years of contest with Hakon ; and the 

 eldest of them now, the ensuing king of Norway, was 

 that Harald, who had been adopted as his foster-son by 



