his Asa-strength, his force of frenzy, when performing his great 
deeds against dwarfs and Jdtuns. But the Danish historian, 
Saxo Grammaticus, speaks of the whole as the result of witch- 
craft, and there can be little doubt that it was regarded in 
early Christian times with all the more suspicion, because of the 
deep veneration that it had called out among the pagans. As 
after the Iacchic festivals in Greece, so after a Berserksgang, 
the performers suddenly became exhausted and comatose, and 
presented the appearance of men barely alive after a crisis of 
fever. Something parallel is to be seen nowadays in the 
Asiatic dervishes, who are inspired with a kind of religious 
catalepsy, and, after a period of frenzy, fall down in the utmost 
exhaustion. The chief interest this physical phenomenon has 
for our inquiry, is the light its existence and encouragement 
throw on the temper of the race. To a people so essentially 
lovers of athletic exercise as the Norsemen, such a condition of 
superhuman power would present something of the glory of an 
apotheosis, and we find such to have been the case. The 
Berserker were regarded as men specially dowered with gracious 
gifts from the gods. 
12. In their rules for battle, and for attack and defence, the 
Northmen appear to have been guided by a natural sense of 
what was upright and just. Shouts and the noise of arms, the 
whistling of arrows, the ringing of shields, manly deeds, 
courage and enterprise, — these combine to form the unvarying 
record of their battles. Fighting for its own sake was a virtue. 
But in the descriptions of incidental circumstances of warfare 
we find more that is characteristic. The rules of holmgdngr , 
or duel, in which the two contesting parties retired alone to a 
quiet place, generally an uninhabited island or holm, and there 
fought till one was dead, were elaborately framed with a view 
to exclude the possibility of foul play. This openness of pro- 
ceeding was universal in the Northern warfare. Even in that very 
constant form of attack, always called in the Sagas atnema hits 
d einn, literally, to take the house from one, which consisted of 
gathering in a body as many men as the clan could afford, and, 
torch in hand, surrounding the settlement of the enemy — 
generally the little castle of the chief and the clustering 
dwellings of clients and slaves, circled by a wall, and setting 
fire to the woodwork, — even in this violent form of attack there 
were rules of honour which all true Norsemen strictly attended 
to. It was the extreme means when two clans had long re- 
mained in open strife, but it must not be attended by any kind 
of treachery. The onslaught must be made in open day, and 
