370 
LETTERS FROM HIGH LATITUDES. 
a good deal to degrade the interior, with pews and 
partitions; but it is a very fine building, and worthy 
of its metropolitan dignity. I am told, that the very 
church built by Magnus the Good,—son of Saint Olave, 
—over his father’s remains, and finished by his uncle 
Harald Hardrada, is, or rather was, included in the walls 
of the cathedral, and though successive catastrophes by 
fire have perhaps left but little of the original building 
standing, I like to think that some of these huge stones 
were lifted to their place under the eyes of Harald the 
Stern. It was on the eve of his last fatal expedition 
against our own Harold of England, that the shrine of 
St. Olave was opened by the king, who, having clipped 
the hair and nails of the dead saint (most probably as 
relics, efficacious for the protection of himself and fol¬ 
lowers), then locked the shrine, and threw the keys into 
the Nid. Its secrets from that day were respected, until 
the profane hands of Lutheran Danes carried it bodily 
away, with all the gold and silver chalices, and jewelled 
pyxes, which, by kingly gifts and piratical offerings, 
had accumulated for centuries in its treasury. 
He must have been a fine, resolute fellow, that Harald 
the Stern, although—in spite of much church-building 
