THE SAGAS IN THEIR RELATION TO ENGLISH HISTORY. 335 
brother-in-law of Earl Godwin, because the earl had taken his 
knight in a game of chess. 
One of the Sagas gives us an animated description of a crusading 
expedition undertaken by King Sigurd of Norway, and another of 
Rognvald’s, Earl of Orkney. As we read how the latter enters 
the Mediterranean, descries a huge Dromund in the distance, and 
determines to attack her, saying that if they pushed close up to 
her their missiles would fall beyond; how they disregarded the 
blazing brimstone and burning pitch, most of which fell outside 
them; and how at last they hacked at her sides and made her their 
prize, we can almost fancy we have descended half a millennium 
down the stream of time, and are reading the exploits of a Drake 
or a Hawkins sailing Westward Ho! to attack a galleon in the 
Spanish Main. 
The Danish spirit still survives in our language, literature, and 
political institutions, though they soon lost, as a people, their 
independent existence; for the Dane, unlike the Celt, easily amal- 
gamates with other people. To them we owe the title earl, which 
was introduced by Cnut, and after the Norman Conquest, according 
to Selden, altogether superseded the ancient title of alderman. 
Hustings was a word originally applied to the chief municipal court 
of London where many of them were settled under the name of 
lithsmen. Dr. Dasent, Mr. Vigfusson, and, I believe, Dr. Maurer, 
attribute also to Danish influence our highly-valued institution of 
trial by jury. The following words in our current English are 
probably of Scandinavian origin: fellow, foster, gain, hap, heel, 
ill (evil is Saxon), call—which has superseded clepan, though poets 
still love yclept—cast, law, wrong, ransack, scamp, take (the Saxon 
niman still survives in nimble and benumbed), till, fro (from is 
Saxon), tidings, true-lover, &c.* To these may be added many 
geographical expressions, seafaring terms, names of persons—those, 
for example, ending in ‘son’—and provincial words still found in 
the North of England. For example: big (barley), duck (cloth), 
eilding (fuel), flit (to remove), garth (an enclosure), gaumless 
(silly), gowk (cuckoo), host (cough), kitling (kitten), lake (play), 
ling (heather), nieve (fist), rig (back), royd (cleared space), scatt 
(an old Danish tax still paid in Shetland), skuggy (gloomy), speer 
* Since writing the above I have come across a list of words of Scandina- 
vian origin, by Herbert Coleridge, Esq. (‘ Phil. Soc. Tr., 1859”); but this 
list contains very few of the words given above. 
