[The Danish History<br> Books I-IX by Saxo Grammaticus (Saxo the Learned)]@TWC D-Link book
The Danish History
Books I-IX

BOOK ONE
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Taught by the fencers, he trained himself by sedulous practice to parrying and dealing blows.

He took to wife the daughter of his upbringer, Roar, she being his foster-sister and of his own years, in order the better to show his gratefulness for his nursing.

A little while after he gave her in marriage to a certain Bess, since he had ofttimes used his strenuous service.

In this partner of his warlike deeds he put his trust; and he has left it a question whether he has won more renown by Bess's valour or his own.
Gram, chancing to hear that Groa, daughter of Sigtryg, King of the Swedes, was plighted to a certain giant, and holding accursed an union so unworthy of the blood royal, entered on a Swedish war; being destined to emulate the prowess of Hercules in resisting the attempts of monsters.

He went into Gothland, and, in order to frighten people out of his path, strode on clad in goats' skins, swathed in the motley hides of beasts, and grasping in his right hand a dreadful weapon, thus feigning the attire of a giant; when he met Groa herself riding with a very small escort of women on foot, and making her way, as it chanced, to the forest-pools to bathe, she thought it was her betrothed who had hastened to meet her, and was scared with feminine alarm at so strange a garb: so, flinging up the reins, and shaking terribly all over, she began in the song of her country, thus: "I see that a giant, hated of the king, has come, and darkens the highways with his stride.


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