you’re gonna make me have to look all this up but it involves the Viking lines in the Norse Saga of Rognvald, Rollo and Rolf the Granger..and oh yeah, the Vikings were meaner than hell...they only spared breedable females and little kids ...the latter if they had a mind to...and a few slaves if need be.....rowing being such a pain you know.
i recall reading it in Churchill’s volumes and thought it an excellent refrain of courage from a soon to die warrior
and it had prophetic consequences in time for Saxon England.
the Saxons are so interesting to have once been hell on wheels and to have been so romaticized bu history from Robin Hood and King Arthur..although King Arthur may actually have been Briton but anyhow...the Saxosn became postoral but never really got the government thing like the Normans did...true feudalism
but the Saxons and their homies the Jutes and Angles were hell on wheels in their day befroe they became farmers
i find all this stuff all fascinating...when Hollywood makes guys in bearskins roaming with long hair and broadswords they are thinking of Saxons...like Skarsgaard cool acerbic portrayal in that funky Arthur movie....
isn’t it weird how Scandinavians are so passive now?...the English are not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jutes
The Jutes, Iuti, or Iutae were a Germanic people who, according to Bede, were one of the three most powerful Germanic peoples of the time. They are believed to have originated from Jutland (called Iutum in Latin) in modern Denmark, Southern Schleswig (South Jutland) and part of the East Frisian coast.
Bede places the homeland of the Jutes on the other side of the Angles relative to the Saxons, which would mean the northern part of the Jutland Peninsula. Tacitus portrays a people called the Eudoses living in the north of Jutland and these may have been the later Iutae. The Jutes have also been identified with the Eotenas (iotenas) involved in the Frisian conflict with the Danes as described in the Finnesburg episode in the poem Beowulf (lines 1068-1159). Others have interpreted the iotenas as jotuns (”ettins” in English), meaning giants, or as a kenning for “enemies”.