Then the ninth man was released and Þorkell asked him as usual. He said: 'I am well content to die as are all our comrades. But I will not let myself be slaughtered like a sheep: I would rather face the blow. Strike straight at my face and watch carefully if I pale at all, as we have often spoken about that.' He was allowed to face the blow and Þorkell approached him from the front and hewed into his face. He did not pale, but his eyes closed as death overtook him.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, May 24, 2021
Facing Death
Saga of the Jomsvikings, tr. N.F. Blake (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1962), p. 41 recto (§ 36; "asked him," i.e. what he thought about dying):