queen in all the north. He had after her, in succession, or perhaps even simultaneously in some cases, at least six other wives; and by Gyda herself one daughter and four sons.
Harald was not to be considered a strict-living man, and he had a great deal of trouble, as we shall see, with the tumultuous ambition of his sons; but he managed his government, aided by Jarl Rögnwald and others, in a large, quietly potent, and successful manner; and it lasted in this royal form till his death, after sixty years of it.
These were the times of Norse colonisation; proud Norsemen flying into other lands, to freer scenes,—to Iceland, to the Faröe Islands, which were hitherto quite vacant (tenanted only by some mournful hermit, Irish Christian fakir, or so); still more copiously to the Orkney and Shetland Isles, the Hebrides and other countries where Norse squatters and settlers already were. Settlement of Iceland, we say; settlement of the Faröe Islands, and, by far the notablest of all, settlement of Normandy by Rolf the Ganger (A.D. 876?).[1]
- ↑ 'Settlement,' dated 912, by Munch, Hénault, &c. The Saxon
