race of fighting giants. There is a grandeur about the conception of her form and character, but it is a grandeur which might well daunt a human actress. One can faintly imagine the part being played by Mrs. Siddons, with such an extremity of fierceness and terror that ladies and gentlemen would be carried out of the theatre in hysterics, as in the days of Byron. Where Hiördis insults her guests, and contrives the horrid murder of the boy Thorolf before their eyes, we have a stage-dilemma presented to us—either the actress must treat the scene inadequately, or else intolerably. Ne pueros coram populo Medea trucidet, and we shnnk from Hiördis with a physical disgust. Her great hands and shrieking mouth are like Bellona’s, and they smell of blood.
What is true of Hiördis is true in less degree of all the characters in The Vikings. They are “great beautiful half-witted men,” as Mr. Chesterton would say:
Our sea was dark with dreadful ships
Full of strange spoil and fire,
And hairy men, as strange as sin,
With horrid heads, came wading in
Through the long low sea-mire.
This is the other side of the picture; this is how Örnulf and his seven terrible sons must have
