"The shields we brought from home were white,
Now they are red-stained in the fight:
This work was fit for those who wore
Ringed coats-of-mail their breasts before.
Where for the foe blunted the best sword
I saw our young king climb on board.
He stormed the first; we followed him--
The war-birds now in blood may swim."
Now defeat began to come down upon the earl's men. The king's men
pressed upon the earl's ship and entered it; but when the earl saw how
it was going, he called out to his forecastle-men to cut the cables
and cast the ship loose, which they did. Then the king's men threw
grapplings over the timber heads of the ship, and so held her fast to
their own; but the earl ordered the timber heads to be cut away, which
was done. So says Sigvat:--
"The earl, his noble ship to save,
To cut the posts loud order gave.
The ship escaped: our greedy eyes
Had looked on her as a clear prize.
The earl escaped; but ere he fled
We feasted Odin's fowls with dead:--
With many a goodly corpse that floated
Round our ship's stern his birds were bloated."
Einar Tambaskelfer had laid his ship right alongside the earl's. They
threw an anchor over the bows of the earl's ship, and thus towed her
away, and they slipped out of the fjord together. Thereafter the whole
of the earl's fleet took to flight, and rowed out of the fjord. The
skald Berse Torfason was on the forecastle of the earl's ship; and as it
was gliding past the king's fleet, King Olaf called out to him--for he
knew Berse, who was distinguished as a remarkably handsome man, always
well equipped in clothes and arms--"Farewell, Berse!" He replied,
"Farewell, king!" So says Berse himself, in a poem he composed when he
fell into King Olaf's power, and was laid in prison and in fetters on
board a ship:--
"Olaf the Brave
A 'farewell' gave,
(No time was there to parley long,)
To me who knows the art of song.
The skald was fain
'Farewell' again
In the same terms back to send--
The rule in arms to foe or friend.
Earl Svein's distress
I well can guess,
When flight he was compelled to take:
His fortunes I will ne'er forsake,
Though I lie here
In chains a year,
In thy great vessel all forlorn,
To crouch to thee I still will scorn:
I still will say,
No milder sway
Than from thy foe this land e'er knew:
To him, my early friend, I'm true."