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292
LOLLAND.
Chap. L.
swim out to sea, and remain floating in the water; if
any one approaches us are “just coming out,” and so
the hour glides by, the horses arrive, and we scramble
out, dress, and reappear just in time to escape
scolding, and not keep people waiting.
According to Helvaderus, a chronicler of early date,
the flat fertile island of Lolland was first populated
some 2000 years after the world’s creation by men from
Jutland; and at as early a period as the seventh
century did a wandering apostle of the true faith, Wilibrod
by name, preach Christianity to the Pagans of this
remote region,—without success, however, it appears;
for it was not until Harald Blue-Tooth tacked on Lolland
to his new-founded diocese of Odense, that Christianity
can be said to have been there established even in name,
Not that the introduction of the new faith profited the
inhabitants much ; indeed, how could it ? a creed forced
upon a people by fire and sword, while they still clung
in their inmost hearts to the worship of Thor, Odin, and
other Scandinavian heroes, whose bloody deeds and wild
traditions were more in accordance with the barbarous
fierceness of the age than the milder tenets of
Christianity.
Terrible were the sufferings of the unhappy islanders
during the succeeding century, from plague, pestilence,
and famine. Thousands are said to have perished from
hunger alone, as well as from the devastations of the
epidemic. So great was the scarcity, the bareness of
the land, that it is related when King Olaf Hunger
(famine was his name) himself sat down on one
Christmas Eve to keep the Yule-feast together with his Court,
there was no bread, no, not one wheaten loaf served on
the royal table. A very dull Christmas, with such poor
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