Of my childhood in this Olaf life I can regain but little. There come
to me, however, recollections of a house, surrounded by a moat,
situated in a great plain near to seas or inland lakes, on which plain stood mounds that I connected with the dead. What the dead were I did
not quite understand, but I gathered that they were people who, having
once walked about and been awake, now laid themselves down in a bed of
earth and slept. I remember looking at a big mound which was said to
cover a chief known as "The Wanderer," whom Freydisa, the wise woman,
my nurse, told me had lived hundreds or thousands of years before, and
thinking that so much earth over him must make him very hot at nights.
I remember also that the hall called Aar was a long house roofed with
sods, on which grew grass and sometimes little white flowers, and that
inside of it cows were tied up. We lived in a place beyond, that was
separated off from the cows by balks of rough timber. I used to watch
them being milked through a crack between two of the balks where a
knot had fallen out, leaving a convenient eyehole about the height of
a walking-stick from the floor.