The Wanderer's Necklace

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.