ancient poems of the Danes royal dignity is implied in his very name.
He practiced with the most zealous training whatsoever serves to sharpen
and strengthen the bodily powers. Taught by the fencers, he trained
himself by sedulous practice to parrying and dealing blows. He took to
wife the daughter of his upbringer, Roar, she being his foster-sister
and of his own years, in order the better to show his gratefulness for
his nursing. A little while after he gave her in marriage to a certain
Bess, since he had ofttimes used his strenuous service. In this partner
of his warlike deeds he put his trust; and he has left it a question
whether he has won more renown by Bess's valour or his own.

Gram, chancing to hear that Groa, daughter of Sigtryg, King of the
Swedes, was plighted to a certain giant, and holding accursed an union
so unworthy of the blood royal, entered on a Swedish war; being
destined to emulate the prowess of Hercules in resisting the attempts of
monsters. He went into Gothland, and, in order to frighten people out of
his path, strode on clad in goats' skins, swathed in the motley hides of
beasts, and grasping in his right hand a dreadful weapon, thus feigning
the attire of a giant; when he met Groa herself riding with a very
small escort of women on foot, and making her way, as it chanced, to the
forest-pools to bathe, she thought it was her betrothed who had hastened
to meet her, and was scared with feminine alarm at so strange a garb:
so, flinging up the reins, and shaking terribly all over, she began in
the song of her country, thus:

"I see that a giant, hated of the king, has come, and darkens the
highways with his stride. Or my eyes play me false; for it has oft
befallen bold warriors to skulk behind the skin of a beast."

Then began Bess: "Maiden, seated on the shoulders of the steed, tell me,