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southern campaigns. The adoption of the mounted
infantry system, afterwards copied by the English, put
them at once into a position of great tactical advantage ;
just as their well-known but most difficult trick
of the feigned flight enabled them to break the line of
the bravest Saxon fyrd, fighting on the old hand-to-hand
principles. Odin, in far antiquity, as their
stories told, taught his children the "swine-fylking,"
—the charge in wedge-formation, such as the Highlanders
used at Prestonpans ; but who was the new
culture-hero who made use of many experiences
gathered from the South, and sent out the Vikings
of the ninth century to be the most efficient soldiery
of their age ? Who planned the great campaign by
which East Anglia, Deira and Mercia, were successively
annexed ? and why did he fail to annex the
kingdom of Ælfred ?
The genius of Viking conquest, according to Prof. A.
Bugge (Vikingerne i. p. 139) was Thorgest, who fell in
Ireland in 843 after extending his empire over half the
country. But a greater man may be suspected in the
half-mythical Ivar "the Boneless," who in 857 to 862
had been fighting in Ireland, and now led the great
host through all its wonderful successes, only to disappear
from the scene at the moment before the tide
turned, and the good fortune of the Saxons prevailed.
It was he whom the Irish Annals called "chief king
of all Northmen in Britain and Ireland," and the
English chroniclers name with deepest hate, the
tribute of the conquered. In the Sagas he is the
wily one, "who had no bones in his body, but was
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