Note 3 — SIR GEORGE DASENT'S PREFACE

Many particulars mentioned in the Saga as wonderful are no wonders to us. Thus in the case of Gunnar's bill, when we are told that it gave out a strange sound before great events, this probably only means that the shaft on which it was mounted was of some hard ringing wood unknown in the north. It was a foreign weapon, and if the shaft were of lance wood, the sounds it gave out when brandished or shaken would be accounted for at once without a miracle.