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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: without an end. She was a weird witch-wife, mother of storm demons
and frost giants, who must be fought with steadily, warily, wearily,
over dreary heaths and snow-capped fells, and rugged nesses and
tossing sounds, and away into the boundless sea--or who could live?-
-till he got hardened in the fight into ruthlessness of need and
greed. The poor strip of flat strath, ploughed and re-ploughed
again in the short summer days, would yield no more; or wet harvests
spoiled the crops, or heavy snows starved the cattle. And so the
Norseman launched his ships when the lands were sown in spring, and
went forth to pillage or to trade, as luck would have, to summerted,
as he himself called it; and came back, if he ever came, in autumn
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