Tag: books

One Additional Week

In response to multiple requests, we are permitting people to purchase the following five Special Limited Editions before we go to print in January and it’s not possible to do so anymore. There will be a few extras, but we can’t know how many at this point. We can do this because we’re still waiting for Arkhaven illustrator Ademir Leal to finish the chapter-heading illustrations for OUT OF THE SHADOWS; all 35 of them are already complete for the other two Signed First Editions.

In other news, the laser cutting system is now fully installed and operational, and both of the very rare rounding-and-backing machines have been fixed and are fully functional for the first time since the first one was dropped by the transport company five years ago. There is also some behind-the-scenes drama regarding the US bindery which I will share on tonight’s Darkstream; we’re optimistic about a positive resolution, but it’s by no means guaranteed. However it turns out, though, it will have absolutely no effect on our ability to produce our books and get them out to you.

Please note that we will not be offering additional Libraria editions of the two books by Homer since we have already taken deliver of the goatskins for them, and unlike the pigskins, we do not have an excessive supply of them. All five books will also be available via NDM Express later today as well; keep that in mind in case you’re having credit card issues.

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One Last Chance

Castalia Library is taking a poll to see if the subscribers would like to permit people last chance at the following books before we submit the final order for the book blocks to the printers. We have time for one week before we have to finalize the number of book blocks being printed and we assume it won’t affect the overall print runs very much.

  • The Iliad
  • The Odyssey
  • Guns of Mars
  • Death and the Devil
  • Out of the Shadows

If you want to share your opinion on the matter, you can vote in the poll. And regardless of what your opinion might be, thanks very much to everyone who supported the acquisition of our new bookmaking beast, as 2026 is going to demonstrate what a gamechanger it is going to be for the Library, while recent events are actively proving how absolutely necessary it was.

The Logistics of Tolkien

An Unmitigated Pedant defends the military elements of The Lord of the Rings. I read this with particular interest, because the military scenes and battles have tended to be the one area where Arts of Dark and Light have been said to actually exceed the master’s masterpiece. His core thesis is that it is primarily Peter Jackson who is to blame for the perception that Tolkien’s military setups and strategies were suboptimal, although he blames most of Jackson’s shortcomings on the medium in which he was working.

I’m not so sure about that, given Faramir’s cavalry charge against a fortified position being held by missile-armed forces. But never mind that for now.

The army Sauron sends against Minas Tirith is absolutely vast – an army so vast that it cannot fit its entire force in the available frontage, so the army ends up stacking up in front of the city:

The books are vague on the total size of the orcish host (but we’ll come back to this), but interview material for the movies suggests that Peter Jackson’s CGI team assumed around 200,000 orcs. This army has to exit Minas Morgul – apparently as a single group – and then follow the road to the crossing at Osgiliath. Is this operational plan reasonable, from a transit perspective?

In a word: no. It’s not hard to run the math as to why. Looking at the image at the head of the previous section, we can see that the road the orcs are on allows them to march five abreast, meaning there are 40,000 such rows (plus additional space for trolls, etc). Giving each orc four feet of space on the march (a fairly conservative figure), that would mean the army alone stretches 30 miles down a single road. At that length, the tail end of the army would not even be able to leave camp before the front of the army had finished marching for the day. For comparison, an army doing a ‘forced march’ (marching at rapid speed under limited load – and often taking heat or fatigue casualties to do it) might manage 20 to 30 miles per day. Infantry on foot is more likely to average around 10 miles per day on decent roads.

Ideally, the solution to this problem is to split the army up. By moving in multiple columns and converging on the battlespace, you split one impossibly long column of troops into several more manageable ones. There is a danger here – the enemy might try to overwhelm each smaller army in turn – but Faramir has had to pull his troops back out of Ithilien, so there is little risk of defeat in detail for the Army of Mordor. The larger problem is terrain – we’ve seen Ithilien in this film and the previous one: it is heavily forested, with few roads. What roads exist are overgrown and difficult to use. Worse yet, the primary route through the area is not an east-west road, but the North-South route up from Near Harad to the Black Gate. The infrastructure here to split the army effectively simply doesn’t exist.

A map from regular Earth, rather than Middle Earth. This is Napoleon’s Ulm Campaign (1805) – note how Napoleon’s armies (the blue lines) are so large they have to move in multiple columns, which converge on the Austrian army (the red box labeled “FERDINAND”). This coordinated movement is the heart of operations: how do you get your entire army all to the battlefield intact and at the same time?
This actually understates the problem, because the army of Morder also needs supplies in order to conduct the siege. Orcs seem to be able to make do with very poor water supplies (Frodo and Sam comment on the foulness of Mordor water), so we can assume they use local water along the march, but that still leaves food. Ithilien (the territory they are marching through), as we have seen in the film, is unpopulated – the army can expect no fresh supplies here (or in the Pelennor beyond, for reasons we’ll discuss shortly). That is going to mean a baggage train to carry additional supplies, as well as materials for the construction of all of the fancy siege equipment (we, in fact, later see them bringing the towers pre-built – we’ll get to it). This would lengthen the army train even more.

All of that raises a second point – from a supply perspective, can this operation work? Here, the answer is, perhaps surprisingly, yes. Minas Morgul is 20 leagues (around 60 miles) from Minas Tirith. An infantryman might carry around (very roughly) 10 days or so of rations on his person, which is enough to move around 120 miles (these figures derive from K. Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (2003) – well worth a read! – but are broadly applicable to almost any army before the invention of the railroad). The army is bound to be held up a bit along the way, so the Witch King would want to bring some wagons with additional supplies, but as a matter of supply, this works. The problem is transit.

As a side note, the supply issue neatly explains the aggressive tactics the Witch king employs when he arrives at Minas Tirith, moving immediately for an assault rather than a siege. Because the pack animals which pull wagons full of food eat food themselves, there is literally no amount of wagons which would enable an army of this size to sustain itself indefinitely in a long siege. The Witch King is thus constrained by his operational plan: the raw size of his army means he must either take the city in an assault quickly enough to march most of his army back, or fail. He proceeds with the appropriate sense of urgency.

That said, the distances here are short: 60 miles is a believable distance for an army to make an unsupported ‘lunge’ out of its logistics network. One cannot help but notice the Stark (hah!) contrast with the multi-hundred-mile supply-free lunges in the TV version of Game of Thrones, which are far less plausible.

Great, now I have to re-read The Lord of the Rings from a strategic and logistics perspective. Hmmm, this might actually make for an interesting Darkstream series. Would that be of interest to anyone else or is this just another AI music sort of thing?

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Ebook Creation Instructions

I prepared these for a friend who wanted to make a basic ebook from a text file. I figured they might be useful to some readers here in case they wanted to do something similar. This will provide a basic ebook without much in the way of formatting.

  1. Save the document in .docx or .rtf format.
  2. Download Calibre for your operating system.
    1. https://calibre-ebook.com/download
  3. Open Calibre.
  4. Click the big green “Add books” icon.
  5. Locate the file and click Open. The file will be added to the list of titles in the middle.
  6. Find the title of the file you added and click once to select it.
  7. Click the big brown “Convert books” icon.
  8. Add the metadata on the right. Title, Author, Author Sort, etc.
  9. Click on the little icon next to the box under Change cover image in the middle.
  10. Select your cover image.
  11. Change Output format in the selection box in the top right to EPUB.
  12. Click OK.
  13. Click once to select the title and either hit the O key or right click and select Open Book Folder -> Open Book Folder.

There’s your ebook!

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The Legend’s Latest Bestseller

GUNS OF MARS, the newest novel from The Legend Chuck Dixon, has gotten off to a very good start. In case you’re not sure you’re interested in his excursion onto the dying Red Planet of Barsoom, please enjoy the following sample from the text.

Kal Keddaq rested his full ten-foot height prone on the slope of a ring of ochre sand that surrounded a shallow depression. His rifle was cradled in the crooks of his upper set of arms. Raised on four elbows, he lifted his head until his eyes cleared the lip of the bowl to scan the broad plain to the south. He was careful to tilt his head back in order that the protruding ears atop his head be less visible.

All he could see was an uninterrupted horizon against an orange sky. The sun was setting, and the cold would be upon him once more. The days were shorter and nights longer as he rode farther to the north. The sand was still warm beneath him. The last of the sun’s rays touched the thick green flesh of his back, a mottled mix of olive and jade. He might risk a fire later if he were certain he’d shaken the man pursuing him.

Kal knew, deep in his bones, that he had not lost the man who’d been tracking him over the dead sea floor for the past three days. His only chance to escape the bounty man was to keep heading north to one of the settlements that ringed the pole. Even that was a risk as he could run out of water for himself or his mounts before ever reaching one of them. And there was every chance his kind would not be welcome in the mostly human polar refuges.

He turned on his side to glance back at the two thoats grazing on patches of yellow lichen at the bottom of the bowl. The larger one was his saddle mount. The second was a pack animal bearing his remaining supplies and his last skin of water.

Before returning to his vigil, Kal removed a telescopticon from a pouch on his harness. He set his rifle aside and extended the scope to its full length before fitting an eye to the lens cup. Shifting from left to right he fixed his gaze on the uninterrupted line of the horizon. Dervishes of dust danced across the plain as the night winds stirred the talc surface. Kal blinked a few times and strained to sharpen his sight.

There, past the curtain of swirling sand, the last light of the setting sun caught a thread of dust rising in the far distance. Kal squeezed his dry eyes shut and pressed his better eye to the cup once more.

Through the haze he could make out a dark figure at the base of the golden column. A lifetime of living in the near featureless barrens of the Great Sand Sea had trained his eyes to recognize details that might be missed by another. More from the approaching shape’s motion than any details he could make out, Kal recognized it as a man riding atop a thoat. From that distinct swaying cadence, he knew the man rode his mount at a walk. Even so, he would reach Kal’s position by the time the sun set. Kal collapsed the spyglass shut and returned it to its pouch.

“Damn this man,” Kal muttered as he snatched up his rifle and slid on sandaled feet to the floor of the bowl.

He quickly untied the reins of his thoats from the rock he’d hitched them to. He secured the long rifle in the boot under his saddle alongside the scabbard of his long saber. His thoat croaked and bleated as he swung into the saddle. The animals were thirsty. Hell, he was thirsty too.

He kicked his heels into the flanks of his mount and it rose on its ten legs to canter in a general northerly direction, the smaller pack animal following at the end of a lead line of braided hide.

The rim of the bowl would serve to hide him from the pursuer for the next hour or so. The cracked clay surface of the dead lake would not raise any dust to betray his position before that. With any luck, Kal would be out of sight in the gathering dark by the time the bounty man crested the slope. Kal recognized that his run of luck was nearing its end after three days of riding hard with little rest and dwindling supplies. If he could only reach Argon or Samarium, one of the two settlements that lay north against the edge of the ice cap! Or perhaps a camp of fellow tharks where his name was not known.

He was Warhoon, a tribe not welcome among the more civilized of the tharks. There was no hiding his allegiance, as the signature bands of Warhoon tattoos about his arms attested. The distinction between tribes was less important the farther north he rode. The need for water sourced from ice melt erased the differences between tharks, and even between tharks and men. In this pitiless country, thirst was a greater concern than tribal or species loyalties.

And there was little chance his reputation had preceded him to the settlements. But word would soon follow him and then there would be more than just this single human dogging his trail. Until he found a place remote enough, backward enough in which to hide, there would be no rest for him.

All because he had dallied with the bitch Tagas, the first daughter of a Warhoon elder hetman. He’d only agreed to the arrangement because he saw advantages for himself in the union. A warrior of little distinction and less property, he had few prospects of ever being more than a handy sword and lance for the many conflicts the tribe engaged in.

Then the harpy Tagas had become taken with him for some reason. It was she who proposed they become mates. And, after consuming enough briga, a drink made from fermented tojan root, he agreed to the match. But there was not enough briga on Barsoom to make Tagas attractive enough for more than a few ruts. And so, Kal mounted up and rode off leaving his bride to wail at his absence and her father to roar himself raw with rage.

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Independence is Opportunity

Brien Niemeier retrospectively points out what should have been obvious, but wasn’t, to everyone all along:

For most of the twentieth century, creative ambition followed a single script. You studied the field, polished a manuscript, hunted for an agent, and prayed for a contract.

If you were in film or music, the process was different in details but identical in structure: Everything hinged on the approval of an institution. Success came from being chosen. Talent mattered, but luck mattered more. Most creators knew it but kept playing the game because the alternative seemed unthinkable.

That expectation didn’t come from nowhere. It grew out of a period when the gatekeepers could actually elevate an unknown. They possessed the distribution networks, the advertising budgets, the corporate partnerships, and the capacity to manufacture stardom.

That pattern repeated enough times to take on the aura of tradition. If you wanted a career, you knocked on the same doors everyone else knocked on. The problem is that the doors stopped opening long before artists realized the hinges had rusted shut.

By the late 1990s, the blockbuster mentality had consumed the traditional institutions. Every division—publishing, film, television, and music—became obsessed with scale. Risk tolerance flatlined. Executives seeking hits that could justify their salaries clung to anything that produced reliable profit and panicked at the unfamiliar. Innovation came to represent risk instead of opportunity.

At the same time, audiences aged. The properties that kept the lights on were the ones that debuted thirty, forty, or fifty years earlier. Instead of cultivating younger talent, the corporations recycled the same brands over and over, hoping nostalgia would substitute for relevance. You saw endless sequels, remakes, reboots, and spin-offs. The cultural oxygen was consumed by dying giants.

Creators sensed something was wrong, but most didn’t grasp how deeply the rot ran. The old structures no longer had the ability or the interest to launch new creators into the mainstream. The institutions that once acted as kingmakers had lost the will and the means to fulfill that role.

Yet legacy outlets continued promoting the old discovery narrative because it kept the talent pipeline flowing. As long as artists believed salvation waited inside the old system, they wouldn’t look for alternatives.

This conditioning left scars. Many creators still cling to the hope that one good pitch or lucky submission will unlock a career. They believe someone in a skyscraper will pluck them from obscurity and grant them access to an audience. This belief persists despite decades of evidence that the system has no interest in fulfilling creators’ expectations.

Worse, some artists internalized the idea that bypassing the old gatekeepers equates to failure. Seeing independence as a last resort, they imagine legitimacy comes only from institutional approval, even though the institutions abandoned their curatorial role.

That psychology runs deep: Creators were trained to think of themselves not as people who produce value for audiences, but as supplicants waiting for an authority figure to validate them.

The irony is that while creators waited for help, audiences changed faster than the institutions could track. Once internet access became ubiquitous, people stopped caring about traditional pipelines. Their interests moved to quality and authenticity, not pedigree.

The challenge now is that the playing fields are not even close to level. How can a podcaster compete on YouTube or Spotify when he’s banned from one, the other, or as in some cases, both? How can an author compete when the A9 algorithm, or whatever Amazon calls the way it makes winners out of losers and losers out of winners, fails to favor him?

The answer, as we were forced to figure out much, much earlier than most, is direct sales and patronage. That’s why Castalia thrives while many other publishers, including the big ones, are struggling more and more every year. It’s because we were forced to rely on you readers early on, long before

There are still challenges posed by structural elements like the payment processors, but even those challenges are starting to fade as Russia, China, and the BRICS countries improve their financial products. And what that means is that independent creators don’t have to go down with the collapsing mainstream infrastructure.

As AI improves, as the number of options improve, it’s only going to keep getting better for true independents and worse for those who still cling to the idea that the gatekeepers matter, no matter how propped up they might be.

Speaking of the collapse of the mainstream gatekeepers, shame on all of you Rabid Puppies. Shame!

I was in a small bookstore just after the Hugo blow up, and this old guy was asking the clerk for recommendations. She straight face recommended NKJemison, “She won 3 years in a row, and it’s never happened before!” Poor guy.

And that’s why it only takes 11 votes to get nominated for a Hugo these days.

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GUNS OF MARS ON AMAZON

Chuck Dixon’s new ebook is now available from Amazon. I would argue that it is every bit as good as the John Carter novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs that inspired it; this is a project that has been at the back of The Legend’s mind for literal decades and it shows. For those who purchased the Signed First Edition, this ebook release is part of that process, as the ebook readers will help us eliminate as many typos as we can before we start laying out the hardcovers and the leatherbound edition. And, of course, a copy of the ebook will go out to all the Signed First Edition buyers before the end of this weekend. The cover of the ebook, and the coming print editions, features an original illustration by Joe Bennett.

On the dying world of Barsoom, where ancient seas have turned to dust and the last water on the planet is at the polar ice caps, Kal Keddaq is running for his life. A ten-foot-tall green warrior of the Warhoon tribe, he’s committed the ultimate blunder by violating a fatal taboo. Now branded an outcast by his own people and hunted across the merciless Martian wastelands, Kal must reach the settlements at the edge of the northern ice cap before his water runs out, his mounts die, or the mysterious bronze-skinned bounty man tracking him finally closes in for the kill.

Set more than one thousand years after a visitor from Earth first walked the deserts of the Red Planet, Chuck Dixon’s GUNS OF MARS plunges readers into a thrilling survival odyssey across the desolate grandeur of the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs. As Kal races north through scorching deserts and treacherous ice fields, his desperate flight becomes entangled with something far more dangerous than a mere personal vendetta. Is the relentless bounty hunter pursuing him his greatest threat, or his only ally, against forces that threaten every living being and tribe clinging to existence on the dying planet?

Packed with breathtaking action, exotic alien landscapes, and the gritty frontier justice of the Old West, GUNS OF MARS delivers classic sword-and-planet adventure for a new generation. As the longtime writer of BATMAN and THE PUNISHER, comics legend Chuck Dixon skillfully combines a brutal battle for survival with breathtaking world-building, creating a page-turning tale where honor, desperation, and raw courage collide beneath the orange skies of a world breathing its last. A perfect book for fans of classic planetary romance, Westerns, and science fiction adventure.

As with DEATH AND THE DEVIL and OUT OF THE SHADOWS, the Signed First Edition of GUNS OF MARS will feature original chapter-heading illustrations from Arkhaven artist Ademir Leal.

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On the Genji Translations

The people have spoken. The poll is closed. The decision has been made. But there are certain things that might surprise some of you, so you might want to check out the lengthy post on the Library stack.

The translations were as follows:

Translation 1 = Arthur Waley 1933

Translation 2 = Castalia House 2025

Translation 3 = Edwin Seidensticker 1973

Translation 4 = Royall Tyler 2009

Translation 5 = Dennis Washburn 1999

Since it would not be professional for me to address some of the comments there, I hope you will indulge me in doing so here. But as I do, I hope you will understand that I very much appreciate both the opinions and the passion of those who disagree with me on these matters, as even in opposition, the mere fact that you care about these things means that we have far more in common than we do with the vast majority of the planet that couldn’t care less either way.

So by all means, take my contemptuous dismissals as a sign of praise and your own merit.

I really dislike 2. It feels too modern and maybe not the author’s true voice for the time period. It feels more like her voice in translation 1.

It is more than modern, it is up-to-date in a myriad of ways. But here’s the thing. None of the translations are representational of the author’s true voice. That voice from the first translation you feel is actually the century-old voice of an Anglo-Jewish man who never spoke Japanese, never visited Japan, and expresses an “Edwardian register” more than 1,300 years removed from the author.

I strongly suspect that of all these translations, #1 is the most faithful to the original. Vox’s background puts him in in a far better position to judge – and if that is so, I would disregard “vox populi, vox dei” and turn to Translation #1 for Castalia.

Actually, #1 is by far the least faithful to the original. The liberties that I have taken in the interest of literary quality and psychological fidelity for #2 are far more justifiable than the ex nihilo inventions of Arthur Waley. He even omitted an entire chapter because he didn’t feel it was sufficiently important to the narrative.

I agree that 2 seems very “modern” and missing something of a soul behind it. By “modern” I mean watered down.

This is a reasonable response because while the modernity is there in the brief 19 lines compared, none of the psychological elements so important to the novel are. I doubt the commenter would feel that way after reading a comparison of an entire chapter.

Conventional Gamma posturing and doubling-down.

See Sigma Game.

I’m curious to hear which translation you think best preserves the flavor of the original.

The best literal translation is #4, the Royall Tyler translation. There is no question about that. But being a multilingual individual, I very much disagree with the idea that the literal translation is always the optimal translation. I am optimistic that our translation will best preserve the original flavor in literary, emotional, and psychological terms, but that is a verdict that others will have to render down the road.

For authentic narration and a closer match in tone to the time period, I would really like to have translation 1. For ease of reading, 2 is an obvious choice but I think the loss of the courtly, observational voice takes too much away from what I imagine the author’s style was. I think this particular tome requires a more traditional translation, given what it is. To go with the easier to read option 2, is a disservice.

Again, there is nothing authentic about the Waley translation. It is a masterpiece, but the courtly observational tone is his, not the author’s. One of the reasons we are doing the new translation is precisely because the emotional distance, almost diffidence, that Waley portrays is absolutely apposite to the emotional sensitivity of the protagonist, whose sleeves are always wet with the dew of his tears.

1 sounds like it was written by a woman and has a nice poetic rhythm to it. 5 is similar in that it has a poetic rhythm and sounds like it was written by a woman. This sounds like an odd argument, but the Tales of the Genji was written by a woman, and there are certain stylistic qualities that we all share. 

Both translations 1 and 5 were written by men. 2, on the other hand, is heavily influenced by the modern Japanese translation written by a woman.

In any event, I very much appreciate everyone who took part in the poll and expressed their opinion. To be honest, I’m just very pleased that our translation was able to hold its own with the excellent translations of Messrs. Seidensticker, Royall, and Washburn, I did not expect that it would actually be preferred to the traditional masterpiece of Arthur Waley, which was our original selection and only other viable option.

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A Tale of 5 Translations

As you know if you are a Library or Libraria subscriber, the two volumes of THE TALE OF GENJI by Lady Murasaki Shikibu are the subscription books for October 2025 through March 2026. Written some 1400 years ago, GENJI MONOGATARI is the world’s first true novel, and one of the great classics of Man’s literature. And so, naturally, we want the Castalia Library edition to be something truly special.

There are seven English translations produced between 1882 and 2015, although only four of them are complete. So, we’re asking Library subscribers, literary readers, and linguistic enthusiasts to help us choose the translation for the two-volume edition on which we’re working now.

You can read the selections, vote in the poll, and leave any comments or rankings you might have right there on the Library stack. If you have any interest in this sort of thing at all, or you want to help Castalia, please take five minutes, read the five translations – which are, on average, only five paragraphs apiece – and share your opinion. This is important data for us, so the more people who can weigh in with their opinions, the better.

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Vol. 4: A Roland for an Oliver

My favorite story from JUNIOR CLASSICS VOL. 4: HEROES OF CHIVALRY

Guerin de Montglave held the lordship of Vienne, subject to Charlemagne. He had quarrelled with his sovereign, and Charles laid siege to his city, having ravaged the neighboring country. Guerin was an aged warrior, but relied for his defence upon his four sons and two grandsons, who were among the bravest knights of the age. After the siege had continued two months, Charlemagne received tidings that Marsilius, King of Spain, had invaded France and, finding himself unopposed, was advancing rapidly in the Southern provinces. At this intelligence, Charles listened to the counsel of his peers, and consented to put the quarrel with Guerin to the decision of Heaven, by single combat between two knights, one of each party, selected by lot. The proposal was acceptable to Guerin and his sons. The names of the four, together with Guerin’s own, who would not be excused, and of the two grandsons, who claimed their lot, being put into a helmet, Oliver’s was drawn forth, and to him, the youngest of the grandsons, was assigned the honor and the peril of the combat. He accepted the award with delight, exulting in being thought worthy to maintain the cause of his family. On Charlemagne’s side Roland was the designated champion, and neither he nor Oliver knew who his antagonist was to be.

They met on an island in the river Rhone, and the warriors of both camps were ranged on either shore, spectators of the battle. At the first encounter both lances were shivered, but both riders kept their seats, immovable. They dismounted, and drew their swords. Then ensued a combat which seemed so equal, that the spectators could not form an opinion as to the probable result. Two hours and more the knights continued to strike and parry, to thrust and ward, neither showing any sign of weariness, nor ever being taken at unawares. At length Roland struck furiously upon Oliver’s shield, burying Durendal in its edge so deeply that he could not draw it back, and Oliver, almost at the same moment, thrust so vigorously upon Roland’s breastplate that his sword snapped off at the handle. Thus were the two warriors left weaponless.

Scarcely pausing a moment, they rushed upon one another, each striving to throw his adversary to the ground, and failing in that, each snatched at the other’s helmet to tear it away. Both succeeded, and at the same moment they stood bareheaded face to face, and Roland recognized Oliver, and Oliver, Roland. For a moment they stood still, and the next, with open arms, rushed into one another’s embrace.

“I am conquered,” said Roland.

“I yield me,” said Oliver.

The people on the shore knew not what to make of all this. Presently they saw the two late antagonists standing hand in hand, and it was evident the battle was at an end. The knights crowded round them, and with one voice hailed them as equals in glory. If there were any who felt disposed to murmur that the battle was left undecided, they were silenced by the voice of Ogier the Dane, who proclaimed aloud that all had been done that honor required, and declared that he would maintain that award against all gainsayers.

The quarrel with Guerin and his sons being left undecided, a truce was made for four days, and in that time, by the efforts of Duke Namo on the one side, and of Oliver on the other, a reconciliation was effected. Charlemagne, accompanied by Guerin and his valiant family, marched to meet Marsilius, who hastened to retreat across the frontier.

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