As to
where they dwell: when I say the name of their dwelling-place men
mock at me, as if I named some valley in the moon: yet came I to
Burgdale thence in one day across the mountain-necks led by sure
guides, and I tell thee that the name of their abode is Shadowy
Vale.'
'Yea,' said Iron-face, 'knoweth any man here of Shadowy Vale, or
where it is?'
None answered for a while; but there was an old man who was sitting
on the shafts of a wain on the outskirts of the throng, and when he
heard this word he asked his neighbour what the Alderman was saying,
and he told him. Then said that elder:
'Give me place; for I have a word to say hereon.' Therewith he
arose, and made his way to the front of the ring of men, and said:
'Alderman, thou knowest me?'
'Yea,' said Iron-face, 'thou art called the Fiddle, because of thy
sweet speech and thy minstrelsy; whereof I mind me well in the time
when I was young and thou no longer young.'
'So it is,' said the Fiddle. 'Now hearken! When I was very young I
heard of a vale lying far away across the mountain-necks; a vale
where the sun shone never in winter and scantily in summer; for my
sworn foster-brother, Fight-fain, a bold man and a great hunter, had
happened upon it; and on a day in full midsummer he brought me
thither; and even now I see the Vale before me as in a picture; a
marvellous place, well grassed, treeless, narrow, betwixt great
cliff-walls of black stone, with a green river running through it
towards a yawning gap and a huge force.
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