It has been my experience, as a Viking enthusiast, that historical biographies of great Vikings tend to be disappointing. A particularly sore memory is a biography of Canute the Great, some years back, that reduced a life of battle, intrigue, and conquest to the statistical analysis of personal names in old charters. The problem is sources, which in the Early Medieval Period (we used to call it The Dark Ages, precisely because of the scanty written record) tend to be spare even in relatively well-organized countries like France and England. For famous Scandinavians, the most accessible sources are the Icelandic sagas, which historians usually reject wholesale (in spite of the groundbreaking work of Torgrim Titlestad, available in a marvelously translated book called Viking Legacy).
In the case of Norway’s King Harald Hardrada, subject of Harald Hardrada: The Warrior’s Way by John Marsden, the situation is a little better. King Harald Sigurdsson lived his legendary life at the very end of the Viking Age, when things were getting a little better organized. On top of that, he had a wide-ranging career and often left discernable, discoverable tracks in local records.
I’ve often said that if there was ever a real-life Conan the Barbarian, it was Harald Sigurdsson, the tall and mighty half-brother of King Olaf Haraldsson, patron Saint of Norway. Carried wounded from the battlefield of Stiklestad, where Olaf died (Harald was 15 years old), he fled to Russia, where he served Prince Jaroslav as a mercenary. Then on to Constantinople, to join the fabled Varangian Guard, the emperor’s personal corps and bodyguard. After fighting all around the Mediterranean, he was imprisoned and escaped, participated in a rebellion, and personally blinded the deposed emperor. Then, having illegally sent treasure back to Russia for safekeeping for years, he fled the capitol and sailed back to Jaroslav. He married Jaroslav’s daughter, then returned to Norway, where he traded half his treasure to his nephew, Magnus the Good, for half the kingdom. Magnus’s death a few years thereafter left him as sole king. He spent most of his reign fighting wars with Denmark, until in 1066 he turned his eyes to England. In September of that year, he and his army were slaughtered by King Harold Godwinson at Stamford Bridge, after which the weakened English army went on to be beaten by William the Conqueror at Hastings a few weeks later.
That’s some life. It would be hard to make it dull, but there are historians who could do it.
Thankfully, John Marsden is not one of those.
I had trouble putting Harald Hardrada down. I knew the story well, of course, but Marsden does an excellent job of presenting it as a series of puzzles – he assumes the sagas unreliable, but he doesn’t dismiss them out of hand, especially when buttressed by contemporary skaldic poems. Sometimes he actually defends the saga writers against more skeptical historians. The narrative that emerges is worthy of the epic subject.
To top it all off, he even tells the story of Harald’s famous banner, “Land-ravager,” relating a legend I’ve already described on this blog, some time back, that an ancient scrap of silk on the Isle of Skye, known as “The Fairy Flag of Dunvegan,” belonging to the Clan McLeod, may plausibly be “Land-ravager” – there’s even scientific evidence. It’s that kind of touch that makes Marsden’s Harald Hardrada a treat for the Viking buff.
Highly recommended.
