Tag Archives: Harald Hardrada

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The saga of Harald Hardrada

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Monument to Harald Sigurdsson at Harald Hardrådes plass in Gamlebyen, Oslo, Norway. Relief by Lars Utne 1905. Photo credit: Wolfmann. Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike 4.0.

I’m in between book reviews. Of what shall I blog? The other day, somebody on Facebook asked what I had to say about King Harald Hardrada of Norway. Well, there’s plenty. Probably enough for a long post. I’ve blogged before about Harald’s death at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, but I don’t think I’ve ever devoted a post to the man himself.

He has much in common with Napoleon, whose biography I reviewed the other day. An important figure, and a fascinating personality. But in almost no way appealing.

I didn’t feel that way when I was a kid. I read about him in David Howarth’s 1066, and it fired my imagination. What a saga! This guy ranged all over Europe and the Mideast, fought scores of battles, amassed a fortune, and went home to be king of his homeland. A real-life Conan the Barbarian.

If you’ve read my novel The Baldur Game (you have read it, haven’t you?), he shows up in 1030 at the Battle of Stiklestad, where Saint Olaf died. Harald’s patronymic was Sigurdsson; he was half-brother to Olaf (same mother). He was about 15 at that time; I picture him as a reckless teenager, still growing into his height (he’s supposed to have been unusually tall). He was wounded in the battle, but got away with the help of Ragnvald, later jarl of Orkney. I assume he must have hero-worshipped his older brother. Very likely he admired Olaf’s autocratic policies.

Then off to exile in Kiev, where he served at the court of Prince Jaroslav the Wise (who also appears in my novel). There Harald grew to maturity – and no doubt picked up Russ ideas about government.

In 1042 he headed south for Constantinople, the goal of every enterprising young Viking in the east. The Byzantine emperors valued the tall Northmen as warriors, and Harald rose to become captain of the famous Varangian Guard, fighting in various campaigns in various places, including Sicily and (possibly) Jerusalem. We actually have outside corroboration for this service– a Greek book from the 1070s, the Strategikon of Kekaumenos, describes a portion of his Byzantine career.

Harald seems to have been involved in the revolt against Emperor Michael V, and at some point (according to the saga) he was imprisoned and escaped. Somehow he managed to get out of the city with the enormous fortune he’d amassed, and he made his way back to Kiev, where he won the hand of the princess Elisabeth, and set off for home, where his nephew, Olaf’s illegitimate son Magnus the Good, now reigned.

(Continued on p. 2)

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Fiction, Reviews

Saga reading report: ‘The Tale of Thorvard Crow’s-Beak’

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13th Century illustration of the Battle of Stamford Bridge from Matthew Paris. It looked nothing like this.

I’m still slogging through a Very Long Book (a good book, but comprehensive), so tonight I’ll report on another tale from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. This is the last story in Volume I, which means I’ll be coming to longer sagas again in the next one. I’m not sure what I’ll do to vamp while I’m reading future long books.

To my delight, this tale turned out have considerable personal interest. It involves Erling Skjalgsson’s grandson, Eystein Orre (son of Erling’s daughter Ragnhild and Thorberg Arnesson – you may remember the story of Thorberg’s courtship from King of Rogaland). Eystein had a sister named Thora who would, in time, become concubine (or wife, sources differ) to King Harald Hardrada, and would die with him following a legendary charge at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in England.

Our tale is the Tale of Thorvard Crow’s-Beak. Thorvard is a wealthy Icelandic merchant. He sails to Norway where he speaks to King Harald, inviting him to come down to his ship and accept the gift of a sail. (According to this article from the Viking Herald, the manufacture of one sail for a Viking ship could take as long as fifty years [!] Perhaps they mean 50 years in man-hours).

I’ve mentioned previously that King Harald appears uncharacteristically genial in most of these saga tales. But in this one we see him in his usual temper. He tells Thorvard, curtly, that he got an Icelandic sail once before, and it tore apart under wind pressure. So he’s not interested in another such gift.

However, Thorvard then offers the sail to Eystein Orre, the king’s best friend, and Eystein, on examining it, recognizes it as an excellent specimen. He accepts it with thanks and invites Thorvard to stop and see him at his own home when he sails back to Iceland. When Thorvard does so, Eystein gives him generous gifts.

And to cap it we are told that, on a later occasion, Eystein’s ship outsails the king’s. And when the king asks where he got this fine sail, Eystein tells him it’s one he had turned down. A nice final note for the storyteller – it could even be true.

I was surprised to see “Eystein Orre” translated as “Eystein Grouse” here. Orre does mean grouse, even in modern Norwegian, but I’m sure I read somewhere that Eystein got his nickname from Orre farm in Jaeder. Perhaps that’s the meaning of the farm’s name. If Eystein lived there, it would likely have been due to inheritance from Erling.

The Tale of Thorvard Crow’s-beak is one of the more plausible stories in the collection, just trivial enough to believe.

Fiction, Non-fiction, Reading

A fatal slip of the tongue

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St. Magnus’ Kirk on Birsay, believed to be the site of the old Christ Church, where Jarl Thorfinn was buried. Photo credit: Chris Downer. Creative Commons license, Wikimedia.

When I wrote last night’s review of Orkneyinga Saga, I’d intended to mention one more thing, but I find I overlooked it. It’s not crucial to appreciating the book. Just an interesting point.

The saga includes one of the earliest references I’m aware of to a Freudian Slip. Not as such, of course. But I hadn’t been aware that the Vikings found such slips of the tongue as significant as psychologists do – only in a different way. Where we look for the voice of the subconscious, the Vikings looked for Fate.

The passage concerns the death of Jarl Ragnvald Brusesson, rival to Jarl Thorfinn the Mighty. He and his men had burned Jarl Thorfinn and his men in his house – or so he believed – and now he has traveled to the island of Papa Stronsay to collect malt for the Christmas ale. As they’re sitting around a hearth fire in a house there, someone mentions that more wood is needed for the fire.

Then the Earl made a slip of the tongue and this is what he said: ‘We shall have aged enough when this fire burns out.’ What he meant to say was that they would have baked enough. He realized his mistake immediately.

‘I’ve never made a slip of the tongue before,’ he said, ‘and now I remember what my foster-father King Olaf said at Stiklestad when I pointed out a mistake of his, that I’d not have long to live if ever my own tongue made a slip. Perhaps my uncle Thorfinn is still alive after all.’

Immediately thereafter the house is attacked by Jarl Thorfinn (who had indeed survived), and Ragnvald and all his men are killed.

I take this to indicate that there must have been some superstition about slips of the tongue being portents of death. It’s reminiscent of their belief in the “fetch,” the separate soul. When you see your fetch, it’s a sign you’re soon to die. It may be that the fetch also speaks audibly through slips of the tongue.

Or, it might just be an isolated anecdote about St. Olaf’s powers of prophecy.

Ragnvald, by the way, was the man who had saved King Harald Hardrada’s life after the Battle of Stiklestad, carrying the wounded 16-year-old prince off the battlefield and getting him safely away to Russia. Harald was now king of Norway, and Thorfinn’s overlord. Nevertheless, when Thorfinn went to Harald in Norway to explain it all, Harald was not greatly upset, and let him off lightly.

It seems he recognized a kindred spirit when he encountered him.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Tale of Sarcastic Halli’

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Stained glass image of Harald Hardrada in Kirkwall Cathedral, the Shetland Islands. Credit: Colin Smith.

Tonight, another tale from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. This one is called The Tale of Sarcastic Halli. It’s a little longer than the last one’s I’ve read and offers several points of interest, though there are a few problems as well.

Halli is an Icelandic poet who has a string of adventures in Norway and elsewhere during the time of King Harald Hardrada. His adventures tend to involve rather coarse jokes and tricks.

Halli first meets Harald while sailing up the Trondheimsfjord. With amazing impudence – especially considering King Harald’s well-known temper – he takes an insult from him (an insult, by the way, which was particularly offensive to Norsemen), and turns it back on the king. Harald is apparently in a good mood, because when he returns to the town he accepts Halli into his household. He seems to keep Halli around as a kind of a jester (along with a dwarf about whom I’d never read before), permitting him quite a lot of leeway. He even lets him get away with an ambivalent insult to his wife (Thora, Erling Skjalgsson’s granddaughter), using the opportunity to score off her himself.

Some of the references to Halli’s poems are hard to understand. At one point, in the court of King Harold Godwinsson of England (who would later defeat Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge), he gets away with a reward for a poem which he privately admits is just a load of rubbish. Apparently we’re meant to understand that the English were so unsophisticated about skaldic poetry that you could unload anything on them at a profit.

Two of the stories prominently feature what we like to call the “f-word.” No doubt this is faithful to the text – however, such earthy subject matter harmonizes rather poorly with the sometimes stilted quality of the literalist translation.

Still, this was an intriguing tale, showcasing the famously ruthless Harald Hardrada in a surprisingly genial light.

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Nitpicking in wartime

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Elisiv of Kyiv, probably drawn from life. The earliest portrait of any member of a Norwegian royal family.

I am savvy enough about the current climate of opinion to be aware that it can be a dangerous thing to criticize Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky (for the record, I have no doubt that Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine is both illegal and unjustified).

Nevertheless, I have to correct Pres. Zelensky today.

Something you probably haven’t heard about, but I have, is that Pres. Zelensky addressed the Norwegian Parliament (Storting) today, by remote video. I know this because I was listening to the Norwegian NRK radio network at the time, and heard it live. And I understood it perfectly because (for some unexplained reason) they broadcast it with simultaneous English translation – not Norwegian.

The full text is here.

Pres. Zelensky appeals, among other things, to the historical ties between Norway and Ukraine. He says this in particular:

Today, Russian bombs are flying at our land and our people. At the land where the Ukrainian Princess Elisiv of Kyiv was born and grew up. Wife of King Harald III of Norway, mother of King Olaf the Peaceful, grandmother of Magnus III, great-grandmother of Eystein I and Sigurd the Crusader.

This statement is in error – though the fault is probably that of the president’s speech writers.

Princess Elisiv (Elizabeth) of Kyiv (portrait above, taken from a church wall in Kyiv) was indeed the wife of Harald III, better known as Harald Hardrada, the freebooting Viking and mercenary who became king of Norway in 1046 and died in England in 1066. And she did bear him a child, a girl named Maria who was later declared a saint.

The mother of King Olaf the Peaceful, however, was not Elisiv, but Harald’s mistress, Thora Thorbergsdatter, daughter of Thorberg Arnesson of Giske.

What makes this fact of particular interest to us is that Thora’s mother was Ragnhild Erlingsdatter, daughter of Erling Skjalgsson of Sola, hero of my Viking novels.

The marriage of Ragnhild to Thorberg actually constitutes a plot element in my work in progress, King of Rogaland, currently nearing completion but delayed by heavy translation work.

Uncategorized, Writing

Olaf in eclipse

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Painting of the Battle of Stiklestad by Peter Nikolai Arbo

I must be working on the novel, because I’m not progressing very fast in my reading of Caimh McDonnell’s latest book (which is great, by the way; it’s not for lack of interest). In case you’re losing sleep over my car repair problems, I learned today that the ETA for the replacement part is now June 30. This was, as you might expect, no surprise to me at all at this point.

What shall I write about? How about something I learned from John Marsden’s Harald Hardrada book (favorably reviewed a few inches down)?

It has to do with King Olaf Haraldsson, Saint Olaf (or Olav) of Norway. He appeared in my latest book, The Elder King, and also has a major role in the one I’m working on, King of Rogaland.

I do not like this man. He emerges as a recognizable character in the sagas, and although those sagas are generally intended to promote his sainthood, the writers often had the insight to “paint him warts and all.” And this was a guy with a lot of warts.

Marsden’s book includes an interesting discussion of the date of the Battle of Stiklestad, where Olaf was killed. (Incidentally, I recently learned that one of my great-grandfathers was born on the island of Ytterøy, which is located in a fjord and almost in walking distance of the battlefield [once you get out of the water]).

There’s an anomaly in the standard accounts of the battle. The very first skaldic poems celebrating it (written by Sigvat the Skald, who also appears in The Elder King), tell how a solar eclipse occurred in the very midst of the battle. The problem is, the traditional date for the battle is July 29, but the eclipse occurred August 31. I’ve always inclined to the view that people remembered the battle and the eclipse as extraordinary events, and eventually conflated them. But Marsden points out that Sigvat (who wasn’t in the battle; he was on a pilgrimage to Rome at the time) would have been well-informed about the battle at a very early date. Also, the time of day given for the eclipse in the sagas is spot on.

Marsden passes on a possible explanation, suggested by “the editor of a long-respected English translation of Olaf the Saint’s saga.” This theory involves an error in interpreting a theoretical lost document (which I always consider a tenuous stratagem for scholars), but it works out quite neatly. If the original text of this X Document said that the battle occurred “1029 years and two-hundred and nine days since Christ’s birth,” and you reckon hundreds in the customary way, figuring January 1 as the first day of the year, you get July 29.

However – the Vikings counted in what are called “long hundreds.” When they said 100, they actually meant 120. All figures in the sagas need to be adjusted for that.

If you convert “1029 years and two-hundred and nine days” to long hundreds, and start your count at December 25 (a common date for figuring New Year’s Day at the time), you get the precise date of August 31.

That’s pretty neat, it seems to me. My plan, if I live so long, is to write a book about Olaf and Stiklestad a couple books from now, as a sort of sequel to Erling’s Saga. I think I’ll use this date for it, because that eclipse is a really cool bit of atmospheric staging.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Harald Hardrada: The Warrior’s Way,’ by John Marsden

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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.

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Stamford Bridge

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The lone Viking at the bridge, by the great Angus McBride

More Viking stuff tonight.

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Stamford Bridge, traditionally (though somewhat arbitrarily) reckoned as the end of the Viking Age. It happened near a village not far from York, in the year 1066. King Harald Hardrada of Norway, who was getting on in years, had made a pact with Toste, the estranged brother of King Harald Godwinsson of England, to conquer the country. Harald believed he had a technical right to the throne as legal heir to his nephew, who’d had a slim claim.

According to the saga, Harald brought a fleet of 300 ships from Norway. On September 20 they defeated an English army at Fulford, and then accepted the submission of Northumberland. They were on their way to receive hostages on the 25th when they were suddenly attacked by the army of King Harold Godwinsson, who had made a forced march from the south.

The English must have been exhausted, while the Norwegians would have been relatively fresh. However, the Norse were not prepared for battle and many had left their mail shirts behind, because the day was warm and they expected no trouble. The battle, by all accounts, was nevertheless a hard-fought one.

An interesting detail is a story found in English sources (but not, surprisingly, in Norwegian ones as far as I know) about a warrior who defended the bridge with an axe all alone for an extended period of time, giving the Norwegians time to form up their ranks. He was killed at last by a spear thrust from below.

According to the saga, the Norwegians might have won if King Harald Hardrada had not taken an arrow in the throat, finishing on English soil a military career that had stretched from Norway to Russia to the deserts of the Middle East. But that’s how saga writers tell stories – I wouldn’t be surprised if the truth was more complicated. In any case, it’s undisputable that Harald was killed there.

One final item, often overlooked, might be of interest to our readers. There was a final (third) stage of the battle, after Harald’s death, remembered in Norway as Orri’s Storm. A young man named Eystein Orri, who was betrothed to the king’s daughter, had been left at Riccall to guard the ships. When he learned of the army’s peril, he and his force set off at a dead run to join the battle. There was really little they could do for the cause except die with their king, and that’s what they did. According to the saga, they were wearing their mail. But the weight and the heat exhausted them so that they were nearly played out when they got to the battlefield. But then (if you can believe the saga), they went into such a berserk frenzy that they threw off their mail shirts and fought unarmored. This made them easy targets (some, according to the saga, died from sheer exhaustion).

Eystein Orri was Erling Skjalgsson’s grandson, through his daughter Ragnhild.

According to the sagas, of the 300 ships that sailed to England with Harald, only 24 returned home. The English said that whitening bones could still be seen on the battle ground 50 years later.