Harald Hardrada (26 page)

There is every reason, of course, to assume Harald's genuine interest in memorials to his kinsman Olaf, who was already effectively established as Norway's patron saint and whose cult was ever more widely revered throughout the Scandinavian world within a few decades of his martyrdom. Yet it would be fully characteristic of Harald to have had a more political motive when every opportunity of association with the saint would more securely establish himself as a worthy successor in the kingship. In so doing, he would surely have been inspired by the example of Jaroslav and particularly by his magnificent Hagia Sophia which Harald had seen under construction in Kiev and in which he would have recognised a reflection of the prestige of the Grand Prince no less clearly than a monumental dedication to the Holy Wisdom.

While the reverence of Olaf as saint and martyr had finally established Christianity in Norway by the mid-eleventh century, the Christian tradition with which Harald himself would have been most familiar after spending so much of his adult life in Russia and Byzantium would have been the eastern Orthodox faith, so it is unsurprising that he invited eastern churchmen to his Norwegian court and arranged for them to visit Iceland also. Their presence in Scandinavia evidently incurred disapproval not only from the archbishop of Hamburg (which met with a typically defiant response), but evidently also on the part of the papacy itself when a papal legation was sent in protest to Harald's court and promptly thrown out. All of which would very well correspond to the closing line of the account of
Araltes
in the
Book of Advice to an Emperor
in which he is complimented on having ‘maintained faith and friendship towards the
Rhomaioi
[the Byzantines] when he was ruling in his own land'.

Curiously, Snorri makes no reference to eastern churchmen in Iceland, but he does pay full tribute to Harald as ‘a great friend to all Icelanders', telling of his sending four ships with cargoes of flour to a famine-stricken Iceland (thus dating the voyage to 1056) and of his gift of a bell for the church at Thingvellir. It has been suggested that Harald's generosity to the Icelanders was still more generously repaid by the accounts of him in Icelandic sources, and it may well have been so, especially in view of his patronage of so many court-poets from that country. This was very probably what Snorri meant by ‘his great many acts of generosity to the people who stayed with him', and yet the only Icelanders mentioned by name in this passage are Harald's long-standing lieutenants, Halldor Snorrason and Ulf Ospaksson.

Both had served with Harald throughout most of his time in Byzantine service and both returned with him to Norway. Ulf came of an old Icelandic family (ultimately descended from Ketil Bjornsson, called ‘Flatnose', a Norse king in the Hebrides in the mid-ninth century whose offspring were among the earliest settlers in Iceland) and was a nephew of Gudrun Osvifsdottir, heroine of
Laxdæla saga
. His remarkable loyalty to Harald through some three decades in his service was justly rewarded in Norway where he was appointed the king's marshal, made a lenderman in the Trondelag and given Jorunn, daughter of Thorberg Arnason, as his wife. Snorri makes particular mention of Ulf's shrewd judgement, which is most evident in military matters and even to the extent that had he not died so early in the year 1066 Harald's warrior's way might not have come to an end in the manner that it did.

Ulf's comrade-in-arms, Halldor Snorrason, was a man of very different personality. Snorri tells of his huge build and powerful strength, yet frankly admits his personality to have been ‘blunt, outspoken, sullen and obstinate'. Clearly Halldor was never going to be the most diplomatic of courtiers and so it is hardly surprising that some five years at the Norwegian court were to prove quite long enough and sometime around 1051 he returned to Iceland where he lived to a great age on his farm at Hjardarholt enjoying celebrity as a famous storyteller. Even while in retirement in Iceland, Halldor would still seem to have been in contact with Harald, even though his departure from the Norwegian court is said to have involved a dispute with the king over payment due (according to the
Tale of Halldor Snorrason
in
Morkinskinna
), a tradition not unconnected with Harald's increasingly imperious conduct reported in the saga. Even his favourite skald told how the king would brook no opposition to his demands and Snorri quotes a full strophe from Thjodolf telling how ‘neither could the king's own men go against his wishes'.

If it was this aspect of his regal personality which prompted Adam of Bremen to call Harald a ‘tyrant' and allowed later historians to endow him with the cognomen
harðraði
– whether translated as ‘hard counsel' or as ‘ruthless' – the same autocratic mind-set was to prove his first line of defence against the hostile native elements who had challenged Norwegian kings throughout the first decades of the eleventh century and brought down his half-brother Olaf as they had Olaf Tryggvason before him. The focal point of that hostility still lay around the Trondelag, long the heartland of the jarls of Lade and where now Einar Tambarskelve, himself son-in-law to the mighty Jarl Hakon, represented their effective successor in all but title. Although most often hostile and only nominally conciliatory to Olaf, Einar had reclaimed the kingship of Norway for Olaf's son in 1035 and remained staunchly loyal to ‘Magnus the Good' thereafter, yet he clearly had no similar regard for his successor (even though Einar's son Eindridi was married to a daughter of Harald's sister, Gunnhild).

Skilled in law-dealing, Einar took any and every opportunity to speak for the Trondelag bonders against the royal officers at assemblies, even in the presence of the king himself. That attitude of defiance soon developed into a policy of deliberate provocation as the saga tells of his building ‘a great following of men on his estates and bringing a still greater force with him when he came to Nidaros'. On one occasion, he is said to have brought eight or nine longships with a force five hundred strong which he boldly disembarked and marched through the town in full view of the king's residence. This scarcely veiled challenge prompted Harald to compose some lines of verse proclaiming his response to ‘the mighty chieftain who means to fill the throne-seat':

Einar with his flailing blade
will drive me from my kingdom
unless he is forced to kiss
the axe's thin-lipped edge.

Here, then, was a king who intended to take no prisoners and awaited only the opportunity to arrange the axe-kissing he had promised in his poetry.

While there is no doubt as to Harald having arranged the killing of Einar, and of his son Eindridi with him, the saga record supplies two quite different accounts of how it happened. The version found similarly in
Morkinskinna
and
Flateyjarbók
tells of Einar being invited to a feast at Nidaros where he falls into a drunken sleep while a skald is celebrating the king's adventures. Harald has a kinsman suddenly wake him with a straw applied to his nostrils and in a state of embarrassment so acute that Einar takes revenge by killing the offender the next morning, providing the king with just reason to put both him and his son to death.

The alternative version of the story is found in Snorri's
Heimskringla
and independently in
Fagrskinna
, suggesting its likely origin in Norwegian (as distinct from Icelandic) tradition. The tale itself is of some more convincing character too, telling of a man in Einar's service, and standing high in his favour, caught thieving in Nidaros. When the accused was brought to face justice, Einar accompanied him with a heavily armed retinue to take the fellow away from the court by force. Confrontation with the king was becoming unavoidable now and mutual friends sought to arrange a conciliatory meeting between the two. Trusting in his son's kinship by marriage to the king's family as his own safe conduct, Einar arrived at the royal residence, but left Eindridi outside in the courtyard with others of his company while he entered alone, only to find himself trapped in a darkened chamber where Harald's warriors fell upon him and hacked him to death. Hearing the sound of weaponry, Eindridi rushed in to his father's aid, but was likewise struck down and fell dead beside Einar's body. Harald's housecarls formed up outside the entrance to forestall any attack by Einar's retinue, but there was no such attempt now that the Trondelag men were without a leader, so the king marched with his retinue to a ship moored on the river and was rowed away down the fjord.

When the news was brought to Einar's wife, Bergljot, she cried out for vengeance: ‘Were Hakon here, those who killed my son would not now be pulling in safety downriver.' Hakon was the son of Ivar the White, a lenderman in the Upplands whose mother was also a daughter of the great Jarl Hakon and thus sister to Bergljot. If there was a man most able, and even obliged, to avenge Bergljot's husband and son it was this Hakon, a direct descendant of the jarls of Lade and said by the saga to have surpassed all others in Norway at that time in his courage, strength and accomplishment. Even while Einar and Eindridi were buried near to the tomb of Magnus in St Olaf's church in Nidaros, so great a hostility to Harald was abroad among the men of the Trondelag that there was already talk of armed revolt.

The king's form of response on this occasion was to be diplomacy, so he was in need of an emissary well placed to deal on his behalf and the man he chose was Finn Arnason. Second son of the powerful lenderman Arne Armodsson, Finn had remained staunchly loyal to King Olaf, following him to Russia and returning to stand in the front rank of his forces at Stiklestad. Whether or not he had fled back to Russia after the battle and afterwards returned to Norway with Magnus is left unclear by the saga record, but now, almost thirty years after Stiklestad, he was established as a lenderman in Austratt (north-west of Trondheimfjord) and as a figure of great standing in Harald's kingdom. Snorri tells of the king's great affection for Finn and his brothers and (with just one significant exception) there is no reason to doubt him, not least by reason of the bonds of marital kinship. Not only was Finn's wife the daughter of Harald's brother, Halfdan, but Harald had himself recently formed a close relationship with Finn's niece.

According to Snorri, Harald had been ‘married again' in the winter of 1047/8, this time to Thora, a daughter of Finn's younger brother, Thorberg Arnason. There is no question of the historicity nor, indeed, the intimacy of Harald's association with Thora because she was to become the mother of his two sons – and ultimate successors – Magnus and Olaf, but its legitimacy as a ‘marriage' is utterly suspect when there is nowhere any indication that Harald's marriage to his Russian queen had been dissolved and when Ellisif was not only still alive but was to outlive her husband. The true situation, then, can only have been that Thora had become Harald's concubine within months of his full accession as king of Norway. Again it might be possible to detect a Byzantine exemplar because Harald would surely have known of the tripartite arrangement between Constantine Monomachus, the empress Zoe and the Sclerena, and yet the one highly probable reason for his taking a second ‘wife' may well have been the hope of securing a male successor.

The precise dates of birth of his offspring are nowhere recorded, but his two children fathered upon Ellisif were both daughters – Maria and Ingigerd – and it is fully possible that both had been born before his ‘second marriage' to Thora, by which time Harald had been married to Ellisif for some five years and the urgency of producing a male successor must have been a matter of increasing concern to him, because longevity was not commonly characteristic of warrior kings. His half-brother Olaf had been just thirty-five when he was killed in battle, Olaf Tryggvason only about thirty when he fell to his death at Svold and even Cnut had not yet reached the age of forty at the time of his death. Harald was now already a year or two into his thirties and evidently lost no time in fathering male offspring upon Thora when his first-born son, Magnus, was old enough to go to war with his father in the year 1062. Neither was formal legitimacy of birth any essential qualification for succession in Norway in those times, if only on the evidence of his predecessor, Magnus, having been born to Olaf not by his queen, but by his ‘hand-maid'.

Thus all the Arnason brothers were bonded to the king by ties of marital kinship, but Finn was by far the best placed to negotiate on his behalf with current dissident elements, firstly by reason of his own and his family's standing in the Trondelag, but also because of his old acquaintance with Hakon Ivarsson who had sailed with him on viking ventures west-over-sea several summers past. When Harald came to Austratt, the saga tells of Finn having welcomed him in good humour, although with the least formality when he chided the king as a ‘great scoundrel'. If Finn were to go into the Trondelag and the Upplands as Harald's ambassador and there pacify men who hated the king so bitterly, he would want a reward for his service. Harald was prepared to grant any favour he chose and Finn asked that his brother Kalv be restored to his lands in Norway and given a safe conduct and the king's peace when he returned to live there again.

With whatever ultimate motive already in his own mind, Harald granted the favour requested and Finn went forth to accomplish his embassy with quite remarkable success. Accompanied by a retinue nearly eighty strong, he came to the Trondelag men and reminded them of the evil consequences which had befallen the land the last time they had risen in arms against their king. Warning against letting their hatred of Harald push them into the same mistake again, his oratory – and the king's promise to pay compensation for the killing of Einar and Eindridi – persuaded them to take no further action, at least until they heard of Hakon Ivarsson's response to the appeal made to him by Einar's widow, Bergljot.