Harald Hardrada (4 page)

In his obituary of Harald in the closing pages of the saga, Snorri writes of having ‘no particular accounts of his youth until he took part in the battle of Stiklestad at the age of fifteen'. Now that is a puzzling statement indeed because there is one anecdote, however historically dubious, which is specifically concerned with Harald in early childhood and must have been known to Snorri when it was included in his
Olaf the Saint's saga
, the longest of all sixteen in the
Heimskringla
collection and almost certainly written before
Harald's saga
. Moreover, a fairly full account of Harald's parentage, ancestry and background can be pieced together, principally from
Olaf the Saint's saga
but also from other sagas in the
Heimskringla
collection, and might be usefully surveyed to conclude this introduction.

First of all, though, there is a question of nomenclature. Thus far, as also in the title, I have used the name-form ‘Harald Hardrada' simply because it is probably the one most immediately recognisable to an English-speaking readership and even though no form of ‘Hardrada' is found applied to Harald in any of the skaldic poetry or other closely contemporary sources and so would seem not to have been used in his own time. ‘Hardrada', while often taken to mean ‘the hard ruler', represents the anglicised form of the Norse term
harðraði
, literally ‘hard counsel' although perhaps better translated as ‘ruthless'. As to how Harald might have been known to his contemporaries, it is hardly unexpected to find Adam of Bremen calling him
malus
(‘evil' or ‘wicked'), although rather more curious is the cognomen
har fagera
applied to him by the northern recension of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
If
har fagera
represents an Old English corruption of
hárfagri
, the cognomen borne by Harald's celebrated ancestor Harald Fair-hair, it is hardly likely that a late eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon chronicler would have confused the Norwegian king killed in England as recently as 1066 with a namesake who had died some hundred and twenty years earlier, but perhaps it is just possible that he took
hárfagri
to have been a family surname.

The earliest known association of
har
ð
ra
ð
i
with Harald in a Scandinavian source occurs in the verse treatise
Háttalykill
attributed to Orkney/Icelandic authorship in the mid-twelfth century, but it is there applied to him and to other warlords simply as an adjective. Its application to Harald as a specifically personal byname does not appear until more than a century later when, as Turville-Petre explains, ‘Norwegians and Icelanders of a much later age developed the suitable nickname
harðraði
. . . [which] seems to creep into chapter-headings and regnal lists probably during the latter half of the thirteenth century'.
⁴

What can be said with confidence is that Harald was not known to Snorri Sturluson as
harðraði
because, while other saga titles in
Heimskringla
– such as
Olaf the Saint's saga
and
Magnus the Good's saga
, to name those of Harald's half-brother and nephew as just two examples – incorporate bynames established and current in the early thirteenth century, his own saga is headed with the straightforward patronymic as
Harald Sigurdsson's saga
, which will conveniently serve here to introduce the subject of his parentage. Harald's father was Sigurd Halfdansson, a great-grandson of Harald Fair-hair and king of Ringerike in the Uppland region north of Oslofjord. Sigurd's very practical interest in farming earned him the less than kingly nickname of
syr
(or ‘sow' because he ‘nosed about rooting up the ground') from the saga-makers. While Sigurd Syr appears on occasion as the full equal of his peers and a respected voice often tempered with wise caution, other anecdotes in Snorri's
Olaf the Saint's saga
seem to delight in portraying him as the harassed second husband of the formidable Ásta Gudbrondsdottir, the wife who bore him two daughters and three sons, of whom the youngest was Harald.

Ásta had formerly been married to Harald Gudrodsson, called
Grenske
(‘of Grenland', a district south of Westfold), another great-grandson of Harald Fair-hair and ruler of the southern part of Norway on behalf of the Danish king Harald Gormsson, called ‘bluetooth'. Harald Grenske is said to have been killed in Sweden towards the end of 994 or early in the following year (although saga accounts of the circumstances are historically untrustworthy), leaving Ásta to return to her parents as a widow pregnant with his son, the future king and saint Olaf, to whom she gave birth in the summer of 995.

Thus when she remarried shortly afterwards, Ásta brought with her a stepson to be raised by Sigurd Syr until the twelve-year-old Olaf Haraldsson – already possessed of great strength, accomplished with bow and spear, brimming over with self-confidence and fired with great ambition according to his saga in
Heimskringla
– was given by his mother into the charge of an experienced viking warrior who took him raiding around the Baltic. The saga, fully supported by skaldic verses, records his fighting in no fewer than five battles in Sweden, Finland and Holland before he eventually arrived in England as one of the huge raiding force led by Thorkell the Tall which descended on Kent in the August of 1009.

After some three years of warfaring in England, including the battle of Ringmere and the siege of Canterbury, Olaf crossed the Channel to Normandy, effectively a Scandinavian colony which had begun as a viking base on the Seine in the later ninth century and became thoroughly gallicised into a French province within seventy years, yet still offering a haven to northmen at large in Europe into the eleventh century. There he entered the service of Duke Richard II, evidently as a mercenary fighting-man according to saga accounts of his campaigning corroborated by the eleventh-century Norman historian William of Jumièges, who also records the duke's having stood as sponsor for Olaf's baptism into the Christian faith at Rouen in 1013. Even though William's account of Olaf's conversion discredits the sagas' claim for his having been baptised by Olaf Tryggvason in very early childhood, his entry into the faith can be recognised now as an event of the greatest significance for his Norwegian homeland as well as for his own place in history, because less than two years later he was back in Norway fiercely determined to complete the campaign of conversion left unfinished by Olaf Tryggvason. Yet to do so he would first need to fulfil another ambition and reclaim the sovereignty of the unified kingdom lost some fifteen years before when Olaf Tryggvason, facing defeat at the battle of Svold, had flung himself overboard from his beleaguered warship.

The kingdom which had fallen from the hand of Olaf Tryggvason thus became a fruit of victory shared between the victors: the Danish king Svein Haraldsson, called ‘forkbeard', his Norwegian son-in-law Erik Hakonsson, jarl of Lade (
Hlaðir
, near Trondheim), and the Swedish king Olaf Eriksson who apparently owed some form of allegiance to Svein of Denmark. By the time of Olaf Haraldsson's return to his homeland – certainly by 1015, although possibly in the autumn of 1014 – there had been a shift in the political balance of the tripartite lordship imposed on Norway some fifteen years earlier. Svein Forkbeard had died in England in the first weeks of 1014, barely a month after winning the English crown, and the subsequent attention of his son Cnut became firmly fixed on winning his father's English conquest for himself. Olaf of Sweden had already passed responsibility for much of his Norwegian interest to Jarl Svein, the brother of Erik of Lade who by this time had joined Cnut in assembling an invasion fleet which would soon be on its way to England, leaving his Norwegian lordship in the care of his son Hakon.

Thus it was the young Jarl Hakon whom Olaf encountered, took by surprise and made captive, when he arrived off the west coast of Norway with two
knorr
(oceangoing merchant craft as distinct from warships) and 120 warriors. Having secured Hakon's submission and surrender, Olaf released the young jarl unharmed and allowed his departure to join his father in the service of Cnut in England, before setting out on his own progress eastward through Norway seeking support for his cause. In fact, as just one among numerous descendants of Harald Fair-hair, Olaf cannot be said to have had any outstanding claim to the kingship of Norway, but his burly physique (he was known as ‘Olaf the Stout' in his lifetime) and warfaring experience, his sheer self-assurance and persuasive oratory would have offered him as an impressive candidate for kingship. He was almost certainly also in possession of a substantial treasury, accumulated in the course of his viking career and not least from sharing in payments of
danegeld
with which Anglo-Saxon England regularly bought off Scandinavian raiding armies in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Nonetheless, he was to find opinion in Norway sharply divided between himself and Hakon's uncle, Jarl Svein, who had already fled inland to marshal his own support, and so Olaf turned south to Ringerike where he sought the advice and assistance of Sigurd Syr, who solemnly warned his stepson of the formidable powers whom he sought to challenge. Nonetheless, Sigurd was still ready to help his stepson and brought together an assembly of provincial kings and chieftains of the Upplands which was eventually won over by Olaf's oratory and acclaimed him king. As men of central Norway began flocking to his standard, Olaf made his way north into the Trondelag, heartland of the jarls of Lade, and even there opposition had not the strength to withstand him, at least until Jarl Svein launched a counter-attack on Nidaros which drove Olaf back to the south. There he mustered his forces and assembled a warfleet for the inevitable decisive battle which was fought off Nesjar, a headland on the western shore of Oslofjord, on Palm Sunday in the year 1016.

The victory went to Olaf and with it the kingship of all Norway; the defeated Jarl Svein fled east into Sweden, where he died of sickness the following autumn, and the jarls Erik and Hakon became otherwise engaged with Cnut who was now king in England. In the customary way of victorious warrior kings, Olaf bestowed generous gifts on his supporters, and especially upon the stepfather who had not only helped bring the Uppland kings to Olaf's cause but also, according to the saga, brought with him ‘a great body of men' when he joined his stepson's forces in the decisive battle. It seems likely that Olaf's gift-giving to Sigurd Syr was to be the last meeting of the two men, because when the saga next tells of Olaf at Ringerike, some two years after the victory at Nesjar, it mentions that Sigurd had died the previous winter. In fact, that account of Olaf's visit to his mother is of particular significance here because it represents the very first appearance of Harald Hardrada in the
Heimskringla
cycle.

In celebration of her son's homecoming, the proud Ásta prepared a great banquet for Olaf who ‘alone now bore the title of king in Norway' and after the feast brought her three young sons (by Sigurd) to meet their royal half-brother. The saga account of that meeting, while hardly to be considered other than an apocryphal anecdote, does at least have the ring of plausibility when it tells how the king sought to test the character of the three young princes by pretending to become suddenly and thunderously angry. While Guthorm the eldest and Halfdan the second son drew back in fear, the reaction of Harald the youngest was simply to give a tug to his tormentor's beard. If, as the saga claims, Olaf really did respond to Harald's bold gesture by telling the three-year-old that ‘You will be vengeful one day, my kinsman', history was to prove him no poor judge of character.

The following day, as Olaf walked with his mother around the farm they saw the three boys at play, Guthorm and Halfdan building farmhouses and barns which they imagined stocking with cattle and sheep, while Harald was nearby at the edge of a pool floating chips of wood into the water. When asked what they were, Harald said these were his warships and Olaf replied: ‘It may well be that you will have command of warships one day, kinsman.'

Calling the three boys over to him, Olaf asked each in turn what he would most like to own. ‘Cornfields' was Guthorm's choice, while Halfdan chose ‘cattle' and so many as would surround the lake when they were watered, but when it came to Harald's turn he had no hesitation in demanding ‘housecarls', the fighting men who formed a king's retinue. ‘And how many housecarls would you wish to have?' asked the king. ‘As many as would eat all my brother Halfdan's cattle at a single meal!' came the reply. Olaf was laughing when he turned to Ásta saying, ‘In this one, mother, you are raising a warrior king', and, indeed, there is good reason to believe that such had been her intention from the first. The saga relates more than one anecdote bearing on Ásta's ambitions for her sons and it would seem likely that it was she rather than her husband Sigurd who had chosen the name given to their youngest boy. If so, then her choice carries its own remarkable significance because the name
Haraldr
derives from the Old Norse term
her-valdr
, ‘ruler of warriors'.

Some dozen years had passed before there is any saga reference to Harald meeting again with Olaf, although this time it was to be in very different circumstances because much had changed since 1018. Driven from power in Norway, Olaf had found refuge in Russia and it was from there that he returned in 1030 in a doomed attempt to reclaim his kingdom by the sword. News of his coming had apparently reached Ringerike even before he had passed through Sweden and the first to meet him as he approached the border was his half-brother Harald – now fifteen years old and described by the saga as ‘so manly as if he were already full-grown' – who brought some seven hundred Upplanders to join Olaf's modest army on its westward advance into the Trondelag.