Harald Hardrada (5 page)

Ahead of them in Værdal lay the battle which was to mark the beginning of Harald Hardrada's warrior's way when the sun turned black in the summer sky above Stiklestad . . . .

I
n the greater historical scheme of things, the presence of the young Harald Sigurdsson at Stiklestad might be thought to represent little more than a footnote to the epic drama centred upon the death in battle of the king who was soon to become Norway's national patron saint. Such might even be the inference of the saga record when the first chapter of
Harald's saga
in Snorri Sturluson's
Heimskringla
, which takes Stiklestad as the beginning of Harald's story, actually expends just a few paragraphs on his presence at the battle which had already taken up some thirty-eight chapters of
Olaf the Saint's saga
in the same collection.

From the perspective being taken here, however, Stiklestad offers a range of interest which extends beyond its selection as the starting-point of Harald's warrior's way and even beyond an attempt to deduce something more about his own part in the battle than is made explicit in the saga. Not only does the conflict provide an early opportunity to survey the arms, armour, and tactics involved in an eleventh-century Scandinavian land-battle, but in so doing might also offer some insight into the warrior culture within which Harald had been raised to the threshold of his manhood.

Of no less significance for his personal destiny, however, will be a portrait of the man who stood and fell at the centre of the blood-fray of Stiklestad, because there is every reason to recognise his half-brother Olaf as casting his long shadow across the whole subsequent course of Harald's life. While it was surely a determined loyalty to a brother and boyhood hero which brought Harald to fight his first battle under Olaf's banner at Stiklestad, something still deeper might be needed to explain why, thirty-six years later, it was to Olaf's shrine at Nidaros that Harald paid his parting homage just before he embarked upon the invasion that would lead him to his last battle at Stamford Bridge. It is almost as if the ghost of his half-brother can be sensed at Harald's shoulder on very many occasions throughout those intervening years and most especially after he himself had succeeded to the kingship of Norway. As Olaf is said to have foretold at their very first meeting, Harald was indeed to become a vengeful man: so much so that it might almost be possible to recognise his entire reign as a warrior king in terms of a twenty-year pursuit of blood-feud in vengeance for the kinsman laid low on the field of Stiklestad.

None of which is intended to suggest there was anything religious in Harald's respect for his half-brother's memory, because whatever presence might be sensed at his shoulder is assuredly the ghost of the man he remembered rather than the spirit of the martyred saint whose cult had become firmly established even within Harald's lifetime. Indeed, the alacrity with which a king slain in battle by his own people was transformed into his nation's martyred patron saint is remarkable even by medieval standards. The sagas tell of wounds healed by his blood almost before his corpse was cold and such miracle stories can be traced all the way back to the eleventh century, some of them even to men who had actually known Olaf. His body had lain buried for only a few days more than the twelvemonth when it was exhumed and found to be uncorrupted, thus enabling the bishop at Nidaros to immediately proclaim him a saint.

Recognition of his sanctity evidently spread widely and with extraordinary speed. Adam of Bremen, who was at work on his
History
scarcely forty years after Stiklestad, confirms Olaf's feast already being celebrated throughout Scandinavia, just as William of Jumièges, who was writing in Normandy at much the same time, recognised him as a martyr. One version of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, set down some twenty years earlier still, reflects the Scandinavian seam of northern English culture when it styles Olaf
halig
(or ‘holy'). However, even when due allowance is made for the very different values of that world and time, what is known of the personality of the historical Olaf Haraldsson is not easily reconciled with any of the more familiar manifestations of Christian sanctity.

The later saga stories of his having been baptised in infancy by Olaf Tryggvason can be set aside in the light of William of Jumièges' account of the baptism at Rouen, and so it would be reasonable to assume his early life as steeped in the pagan culture of the viking warrior which, indeed, he himself was to become at the age of twelve. Having adopted the Christian faith, however, Olaf was determined to impose it upon the kingdom he was soon to claim in Norway – and, if needs be, at sword-point. Those who refused conversion, or accepted under pressure the man-god whom the northmen called the ‘White Christ' and afterwards reverted to pagan practice, faced banishment, maiming, or even death at royal command.

Disloyalty to the king himself was punished with no less severity, of which the most notorious example is the saga story of five Uppland kings who first supported Olaf's bid for the kingship but shortly afterwards become so disenchanted as to conspire together for his overthrow. When word of their conspiracy was brought to Olaf, an armed force 400 strong was sent to make them captive and bring them to face his wrath. Three of the kings were despatched into exile with their families and their lands seized for the crown, a fourth had his tongue severed, while the most frightful retribution was that inflicted upon the fifth. Rorek of Hedemark had his eyes put out and, still being considered dangerously untrustworthy even thus impaired, was compelled thereafter to remain under surveillance in the king's retinue. Peremptory brutality would also appear to have characterised Olaf's foreign policy when, having seen off the jarls of Lade and knowing Cnut to be otherwise engaged in England, he still had to contend with the Swedish king Olaf Eriksson's intervention in disputed borderlands. Armed bands of Swedish officers sent to extract tribute from Norwegian bonders (
bóndi
, or yeoman farmers) provoked a stern response, and a verse set down by Olaf's skald Sigvat Thordsson tells of a full dozen Swedes hanged as a feast for the ravens when they ventured into Gaulardal and Orkadal south and east of the Trondelag.

The various saga accounts of Olaf's reign are so heavily burdened by legend as to be profoundly suspect as historical record, even though Snorri Sturluson clearly took greater pains to produce a rounded portrait of the man than did those others whose work merely offers a sanitised eulogy of the martyred saint. In so doing, he was able to place great reliance upon Sigvat Thordsson's court-poetry as a uniquely informed source of immediately contemporary evidence. Sigvat's
Vikingarvísur
(or ‘viking verses'), for example, provides a catalogue of Olaf's earlier warfaring around the Baltic, in England and in Normandy which was presumably informed by the king's own reminiscences, while
Nesjavísur
(‘Nesjar verses') is the poet's record of his first attendance upon his lord in battle on the occasion of the famous victory over Jarl Svein in 1016.

Indeed, and quite apart from the value of his poetry as historical record, Sigvat's relationship with his royal patron is of particular interest in that it clearly illustrates some of the paradoxes of Olaf Haraldsson's nature. Sigvat Thordsson had arrived in Norway from Iceland shortly after Olaf's return to claim the kingdom and, in the way of his trade, sought out the new king at Nidaros to offer verses composed in his honour. As a recently baptised Christian, Olaf strongly disapproved of the pagan associations of skaldic art, so his initial response to Sigvat was less than welcoming, yet the skald was able to win him over and eventually to become his most trusted friend, counsellor and emissary.

Despite that professed distaste for poetry, Olaf is known to have written verse of his own, and in the form of love-poems, a use of poetry considered beneath contempt by the high standards of the skaldic art but one which bears out his notorious susceptibility to female charms, which he himself described as his ‘besetting sin' in one of the verses ascribed to him. Olaf's love-poems were addressed to the Swedish princess Ingigerd, on whom they made so favourable an impression that a betrothal was arranged through the intermediary of Rognvald Ulfsson, jarl of Gautland and himself a Swede, but closely linked to Norway by reason of his marriage to a sister of Olaf Tryggvason. In the event, however, the arrangement was to be thwarted when Ingigerd's father King Olaf of Sweden – who so despised the Norwegian Olaf that he refused even to use his name, referring to him only as ‘that fat man' – insisted instead on Ingigerd's betrothal to the Russian Grand Prince Jaroslav.

Almost immediately, Olaf arranged to take another Swedish princess, Ingigerd's sister Astrid, as his bride, but only with the assistance of Sigvat who somehow circumvented her father's disapproval by travelling to Gautland and there negotiating the marriage (‘among other things spoken of . . .', according to the saga) with Jarl Rognvald acting once again as intermediary and himself escorting the bride to Norway for her wedding in the first months of 1019. Rognvald thus incurred his own king's grievous displeasure and on his return Olaf of Sweden would have had him hanged for his ‘treason' had it not been for Ingigerd's insistence that he escort her on her bridal journey into Russia and never again return to her father's kingdom. So it was that Rognvald Ulfsson came to settle in Russia, where he was endowed with the lordship of Staraja Ladoga on the Gulf of Finland, and it was there, some dozen years later, that his son Eilif was to be a comrade-in-arms to the Norwegian Olaf's kinsman, the young Harald Sigurdsson.

In Norway, meanwhile, marriage would appear to have placed little restraint on Olaf's ‘besetting sin' when the mother of his son born around 1024 was not his queen but one Alfhild, described in the saga as ‘the king's hand-maiden . . . although of good descent'. Once again Sigvat the skald was on hand, because it is he whom the saga credits with the choice of Magnus – in honour of
Karl Magnus
, the Norse name-form of the ninth-century Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne – as the baptismal name of the new-born prince. In so doing, though, the skald might simply have been anticipating his lord's own wishes, because Olaf so greatly revered Karl Magnus that he had his portrait carved onto the figurehead of his own warship which was thus named the ‘Karl's Head'.

That passing saga reference to ‘other things spoken of . . .' in the course of Sigvat's negotiations with Rognvald in Gautland has already suggested a political dimension to Olaf's quest for a Swedish queen, and the marriage does appear to have eased his formerly hostile relations with Sweden through the early 1020s. The Swedish king Olaf was becoming increasingly unpopular at home, as a result of his attempts to impose Christianity on his people according to the saga, although just as possibly because of his allegiance to a Danish overlord. Olaf Eriksson is often known as Skötkonung, a cognomen which has been variously interpreted by historians but might well indicate that he rendered some form of tribute – or skatt – to Svein Forkbeard, and some similar obligation to Cnut when he succeeded Svein. Whatever the true reason, Olaf Skötkonung was eventually forced to share the kingship with his son, whom he had christened Jacob but who was to adopt the Scandinavian name of Onund before he succeeded to full sovereignty on the death of his father in 1022. Sweden's new king evidently had no inclination to accept a Danish overlord, and neither did he share his father's hostility to Olaf of Norway with whom he was soon to find himself in an aggressive alliance against Denmark.

By the mid-1020s, and thus within a decade of his return to Norway, Olaf Haraldsson had achieved the high point of his reign. He had once again restored national sovereignty, however short-lived, to Norway and effectively accomplished its conversion to Christianity. He had also affirmed his influence in the North Atlantic colonies, most importantly in the jarldom of Orkney where he apportioned disputed territories between the brothers Thorfinn and Brusi – sons of the formidable Jarl Sigurd slain at Clontarf in 1014 – and brought Brusi's son Rognvald to take up residence at his court. Friendly relations were extended still further west-over-sea to Greenland, the Faroes and especially to Iceland, whence a number of skalds and fighting-men came to the Norwegian court. Still more impressive was Olaf's achievement as a law-maker, when he revived and revised the law code of Harald Fair-hair's time with such just and equal application to all ranks of society that the skald Sigvat could claim that he had ‘established the law of the nation which stands firm among all men'. In so doing, though, he constrained the lordly liberties allowed to provincial magnates when they had been subject only to the client jarls of absent overlords in other lands and thus might already be seen to have sown the seeds of his own downfall.

The saga points specifically to Olaf's prohibition of plunder-raiding within the country and his punishment of powerful chieftains' sons who had customarily engaged in viking cruises around fjord and coastland as the principal causes of discontent with his kingship, but there were other sources of resentment too, not least his draconian response to almost every instance of apostasy or disloyalty. All of these factors were to offer ample scope for the destabilisation of Olaf's sovereignty when the ambition of the mighty Cnut was eventually drawn back from his English conquest to Scandinavia. Sometime around the year 1024, he despatched emissaries to Norway with the proposal that Olaf would be allowed to govern the kingdom as his jarl if he first came to England and there paid homage to Cnut as his lord. Whether or not Olaf was reminded of that ominously prophetic warning given him by his stepfather on his return to Norway some ten years before, his response to Cnut's emissaries, as recorded in Sigvat's verse, was emphatically rendered in the negative. Cnut had thus little option but to come north in arms, which raised the prospect of his reclaiming overlordship of Norway and then turning to Sweden as the next object of his ambition, so there was every urgent reason for Olaf and Onund to form the alliance that was agreed when they met on the border at Konungahella to plan their own pre-emptive attack upon Denmark.