Harald Hardrada (6 page)

Olaf's fleet of sixty ships sailed south to plunder the Danish island of Zealand while Onund brought a larger force against Skaane (in what is now southern Sweden), but Cnut was soon, if not already, sailing north from England with a large fleet which he brought into Limfjord along the northern coast of Jutland where it was reinforced by Danish warships. Under the shadow of that impressive naval muster ranged out in the Kattegat, Olaf promptly withdrew his forces from Zealand to join Onund in harrying the coastland of Skaane until Cnut's fleet came in pursuit and they withdrew to take refuge in the Holy River which flows into the sea on the eastward coast of Skaane. It was there that the chase finally came to battle in circumstances left surrounded with doubt and confusion by the historical record.

Even the date of the battle of Holy River is in dispute, although the majority of modern historians assign it to the year 1026, and yet its course still remains shrouded in mystery. The saga's claim that Olaf built and then broke a dam on the river to engulf Cnut's fleet when it had been lured into the trap has been convincingly dismissed as just one of ‘many tales told of Olaf's ruses at sea and this one is no more credible than the others'.
¹
Although in view of the customary conduct of Scandinavian sea-fighting at the time – where vessels functioned as fighting-platforms upon which contending warriors engaged in close combat, clearing the enemy decks by the sword until victory was decided by a process of attrition – there may be an item of more convincing evidence in the next saga episode. This passage tells of Cnut's own warship beset on all sides by Norwegian and Swedish vessels, and yet built ‘so high in the hull, as if it had been a fortress, with so numerous a selected crew aboard, well-armed and accomplished, that it was too difficult to assail'. Soon afterwards, Olaf and Onund ‘cast their ships loose from Cnut's ship and the fleets separated'.

From this reference alone might be inferred the plausible scenario of Cnut's freshly mustered warfleet outnumbering those of Olaf and Onund, whose crews would already have been wearied by a raiding campaign, and of their suffering heavy casualties in the hail of spears and arrows which invariably opened such hostilities, leaving them with no option other than withdrawal in the face of insuperable odds. What can be said as to the outcome of the conflict is that it was not crushingly decisive, if only because none of the principals were slain, and yet the skaldic verses of Ottar the Black, a nephew of Olaf's Sigvat, have no hesitation in declaring Cnut the victor. His closely contemporary evidence must be recognised as the most convincing, especially in the light of its correspondence to the subsequent course of events.

Worthy of mention here, by way of a footnote to the conflict, is the shadowy figure of Ulf Thorgilsson, appointed by Cnut as his jarl in Denmark sometime around 1023 but who appears to have retreated to Jutland when Olaf and Onund launched their onslaught. Most of the sources ascribe a decisive role to Ulf in the battle of Holy River and yet cannot agree as to which side he was fighting for, although his murder in Roskilde church on Cnut's orders at some point after the battle must point to disloyalty, if not to outright treachery. His principal importance here, though, rests upon kinship by marriage, because both his son and his nephew will feature prominently among the enemies of Harald Hardrada. Ulf's sister Gyda became the wife of Earl Godwin in England and thus mother to the Harold Godwinson who was to triumph at Stamford Bridge, while Ulf himself was married to Cnut's sister Estrid from whom their son Svein (called ‘Ulfsson' in
Heimskringla
, but usually ‘Estridsson' elsewhere) inherited his claim on the kingship of Denmark, in pursuit and possession of which he was to become briefly Harald's ally and for many years afterwards his relentless foe.

Whatever really did befall at Holy River, the outcome of the engagement clearly left Cnut in the ascendant and the Norse– Swedish alliance dissolved. Onund sailed back to Sweden with as much as remained of his fleet, while Olaf – perhaps mindful of the fate suffered in just those same waters by Olaf Tryggvason at Svold – abandoned his ships to make his way home overland. In the following year of 1027, Cnut was on pilgrimage in Rome, where he is known to have attended the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor, and would surely not have entertained the idea of such a journey had he been in any doubt as to the security of his kingdoms. Indeed, in his letter addressed to the English people in that same year, Cnut is styled ‘king of all of England and of Denmark and part of
Suavorum
[by which is probably meant Skaane on the Swedish mainland]'.

Norway was to enjoy a short spell of peace in the aftermath of Holy River, but, on the evidence of English and Icelandic sources, it would not be long before Cnut's agents were active in the western and northern provinces such as the Trondelag and Halogaland where the rising tide of discontent with Olaf was to be most usefully encouraged by the gold, silver and promises they brought with them. Now returned to England from Rome, Cnut had apparently decided that Olaf's kingship was to be most effectively – and bloodlessly – undermined by bribery of Norwegian magnates greedy for wealth and esteem. ‘Money will make men break their faith,' observed Sigvat the skald, and his verses record ‘enemies about with open purses; men offering heavy metal for the priceless head of the king'.

The saga tells of Olaf's commanding the execution of one young man who had accepted Cnut's bribe in the form of a golden arm-ring and thus provoking the hostility of his kinsmen. Although just one among numerous examples of draconian retribution for disloyalty, this particular instigation of blood-feud was to prove of especially ominous significance when the victim's stepfather was the powerful Kalv Arnason and his uncle Thore Hund (‘the Hound'), both of whom were ultimately to confront the king in battle at Stiklestad where Kalv himself would be accused of having delivered Olaf's death-wound.

While this episode and other similar stories in the saga show how effectively Cnut's policy of destabilisation gained ground, the situation is convincingly summarised by the modern historian Gwyn Jones. He suggests that Olaf ‘had more support in parts of the country, in Uppland and the Vik for example, than Snorri allows for, and that his opponents were not so much politically allied against their sovereign as disaffected for more personal reasons, including loss of land or status, change of religion, family grievances, and private quarrels with the king'.
²
The core territory of Olaf's remaining support would seem to have lain around the Vik (now Oslofjord) and, indeed, he is said by the saga to have been in that region when he heard news of Cnut's arrival in Denmark with a fleet of fifty ships from England in 1028. His immediate response was to summon a levy in defence of his kingdom and some numbers of the local people rallied to his banner, but very few came to join them from other parts of Norway and his warfleet was only such waterlogged hulks as could be salvaged from what remained of the fleet he had abandoned in Holy River two years before. Such a force hardly represented any credible resistance to the fleet of more than 1,400 ships which Cnut had assembled in Denmark and was now sailing up the west coast of Norway.

Accepting submission and taking hostages as surety wherever he touched land, Cnut sailed on until he reached the Trondelag and put in at Nidaros where a great assembly (or
thing
) of chieftains and bonders was summoned to acclaim him as king of all Norway. The great men of the north and west who swore allegiance were duly rewarded, some as his ‘lendermen' (or
lendr maðr
, literally ‘landed-men', effectively ‘barons'), and the same Hakon Eriksson of Lade who had surrendered to Olaf on his homecoming some fourteen years before was now appointed Cnut's jarl to rule on his behalf over Olaf's kingdom.

Only when Cnut's fleet had set sail back to Denmark did Olaf bring his few ships out of the Vik, but his progress up the west coast served merely to confirm his dwindling support. The saga tells of his confrontation with Erling Skjalgsson, one of the most powerful of the chiefs who had made submission to Cnut. Defeated in battle by one of Olaf's ruses, Erling stood alone with no choice but to yield and yet was struck dead by a warrior's axe moments after he had agreed to return to Olaf's service. The saga describes that axe-blow as having struck Norway ‘out of Olaf's hand', and as the royal fleet of just a dozen ships sailed north the sons of Erling were already summoning the bonders of the south-west to rise in pursuit of yet another blood-feud against the king.

Even as Olaf sailed north of Stad and learned of the great warfleet assembled against him by Jarl Hakon in the Trondelag, his desperate situation had become virtually irretrievable. The warrior who had killed Erling Skjalgsson went ashore and was slain before he could return to his vessel, while the Erlingssons had twenty-five ships in close pursuit and Jarl Hakon's great force was seen in the distance by watchers sent to look north from the hilltops. When Olaf's fleet put into Aalesund, Kalv Arnason joined with others of the few remaining lendermen and shipmasters in defecting to Hakon, leaving the king with just five ships which he drew on to the shore. Clearly, all was lost to him now and his only available course was to take flight overland, first by way of Gudbrandsdal into Hedemark where he granted his warriors leave to return home if they chose so to do.

Accompanied by his young son Magnus, his queen Astrid and their daughter Ulfhild, Olaf still had with him a loyal warrior retinue, of whom the most prominent members identified by the saga included Arne, Finn and Thorberg Arnason, brothers of the Kalv who had defected to Jarl Hakon and was even now being promised great prospects under Cnut. One other of Olaf's loyal companions in adversity mentioned by the saga will be of further significance here, namely Rognvald Brusason who had been brought to the Norwegian court as a boy with his father, the Orkney jarl Brusi, some ten years before and stayed on, probably at first as a hostage for his father's good behaviour, but in time becoming a trusted friend to the king. Such, then, was the company that made its way through the Eida forest into Vermaland and over the border to take refuge in Sweden, where Olaf stayed until the following summer when he entrusted his daughter and his queen to the care of her brother Onund at the Swedish court before taking ship across the Baltic to Russia and the court of the Grand Prince Jaroslav at Novgorod. There he was assured of generous hospitality, not only by reason of Jaroslav's being his kinsman by marriage when both had taken daughters of the Swedish king Olaf as their brides, but because of the wider and more ancient relationship between the ruling houses of Scandinavia and Russia. Jaroslav and his background will be more fully considered later in the context of Harald Hardrada's east-faring, but it might still be useful at this point to indicate something of Russia's place within the orbit of medieval Scandinavian expansion.

The term
Rus
derives from a Finnish name applied to the Swedes who were the first of the northmen to penetrate the mainland of what later became Russia, and was taken up by the Slavonic settlers to identify Scandinavian traders who had established their bases along the northern Russian waterways long before the arrival of Rurik. The traditional forebear of medieval Russia's ruling dynasty (and thus the great-great-grandfather of Jaroslav), Rurik is said to have founded his power base at Novgorod in the year 862. As in Normandy and elsewhere throughout the Scandinavian expansion, the early settlements steadily absorbed the host culture and within less than two centuries their ruling warrior aristocracy had become thoroughly Slavonic in character, yet the traffic of Scandinavian traders and warriors along the Russian rivers still sustained close relations between the Rus and their northern cousins.

Thus Russia, or
Gar
ð
ar
as it was called in Old Norse,
³
offered a convenient realm of refuge for Scandinavian kings and princes in exile, and a remarkably generous welcome to Olaf when Jaroslav offered him lordship over the Bulgars on the Volga. In the event, that proposal proved unpopular with the warriors of Olaf's retinue, who were disinclined to settle in Russia and urged him instead to return to Norway. Olaf himself, however, is said to have been considering a pilgrimage to the Holy Land when tidings came from Norway of the unexpected death of Jarl Hakon, who had been in England with Cnut that summer and was drowned on the voyage home when his ship was lost off the coast of Caithness. The news that Norway was suddenly bereft of a ruler prompted Olaf to consider attempting to reclaim his lost kingdom. While Jaroslav warned of the might of opposition he would be facing with only slender forces of his own and offered him an even more generous lordship were he to stay in Russia, the saga tells of a vision of Olaf Tryggvason in full regalia urging his return to Norway, and this supposedly divine intervention is presented as the decisive factor prompting Olaf to set out on what was to become his death-journey into martyrdom.

‘Immediately after Yule', according to the saga and so presumably in the first weeks of 1030, Olaf was making ready for departure. His son Magnus was left in Jaroslav's care and stayed behind in Russia when Olaf assembled his retinue of some two hundred and forty warriors, who had been generously armed and equipped by his Russian host, and set out on horseback along the frozen rivers of northern Russia to the shore of the Baltic. When the ice broke with the approach of spring, they took ship first to the island of Gotland and then over to the Swedish mainland where Olaf was reunited with his wife and daughter and also met King Onund who, although glad to welcome his old friend, was disinclined to renew their alliance. His spies had brought back reports of the widespread hostility they had found throughout Norway and Onund feared the worst outcome for the expedition, but he was still prepared to reinforce Olaf's small company with some four hundred of his own best warriors equipped for battle,
⁴
granting him permission also to recruit such Swedes as were willing to join his cause on their own account.