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 fight
ing 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.
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
Stiklestad
Norway, 1030
In 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 inform
ed 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.