The Greatest Viking E-Book

Desmond Seward

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 430

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Raider. Conqueror. King. Saint. This is the story of Olav Haraldsson, the greatest Viking who ever lived. A ruthless Viking warrior who named his most prized battle weapon after the Norse goddess of death, Olav Haraldsson and his mercenaries wrought terror and destruction from the Baltic to Galicia in the early eleventh century. Thousands were put to the sword, enslaved or ransomed. In England, Canterbury was sacked, its archbishop murdered and London Bridge pulled down. The loot amassed from years of plunder helped Olav win the throne of Norway, and a century after his death he was proclaimed 'Eternal King' and has been a national hero there ever since. Despite his bloodthirsty beginnings, Olav converted to Christianity and, in a personal vendetta against the old Norse gods, made Norway Christian too, thereby changing irrevocably the Viking world he was born into. Told with reference to Norse sagas, early chronicles and the work of modern scholars, Desmond Seward paints an intensely vivid and colourful portrait of the life and times of arguably the greatest Viking of them all.

Leseprobe

First published in 2022 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © the Estate of Desmond Seward 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 78027 795 0EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78885 567 9

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Designed and typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

For Frederick Lesser, a lover of Norway, who suggested that I write this book

Contents

Prologue: The Sword in the Burial Mound

Introduction: Norway’s Once and Future King

Chronology

1 The World of a Young Norse Chieftain

2 Harald Fair Hair and His Successors

3 The Viking Olav Haraldsson

4 Olav Abandons the Gods

5 The Battle of Nesjar,1016

6 Building a Kingdom

7 The Terrible One and Other Gods

8 The New Religion

9 Olav’s Empire

10 Olav and the Swedish Princesses

11 A War on Demons

12 The Killing of Asbjorn Slayer of Seal

13 The Shadow of Knut the Great

14 War with Knut

15 Norway Rejects Olav Haraldsson

16 Exile in Viking Russia

17 Olav’s Homecoming

18 The Old Gods’ Revenge: Stiklestad

19 Olav’s ‘Return from the Dead’

20 The Triumph of Olav Haraldsson

Epilogue: The Eternal King of Norway

Acknowledgements

Note on Translations and Spelling

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Prologue

The Sword in the Burial Mound

This is the sword called Baesing

Legendary Saga of St Olav1

One summer in about the year 995 (the precise date is unknown), heavily pregnant and confined to bed at the house of her father Gudbrand Kula, Åsta Gudbrandsdatter found herself incapable of giving birth.2 Worry or rage, or both, may have been the cause, because her husband, Harald Grenski, King of Grenland,3 had cast her off to go to Sweden and court the widowed Queen Sigrid the Proud, whose wealth he coveted. Nor was Åsta soothed by learning that, irritated by his advances, Sigrid had persuaded Harald and his housecarls to drink until they dozed off into a stupor, then sent men to fire the hall where they slept – and, as the burning rafters were falling on them, to kill all who ran out from the flames.

The news of Harald Grenski’s death and her widowhood was brought to Åsta by Hrani Vidforli (‘Far Travelled’), who had been his right-hand man. He survived because in the wake of a recent victory over the Jómsborg Vikings, Harald had left him behind in charge of the main body of his hird – his armed retinue – when he went to woo Sigrid.

According to the Legendary Saga of St Olav (a thirteenth-century life based largely on stories told by the skalds) a majestic figure who wore a red cloak and a massive gold arm ring then appeared to Hrani in a dream. ‘I am Olav Digre,’ it said. ‘I want you to break into my burial mound at Geirstad. There you will find a man in clothes like mine. Go up to him, take his arm ring, belt and sword, and finally cut off his head. There will be other men in there, too, but have no fear of them . . . If you do not do just as I say, all will go wrong, but if you do, then all will be well . . .

‘Next, you must go to the Upplands, to King Gudbrand Kula’s house, where you will find his daughter Åsta in childbirth but unable to deliver. Gudbrand is broken-hearted, distraught from a humiliation for which there is no remedy. All this has happened because Harald Grenski sent Åsta and her women back in disgrace to her father who, with his daughter, is prostrate with misery. Wait until they ask for your advice, then tell them to gird my sword belt around her.’

The mound was that of King Olav Geirstad-Alf, ‘Olav Digre’, who had been killed sixty years before. He and his half-brother Sigrød of Trondheim had refused to pay tribute to another half-brother, King Eirík Bloodaxe. Through a howling gale, Eirík and his army ‘sailed night and day, coming faster than the news of him’. Defiantly Olav and Sigrød drew up their men in a shield-wall on a ridge near the farm Haugar close by Tønsberg in Vestfold but, outnumbered, they were soon overwhelmed. Their housecarls built howes for them on the ridge where they fell.

There were many kings’ burial mounds of this sort in Norway, such as the famous Gokstad howe. When in 1880 archaeologists discovered a ship underneath, they found seated on a chair the skeleton of a huge man covered with terrible wounds received in battle, all in front, and for many years people believed, wrongly, that he was Olav Geirstad-Alf. Norsemen usually gave such places a wide berth. The god Odin, ‘Ghost Sovereign and Lord of the Mounds’, did not care for trespassers while elves lived in them, not pretty little fairies of the English sort but spirits of the dead who, if angered, might send a storm or cast a spell that would ruin the harvest. Prudent people, especially farmers’ wives, offered sacrifices to placate the álfar in their area.

Most fearsome of all were the draugr, the ‘undead’ or ‘again-walkers’ for whom the howes had been built and who, guarding their treasure, attacked anybody trying to enter. The Saga of Grettir the Strong tells how Grettir breaks into the howe of Kari the Old, whose ghost is terrorising the local farmers. In the foul-smelling darkness he stumbles against a high chair on which sits undead Kari, surrounded by heaps of gold and silver, with a gleaming sword at his feet. As Grettir is climbing out with the treasure, a bony hand grips his shoulder and he wrestles for his life with the again-walker until it collapses with a rattling crash. Before leaving, Grettir draws his own sword and cuts off the draugr’s skull which he lays between its thigh bones.4

However, Hrani was an exceptionally brave man. Breaking into Olav Geirstad-Alf’s howe, he hacked off his head, taking his arm ring, belt and sword. Then he went to Gudbrand Kula at Hringerike in the Upplands, wild forest country to the far northwest of what is now Oslo, where he told his story. With Gudbrand’s approval, he placed the belt and sword on Åsta’s belly as a charm and soon after she gave birth to a son. Bitter at Harald Grenski’s desertion, Gudbrand ordered it be left to die from hunger and exposure, as was often done in pagan Norway with unwanted children – a custom known as ‘out bringing’. Despite Hrani’s protests, the child was placed in a ruined hut.

That night Hrani, woken by the baby’s cries, saw a strange light shining over the hut, and went to its grandfather, prophesying that it would grow up to be a wonderful man who would do his kindred great honour.5 When Gudbrand Kula refused to take it in, Hrani brought a friend to the hut who also saw the light. Still the old man remained adamant. (‘Kula’ means ‘lump’, which does not suggest high intelligence.) Eventually, Hrani persuaded Gudbrand to come and see for himself. This time, the light was almost blinding. Shaken, Gudbrand gave orders for the baby to be taken into the house and brought up as a member of the family.

Having agreed to be foster-father, Hrani gave the child the belt and the arm ring to play with. He also named him ‘Olav’ after the king in the howe, an act of great significance for pagan Norsemen, some of whom believed strongly in the transmigration of souls. Bearing the same name could even imply that the boy was Olav Geirstad-Alf born again.

At the same time, Hrani entrusted Åsta with the sword Baesing, to keep for her son.

Introduction

Norway’s Once and Future King

‘warriors dared not look into the serpent-shining eyes of terrible seeming Olav’

Sigvat Thordarson, Erfidrápa Óláfs Helga1

This is the life of a Viking hero who became Norges evige Konge, ‘Eternal King of Norway’. He was Olav Haraldsson, who reigned at the beginning of the first millennium, and we know more about him than about any other Viking. For Norwegians, he haunts their landscape, even more important to them than Arthur is to the British. But unlike Britain’s ‘once and future king’, he really existed, and like Arthur and Excalibur his story begins with a sword, taken from a burial mound instead of a stone. Unlike Arthur, his life was ended by an axe that became his symbol.

Each year his shrine at Nidaros attracts more and more pilgrims. Part of his spell lies in the contrast between his life as a peculiarly ferocious Viking and as the man who made Norway Christian. Demon haunted and god haunted, he emerges from the company of Odin and Thor into the High Middle Ages – the world of illuminated manuscripts, Romanesque sculpture and Gregorian chant.

When a very young man, he was dramatically successful in raids along the Baltic, in France and Spain, and above all in England. Yet he also doomed the Viking way of life to extinction by ensuring that Norway abandoned its ancient gods. What is seldom taken into account is how strong was the hold of the old pagan deities on the Norse people, which makes his achievement in overthrowing them all the more remarkable. Understandably, he made many enemies.

He was long remembered in Britain as well as Norway. In 1009 he joined a wide-ranging Viking raid on England that turned into a bloodbath. He himself pulled down London Bridge, then stormed and burned Canterbury, whose inhabitants were massacred. He also acquired quantities of loot, receiving a huge sum in Danegeld. His surprising popularity stemmed from his gift for healing. At least forty churches were dedicated to him in the British Isles and a fifteenth-century screen at the church of Barton Turf in Norfolk still has a painting of ‘St Olofius’, carrying the axe that helped to kill him.

Olav’s story was best preserved by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241) in his astonishing Heimskringla (‘Circle of the Earth’), the sagas of sixteen Norwegian kings, which until recently was the most widely read book in Norway. Among the sagas is that of Olav, the masterpiece of a man who anticipated the great psychological novelists.2 He was not always accurate since he lived two centuries after Olav and his chronology is erratic, but he had the benefit of folk memories handed down from generation to generation and of contemporary skaldic verse. Beyond question, Snorri is our most important source of information.

Nowadays the Vikings are a cult, inspiring television programmes and novels that command a huge audience, yet Olav is largely unknown outside Norway or the academic world. My own interest in him began during a Christmas spent at Oslo when my host told me that the pilgrimsleden, the ancient pilgrims’ roads to the king’s shrine at Nidaros, had been revived.

Chronology

995 Olav Haraldsson born at Hringerike

1000 King Olav Tryggvason killed at the battle of Svoldr

1007 Olav begins his Viking cruises, raiding the Baltic and North Sea coasts

1009–

1011 Olav with Thorkell the Tall’s Viking army in England

1012 Olav a leader of Viking mercenaries in France

1013 Olav winters peacefully in Normandy and becomes a Christian

1014 Olav and his Vikings ravage Galicia, holding a bishop to ransom

Olav attacks Moorish Cádiz

1015 Olav goes back to England to fight for Ethelred II against Knut

Olav returns to Norway and is acclaimed king in the southeast

1016 Olav defeats Jarl Sveinn at the battle of Nesjar

1017 Olav acclaimed king throughout Norway

Olav is jilted by the Swedish Ingegerd Olofsdotter – at her father’s insistence

1018 Olav marries Astrid Olofsdotter

1022 Olav bans grain sales to northern Norway

Asbjorn humiliated by Thorir Seal

1023 Asbjorn kills Thorir Seal in Olav’s presence

1024 Synod of Moster

Olav’s concubine Alvhild gives birth to his son and heir Magnus

Asbjorn Slayer of Seal killed by Asmund Grankelson – with Olav’s approval

1027 Olav and Anund Jacob of Sweden ravage Denmark

Battle of the Holy River with Knut, King of Denmark and England

1028 Knut invades Norway and is acclaimed king

1029 Olav escapes through the snow to Sweden, then takes refuge at Novgorod

1030 Olav returns to Norway and is killed at the battle of Stiklestad

1031 Olav reburied and declared a saint

1035 Olav’s son Magnus becomes King of Norway – end of the Danish occupation

1154 Olav acclaimed as the Eternal King

1

The World of a Young Norse Chieftain

‘Odin owns the nobles who fall in battle and Thor owns the race of thralls’

Harbard’s Song1

Olav’s foster-father, Hrani the Far Travelled, is often called his uncle, but although he was Harald Grenski’s foster-brother and like Harald came from Grenland where he had a farm, there was no blood relationship. Even so, he was Olav’s first great ally and because of the dream that brought the boy into the world he sensed something uncanny in him. As soon as his first tooth appeared, Hrani placed the sword Baesing beside his cradle.

Old Gudbrand Kula died when Olav was five, and his mother Åsta had married again. Her new husband was Sigurd Syr, King of Hringerike. Despising Sigurd’s preference for farming instead of war or raiding, neighbours nicknamed him Syr (‘Sow’), inferring that he spent his time snuffling and rooting in muddy fields. Snorri Sturluson was nearer the mark in calling him a ‘careful householder’.

When Olav was eight, he saw a mysterious object in one of his mother’s chests that gleamed with a cold, blue light. Fascinated, he asked her what it was. ‘That is the sword called Baesing’, Åsta told him, ‘given to you by your foster-father. Once, long ago, it belonged to King Olav Geirstad-Alf.’ The boy insisted on taking possession of it at once. No doubt he thought it possessed magic powers.

The shield-destroyer, with gold it shines.

In the hilt is fame, in the haft is courage,

In the point is fear, for its owner’s foes2

Made of tempered steel, with a plain cross-guard, Baesing would have had a double-edged blade two and a half to three feet long, lightened by a ‘blood groove’ running from hilt to point. Swords like this were so sharp-edged that the sagas describe a single blow slicing off a man’s head, even his buttocks. Despite a rounded point, they could be used for thrusting, but were primarily designed for slashing. The blade and pommel were frequently inlaid with gold or silver, and the hilt wound round with gold or silver wire. Occasionally the blade was inscribed. The Lay of Sigrdrifa advises, ‘Victory-runes you must cut if you want victory, and cut them on your sword-hilt; some on the blade guards, some on the handle.’3

Passed down from father to son as an heirloom, and credited with magic powers, a sword of this sort was indispensable for anybody who hoped to become a famous warrior.4 Like Baesing, outstanding ones were given names. King Hakon the Good owned a sword named ‘Quern-biter’ that he claimed could split a millstone and on one occasion he cut through the helmet and skull of a hitherto all-conquering berserker with a single blow.5 Rulers rewarded favourites with them. Olav would present his skald Sigvat Thordarson with a sword that had a silver pommel and a gold hilt.

Much too big and heavy for Olav, who insisted on wearing it all the time, Baesing’s scabbard dragged along the floor, clattering behind him. When with the kindest intentions Sigurd offered to exchange it for a smaller sword until he grew a bit older, the boy snarled back that while he might be little, he would never let anyone else own Baesing. He spoke so fiercely that Sigurd told him to keep it.

As Baesing’s owner, Olav saw himself as heir to King Olav Geirstad-Alf in the howe at Haugar, which increased his pride in the weapon. It gave him not only a claim to the land in Vingulmark, but to some distinguished supernatural forebears. ‘Geirstad Alf’ means ‘Elf of Geirstad’, the name of a King of Vingulmark long ago whose mother, the mythical Alfhild, was the daughter of Alfarinn, King of Alfheim (Elfland). She had born children with such striking good looks that everybody thought they must be kin to the elves.

We know from the sagas that in later life, besides a sword, Olav owned a long-shafted broad-axe called ‘Hel’ after the death goddess. Designed for fighting, not for cutting timber, its head, thinner and lighter than that of a woodman’s axe, was sometimes inlaid with silver or gold like a prized sword blade and had a broad, razor-sharp edge of specially hardened steel. Using both hands, a man who knew how to fight with an axe like this could smash shields with ease and decapitate a horse.6 Some were said to be so magical that they gave a ringing sound if you touched them.

Olav was also a fine archer and adept with a spear. Some spears were heavy, close-quarter weapons for lunging, used not unlike the old bayonet and rifle, while lighter spears were for throwing with the aid of a thong, capable if hurled strongly enough, of going straight through a man who did not wear a mail shirt. He may also have learned to use the sling, that too-often overlooked instrument of death.

We may guess that it was Hrani who taught him how to handle weapons, as well as the skills needed for sailing, rowing and navigating a ship. He was an apt pupil, learning quickly. Snorri says that when very young the boy was already ‘expert in all bodily exercises’, an unusually strong swimmer, and a smith who could work every kind of metal. Determined to excel, he wanted to win in every sport or game.

As he grew up, Olav Haraldsson felt less and less respect for his unwarlike stepfather. Snorri pictures Sigurd overseeing the harvest in clothes that are not what one might expect of a Viking: ‘A blue coat and blue hose; shoes laced about the legs; a grey cloak, and a grey wide-brimmed hat; a veil before his face [against midges]; a staff in his hand with a gilt-silver head.’ Normally, unless in the banqueting hall, Norsemen of all ranks dressed plainly at home, wearing wadmal – a coarse, undyed, homespun cloth.7

When he ordered Olav to saddle his horse, the boy saddled the biggest billy goat on the home farm and brought it to his door. Sigurd said resignedly, ‘Your mother thinks it right that I order you to do nothing against your own inclination,’ then added, ‘I can see that we are of very different dispositions and that you are far prouder than I am.’ Olav laughed and strolled away.

Yet the peace-loving Sigurd made young Olav an excellent step-father who was tolerant and, one suspects, affectionate. Not only was he rich but a survivor, the last petty ruler in Norway able to call himself ‘king’. Olav grew up happily, in comfortable, aristocratic surroundings.

Living in a land without books, young Olav was illiterate but learned to read and write runes, a clumsy, sixteen-letter script for carving memorial stones, for inscribing protective spells (or curses) on ships, weapons or amulets, or for writing questions on sticks, twigs or wood shavings then thrown up into the air in order to tell the future – told from the position in which they landed on the white shirt or cloth laid out to catch them.

Hidden Runes shalt thou seek and interpreted signs, many symbols of might and power . . .9

But throwing them could be dangerous, because it attracted evil spirits.

He learned, too, about the Norse gods and how to worship them since as a chieftain he was a gothi, a priest, who when he grew up would sacrifice to them, the only way of ensuring that his people had a good harvest and lived through the winter. The long julblót, the midwinter sacrifice at Yule, was a happy interlude during so bleak a season, a pleasant change from feeding farm animals, or mucking out stables and cow byres, even more enjoyable than feasts in better weather, such as the sumarblót in mid-April for victory in battle, or the winter ale in mid-October for a good year. The feasts were attended by the bonder (farmers) on Sigurd Syr’s estate with their families and servants.

The sacrifice might take place at a sacred spot near the chieftain’s homestead, in one of the rare temples, or under a holy oak or on a horg (altar) in front of a howe, provided the local elves were not being troublesome – as they are sometimes said to be in Iceland even today. However, it is likely that the first sacrifices which Olav saw were in Sigurd’s mead hall. Each bonde brought a horse, the most valuable animals after men, with other gifts.

The ceremony began by hanging the horses whose throats were then cut by Sigurd as priest. Pouring their blood into a cauldron, he sprinkled it with a bunch of twigs on the walls and ground, and over everybody present like Christian holy water. Sometimes other animals were sacrificed, even, although rarely, men – criminals, captives or slaves – who were killed in the same way. After the horses had been butchered, their flesh, credited with magic properties, was boiled in kettles, then handed out as meat and soup in goblets blessed in a prayer said by Sigurd. Toasts were drunk to the gods, especially Odin and Thor, and to departed kindred. The bonder brought plenty of food with quantities of ale and mead, so that feasting went on for days with singing and dancing.

In the Viking age the houses of Norse aristocrats were glorified cabins of logs and wattle-and-daub, with ‘staves’ (tree trunks) that carried low-pitched roofs covered with layer upon layer of birch bark held in place by sods of turf upon which enterprising sheep grazed. (Roofs like this can be seen today on Norwegian farm buildings in remoter areas.) A nobleman’s homestead was basically a long innhus with three dark, windowless rooms filled by smoke from the long, trench-like hearth that ran along the middle of the hall, the main room, escaping through a smoke hole in the roof – the sole source of daylight.

The innhus of a wealthy chieftain such as King Sigurd Syr usually possessed an outside gallery, with a banqueting hall close by, as well as detached guest rooms and sauna-like bathhouses. Next to these was the uthus – barns, stalls and sheds – the nearest of which was the stable. A complex like this was the nearest thing to a capital in Sigurd’s tiny domain.

Although a time when the temperature was warming, the winters with their howling gales and drifting snow must have seemed interminable. It is hard for us to imagine the cold, damp, smoke and all-pervading stench accepted as normal indoors while there was always the worry that provisions might not last. ‘In many places their life would be a constant battle against semi-starvation, cold and disease.’8 Should stocks run low, infants would be allowed to die and the old and sick discreetly knocked on the head in a desperate struggle to save food.

However deep the snow, Vikings went out into it to hunt for elk (moose) and red deer, game birds and mountain hares, to supplement a basic winter diet of oatmeal or barley porridge in which a piece of half-rotten meat, salted or pickled in whey, or of dried cod came as a treat. They also hunted for the furs they needed to keep warm – bear, wolf and lynx, marten, otter, fox and squirrel. It was vital to know how to travel fast on skis or snowshoes, to cross frozen lakes and rivers on skates made from cow or deer leg bones, to cope with snowstorms. Snorri describes a trapper caught in a blizzard sleeping through it under the snow, a survival skill still taught in today’s Norwegian army.

The Viking world was essentially aristocratic. At the top of a highly stratified clan structure were the chieftains and their closer kindred, although chieftains were far from all-powerful. Feuds between clans about murders or theft, or over ownership of land, had to be debated at the local Thing, an assembly of freemen. A man found guilty of a serious crime such as murder would have to pay compensation to his relatives, in livestock or crops. If he had done something really atrocious, he might be outlawed, which gave any freeman the right to kill him.

The wealthier freemen (bonder) owned their farms, although there were many landless ones who became housecarls or worked as farmhands. At the bottom, since this was a slave-owning society, were the thralls (slaves) captured on slave raids overseas who formed 20 per cent of Norway’s population. For the Vikings were people traffickers as well as pirates, carrying off strong men and handsome girls.

As Neil Price sums it up, when captured the thralls underwent ‘the disbelieving experience of passing from person to property in seconds’.10 Most were sold overseas but a fair number were brought home where, inadequately dressed in rags and with shoes of birch bark, southerners found the cold winters a new nightmare. Sleeping in the stables, male slaves did all the rough work – digging, dunging, felling trees, cutting turf, herding sheep or pigs. They were indispensable for running a farm while the master of the house was away with his men on a Viking expedition, but when a thrall grew old he could expect to be put down like any other farm animal that had outlived its usefulness.

The fate of female slaves varied. The ugly became sweated labour who were forced to toil until they dropped or were put down, weaving wadmal or sail-making from sunrise to sunset, or at best as house servants or dung-spattered dairymaids. Pretty ones suffered a fate worse than death until they lost their looks and were put to work with the less attractive. However, DNA evidence shows that more than a few had better luck, especially those from Ireland or Scotland. Viking Scandinavia was polygamous, well-to-do men taking concubines, which caused a shortage of nubile young women from freemen’s families, so that often the only way for a poor freeman to find a wife was to marry a slave girl.

Obviously, women were the losers in a society like this, especially female thralls who might be buried dead or alive to serve their owners in a future life. There is a famous account of a Norse chieftain’s funeral by a tenth-century Arab chronicler, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who met Vikings on the Volga. He tells how a young slave, persuaded into going to the next world with her master, was kept drunk for days, then ritually raped by mourners who finally beat and strangled the screaming girl to death. (The rites were presided over by a terrible woman, known as the ‘Angel of Death’, almost certainly a witch.) Another tenth-century Arab, Ibn Rustah, says that when a Viking chieftain died his men built a howe and ‘put his favourite wife in the grave with him while she is still living’. How, asks a historian, did onlookers ‘articulate the knowledge that inside that grave a woman they knew was slowly suffocating, dying in the dark beside the rotting body of her partner, and that one day the same fate might be theirs?’11 Mercifully, such burials seem to have been rare.

Even so, wives and daughters of the free classes enjoyed a certain level of respect and had rights such as inheriting property, even a degree of independence, since common sense dictated that they were the bedrock of the family. A wedding ceremony gave legal status and a wife might divorce a husband and recover her dowry, if she could prove he beat her without cause or was impotent, while there were penalties for rape. Yet she had to put up with concubines or her husband sleeping with any female slave who caught his fancy. She herself was restricted to a single man and might be put to death if found guilty of adultery.

A strong wife could bully a weak husband into letting her do a man’s work and a very few even set up as traders. A ringkvinna was a spinster who in the absence of adult male kindred took over as head of a family with full legal rights when her father or brother died. The Poetic Edda tells of ‘shield maidens’, female warriors with the hearts of wolves, such as the young Hervor in The Waking of Argantyr who, dressed as a man, goes into her father’s howe to retrieve his sword.

The greatest shield maiden in Norse legend was Lagertha, known only from the Gesta Danorum (‘Acts of the Danes’) by the Dane Saxo Grammaticus who wrote in the twelfth century. Sent to a brothel when the Swedes invaded Norway, she escaped and, clothed as a man, fought at Ragnar Lodbrok’s side when he attacked them. Fighting with her hair loose over her shoulders, she astonished everybody by her heroism, winning a battle by charging the enemy from the rear, alone. Ragnar married Lagertha, then deserted her to marry the King of Sweden’s daughter. She found a new husband, a kinglet, whom she speared to death after he proved unsatisfactory, taking over his little realm and ruling it by herself.

Writing in 1991, Judith Jesch dismissed Saxo’s Lagertha as a product of male imagination and all reputable historians would then have agreed that female warriors were literary flights of fancy.12 But in 2014, DNA analysis of a tenth-century burial at Birka in Sweden of a helmeted chieftain who was armed with sword, shield, battleaxe, bow and spears, and accompanied by a stallion and a mare, revealed that the body was a woman’s. No less an authority than Neil Price concludes that other female chieftains must have existed, although rare exceptions.13

It must be said, too, that the Poetic Edda can show a sensitive response to femininity found nowhere else in Western literature at that date. ‘You weep, gold-clad girl, cruel tears . . . each falls bleeding on the prince’s breast, chill as rain, searing, clotted with grief.’14 There are many poignant love affairs in the sagas, as in the Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue that tells of the skald Gunnlaug’s ill-fated passion for Helga the Fair.

A poem from this time, the Rigsthula (‘List of Rig’) contrasts the lives of the classes. Two ragged thralls have a son with a scabby face, horny hands and a back bowed by carrying firewood, while their daughter-in-law, bandy-legged from farm work and with badly sunburned arms, has mud on her bare feet. Their grandsons, who have brutish names such as Horsefly, Shagger or Smelly, do all the rough work on the homestead. The granddaughters are Stumpy, Tatty-Clothes or Bondwoman. The only food the couple can offer a guest is some thin broth and a coarse loaf full of bran.

A freeman leads a much better life. With his neatly trimmed beard and smart shirt, he sits in his house by a roaring fire, carving wood for a loom-beam while his well-dressed wife, who is spinning with a distaff, wears nice brooches and gives a visitor a really good meal. One day their sons will tame oxen, build barns, make carts, drive ploughs and till the fields. These were the rich bonder, well-to-do yeomen farmers, tough and independent minded.

The description of how a nobleman of royal descent lives is that of Olav’s life as a boy. A chieftain, the Rigsthula tells us, owns a great hall, south facing, with rushes on the floor. Wearing a long-skirted dress and a blue linen blouse, his beautiful, white-skinned wife lays a cloth of fine linen over the table on which she puts white bread, before serving a guest with game, pork and roast chicken in silver-mounted bowls, washed down by wine in silver goblets. As their son grows up, he learns to shoot with a bow, use a sword and hurl spears, to ride and hunt with hounds. Fighting his way to still more riches, by the end of his life, he will own many homesteads, rewarding his housecarls with jewels, gold arm rings and thoroughbred horses.15

Much admired as a Viking, Erling Skjalgsson from Rogaland was a chieftain of this sort, a magnificent looking man with an attractive personality. His lands were so broad that he was a king without a title, his estates stretching from the mouth of the Sognefjord to the Naze. Every summer he went raiding in a longship crewed by 200 men, while ‘winter and summer’ he housed and fed ninety housecarls, who were given a lavish allowance of drink. The thirty thralls on his farm were allowed to grow their own corn if they worked in the evenings or at night and then sell it, so that energetic ones gifted with green fingers could buy their freedom within three years – replaced by fresh slaves purchased with the money. He employed the new freedmen in the herring fishery, on his farms or clearing woodland, which enabled them to build their own huts. ‘He helped all to prosperity’ says Snorri.16

However, there was a less likeable side to Erling. From being no more than a member of a clan who had for many years governed west Norway collectively, he became its sole ruler when he married King Olav Tryggvason’s sister, and his autocratic ways made him revengeful enemies. They included most of his kinsmen, led by a certain Aslak Fitjaskalli.17

* * *

Young Olav would have learned all about his distinguished ancestors. An Yngling ‘of Yngve’s race’, he belonged to the country’s oldest family, the Ynglinga, who descended from the god Frey. His unfortunate father Harald Grenski had been a great-great-grandson of Harald Fair Hair, first King of all Norway, through a son Bjorn Farman (the Seafarer) whom Fair Hair fathered on the concubine Svanhild.

On his mother’s side Olav descended from Ragnar Lodbrok, the legendary hero who had killed a giant serpent to rescue his future bride before setting out on an enviable career of mass slaughter, rape, pillage and general mayhem. With poetic justice, Ragnar ended his life in a pit filled with adders into which he was thrown by his intended victims after a raid on Northumbria went wrong. But the defiant way he died and his death song, with its last line ‘Laughing shall I die’, sung while waiting for the snakes’ venom to kill him, were an inspiration for all true Vikings.

We do not know when Olav decided he was King Harald Fair Hair’s successor and that the kingdom of Norway was his by rightful inheritance, yet it may have been during boyhood. In an oral culture, there were many Norsemen who recalled Harald. We know that Sigurd Syr was among them and no doubt he took care to see his stepson knew that all the great king’s male line descendants had a right to the throne.

The Legendary Saga of St Olav says he grew up ‘handsome, magnificent of countenance, stocky, not tall, thick-haired, and bright-eyed with curly, light chestnut hair’. A Norwegian who about 1190 wrote a brief history of his country’s kings agrees that he was good-looking, saying his hair was red, his beard even redder.18 However, Snorri Sturluson states that he was impressive rather than handsome and very strongly built, adding that he was an early developer, highly articulate. Much loved by those who knew him well, he was called Olav ‘Digre’, which can be translated as fat, but in his case probably meant thickset. He did not object – it had been Olav Geirstad-Alf’s nickname.

Echoing the skald Sigvat Thordarson’s memorial poem to Olav, Snorri also tells us he had strange eyes with so piercing a gaze that ‘one was afraid to look him in the face when he was angry’. Everybody knew this was a sure sign of a man born to rule – ‘the glow of his eyes is like gleaming snakes’.19 Beyond question he possessed the traditional Viking virtues, which (as defined by Tom Shippey) were ‘independence verging on insubordination, refusal to show pain and . . . taking certain defeat and death as motivation rather than discouragement’.20

2

Harald Fair Hair and His Successors

‘There were skalds at Harald’s court whose poems the people know by heart even at the present day, together with all the songs about the kings who have ruled in Norway since his time; and we rest the foundations of our story principally upon these songs.’

Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, c.1230

We tend to forget the sheer vastness of Norway, whose coast stretches for over a thousand miles beside the Atlantic. The eastern border – mountainous, densely forested, with wide tracts of bog – is with Sweden while the southern is across the sea with Denmark. The coastline’s northern stretch lies within in the Arctic Circle, including much of the region the old Norsemen called Hålogaland. The northern-most inhabited territory was that of the Sami, ‘solitary rovers and nomadic’, whom Vikings feared for their witchcraft, but who supplied them with exotic furs, rare falcons and walrus ivory.

In ad 1000 the population may have been under 200,000 since only 3 per cent of the terrain was fit for farming with the primitive methods of the time. ‘Most infertile of all lands, fit for beasts alone’, wrote Adam of Bremen seventy years later. Yet there was enough good soil to grow scanty crops of barley or oats with a little wheat, and plenty of grazing for hardy little short-tailed sheep, which provided small, isolated clans with a bare living. Everybody knew that a spell of bad weather in the summer might result in a winter famine that would kill old people and the very young – either directly or indirectly. Many men emigrated or lived by trading, or by plundering and slaving abroad.

Gradually the clans grew closer, linked by trade and a common language (Old West Norse), although Norway’s geography made it a difficult country to unite. Four areas with good soil were reasonably well populated. These were the Trøndelag, which had some of Norway’s best arable; the west coast region down to Stavanger, but only small fertile strips along the fjords; the land in the southeast on both sides of the Oslofjord; and that around Lake Mjøsa. Elsewhere, there were tiny, isolated communities. However, all of the clans inhabiting them, great and small, developed separate identities which with the natural barriers formed serious obstacles to union.

Harald Harfagre (Fair Hair) from Sogndal, who in about the year 870 became King of Vestfold to the west of the Oslofjord, was the first man to unite Norway. At first only one among several ‘sea kings’, he based his power on a hird of well-armed warriors and a large fleet, as well as a string of coastal farmsteads and island depots. To defend his merchant ships against pirates, he allied with Hakon of Lade who ruled the region around the Trondheimsfjord. Joining forces, they sailed their joint fleet along the coast, defeating each rival in turn.

After a decisive victory at Hafrsfjord (a little south of modern Stavanger) in the 880s, Harald was recognised as King of all Norway by the kinglets, who paid him scatt (tribute tax). Yet except on his own estates in Rogaland in the southwest where he spent much of the year, Harald was no more than overlord of the west coast, king only in name, as he did not establish any sort of administrative system apart from jarls who if called on would supply him with troops from their area. In the north real power belonged to the great Lade jarls.1

Some modern scholars deny that Harald ever existed, but the skalds’ evidence for him is compelling. Snorri says he was known as Harald Luva (Shock Head) from vowing not to wash or comb his hair until he had conquered all Norway – a vow taken to persuade a girl to become his concubine. When he did so after ten years it looked so fine and silky that it gained him the name ‘Fair Hair’. A skald who clearly knew his court well, Tórbjorn Hornklofi, wrote a poem in his praise, Haraldskvaedi, a dialogue between a Valkyrie and a corpse-eating raven that tells how generously he rewarded skalds. He gave them, boasts Tórbjorn, red, fur-lined cloaks, silver-mounted swords, chain-mail shirts, gilded helmets and gold arm rings, with beautiful slave girls from Wendland.2 Less poetically, Snorri says that Harald appointed an ‘overseer of guests’ named Wolf the Unwashed.

When Harald Fair Hair died about 930, the succession was disputed, his twenty sons by at least nine women fighting each other to the death. Eventually, Eirík Bloodaxe (otherwise ‘Brothers’ Bane’ from killing so many of them) whom Fair Hair had wanted as his successor, was driven out and Hakon, the youngest, took the throne. Nicknamed ‘Athelstan’s Foster-son’, Hakon had been brought up in England as a Christian at the court of the great King Athelstan.

An able administrator, Hakon set up a centralised Thing system that worked well and made him popular, as did reducing the chieftains’ scatt. A fine soldier whose hird included berserkers, he fought off two invasions by his brothers. However, he was not so successful at converting Norway. Three English missionary priests, probably monks of Glastonbury whom he had brought home with him, were murdered and their churches burned to the ground, while he himself was forced to attend the Yule sacrifice and pretend to eat horse meat.

Like Fair Hair, he might have achieved the rare feat for a Viking ruler of dying in his bed from old age, but in 961 he was mortally wounded by a barbed arrow in the armpit during a final battle with his brothers. Buried in the old pagan style beneath a huge howe, in his armour and finest robes, he had been ‘greatly in favour of all the people’, who now named him ‘Hakon the Good’ and wished him a hearty welcome to Valhalla. His skald Eyvind Skáldaspillir lamented that because Hakon had departed this life, Fenris Wolf, whom even the gods feared, would go unchained and devour numberless human beings.3

Some believed the arrow that slew Hakon had been guided by his Danish stepmother, Queen Gunnhild, Bloodaxe’s widow, a tiny little woman as cruel and evil as she was beautiful, who always did her sinister best to help her sons. The rumour that she had learned witchcraft from Sami warlocks made her widely feared, while she was credited with changing into a swallow whenever she wanted to spy on her many enemies. (Her stepson Dag owned a sparrow with prophetic powers.) Milton’s lines on the ‘night hag’ in Paradise Lost suit Gunnhild very well:

In secret, riding through the air, she comes

Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance

With Lapland witches, while the labouring moon

Eclipses at their charms . . .

Despite mother’s spells, Eirík Bloodaxe’s sons, grim, crafty and warlike as they were, only succeeded in establishing themselves on the west coast and, after their leader Harald Wolf Skin was murdered in 970 by Jarl Hakon Sigurdsson of Lade, they were driven out altogether. The Danish King Harald Blue Tooth then became nominal King of Norway, but for twenty years the country’s real ruler was Hakon who a Christian chronicler tells us was called ‘the Evil’ because of ‘his unbridled cruelty of temperament’.4 Blue Tooth had the jarl forcibly baptised, on a visit to Denmark, sending priests with him when he left for Norway – thrown overboard by Hakon as soon as he set sail.

Hakon was terrified that Gunnhild might cast a spell on him and at his request Blue Tooth lured her to Denmark with a proposal of marriage, saying they were both getting on in years and would make a fine old couple, but when the witch queen arrived he had her drowned in a bog, in ancient Danish fashion.5 A mummified corpse found in a Jutland fen in 1835, thought to be Gunnhild’s, was reburied in a marble sarcophagus with full Lutheran funeral rites at Roskilde Cathedral among the Danish royal family, as befitted a princess of Denmark. Embarrassingly, her body was later identified as that of a man a thousand years older.

At first Jarl Hakon, handsome and pleasant mannered, made himself popular by lavishing gifts on his supporters and, as a shuddering chronicler put it, because he was ‘a slave of demons to whom he was always making sacrifice and calling on for help’.6 He did so at the famous temple to Frey set up at Trondheim by his family while, proud of his descent from Odin, he encouraged everyone to worship the ancient gods. Many, perhaps most, Norwegians approved of such commitment to the old faith. They knew that on one occasion Hakon had made a most effective blood sacrifice after which two ravens flew over his head, croaking loudly – a sure sign of divine support. This was when he beat off a Danish attempt to take over Norway in 986, routing at Hjörungavágr Bay a fleet of longships sent by King Blue Tooth that included a group of Viking mercenaries, the Jómsvikings.

The sacrifice had been the jarl’s own seven-year-old son, a promising child, whom he offered to the goddess Thorgerd Holgabrud – ‘Thorgerd Shine Bright’. When he saw that the battle was going badly, he took the boy into some deep woods and asked for her help, ordering his thrall Tormod Karke (‘Thick Skin’) to kill him. In response a storm blew up and won the battle for Hakon, Thorgerd and her sister Irpa blowing huge hailstones into his enemy’s eyes and shooting arrows from their fingers that invariably brought death.7 Later, on Shine Bright’s advice, the jarl made a man from driftwood, inserting a heart cut out of another human sacrifice. After the goddess brought the thing to life, Hakon gave it an axe, with orders to go to Iceland and kill a skald who had insulted him. The wooden man’s mission is said to have been a great success.

Hakon was respected for more than worshipping goddesses or winning battles since he enforced good law and order, while successive years of fine weather ensured that his sacrifices coincided with excellent harvests and the biggest shoals of herring in memory. It looked as if the gods were on his side. However, as time went by his rule became tyrannical. Nor could he control his womanising, abducting and raping not only common women but highborn ladies, which turned their menfolk into enemies bent on revenge. When in 995 he tried to kidnap a certain Gudrun known as ‘Sunbeam’ because of her beauty, her husband Orm Lugg, a rich Trøndelag bonde, sent round the war arrow – burnt at one end, a hank of rope at the other – which set off a serious revolt.

Already threatened by a rival, Olav Tryggvason, of whom he was terrified because of his descent from Harald Fair Hair and whom he had tried to have kidnapped or killed, Hakon lost his nerve while his goddess abandoned him. He fled with his thrall Tormod Karke to Melhus, to the farm of his main mistress Thora of Rimul, who hid them in a hole under the pigsty in her farmyard where nobody would think of looking.

Unexpectedly, Olav came to her farm with the bonder army whom he reviewed in the yard, and the pair heard him offering a reward to anyone who killed Jarl Hakon. The thrall fell asleep and, when he woke, he whispered to the jarl how he had dreamed of Olav putting a gold ring round his neck. Hakon whispered back that it might be a red one. Although by now suspicious of his companion, eventually the exhausted jarl dozed off but began screaming in his sleep. Karke took the opportunity to cut his throat, then hacked off his head.

Climbing out from beneath the pigsty, he took the head to Olav, expecting to be rewarded with a gold ring. Instead, just as Hakon had predicted, Olav gave the thrall a red necklace, ordering him to be hanged on the spot. As for the jarl’s head, it was stuck on a stake so that passers-by could throw stones at it.

Born shortly after his father’s murder by Harald Wolf Skin, Olav Tryggvason was a great-grandson of Harald Fair Hair. Captured by Estonian pirates at the age of three, after six years as a child slave he was rescued by a Norwegian merchant who, realising who he was, bought and freed him, then took him to Scandinavian Novgorod where he spent the rest of his childhood. When about twelve, seeing his former owner in the marketplace at Novgorod, Olav, unrecognised, snatched the man’s axe and killed him.

Modern historians question this background. ‘Olav must be considered a self-made man’, writes Sverre Bagge, who believes his descent from Harald was a fabrication.8 Tom Shippey agrees: ‘What the legend of Olav’s early life seems to say is that an adventurer from the southern Baltic appeared on the Norse scene with a story of his ancestry that was mostly or entirely self-authenticated.’9 Yet all early sources accept Olav’s account of himself.

What is beyond dispute is that Olav Tryggvason grew up to be a young man who was a magnetic combination of charm and ferocity. Soon after being given command of the druzina (bodyguard) of Prince Vladimir of Kiev and Novgorod, he fell out with his employer and became a Viking, raiding along the shores of the Baltic Sea. During this period, he married the King of Wendland’s daughter, Geila.

When Geila died, Olav joined the Danish King Sveinn Tjúguskegg (Forkbeard) in 991 in a raid on England, ravaging today’s Home Counties with fire and sword, wiping out a little band of Essex men who dared to challenge his army. Their self-sacrifice inspired a famous Anglo-Saxon poem, The Battle of Maldon, in which the heroic old thane Byrhtnoth, fighting to the death against Olav’s Vikings, shouts to his comrades:

‘Thought must be the harder, heart the keener,

Spirit shall be more as our strength lessens.’

But Byrhtnoth’s sacrifice was in vain. Shortly after the battle, King Ethelred the Unready (whose name meant ‘ill advised’) bought off the invaders with 16,000 pounds’ worth of silver, setting a disastrous precedent that attracted further swarms of Vikings.

Now in his late twenties, Olav Tryggvason was the classic Viking, who impressed his crew by juggling with three daggers, throwing two spears at once or running along the oars of a longship. ‘Merry and frolicsome’, he was generous, good company and wonderfully brave in battle, but horribly cruel when angry, apt to have captured enemies burned alive or thrown from mountain tops. He owned a huge dog, probably an Irish wolfhound acquired during a raid in Ireland, with whom he developed a close bond. Highly intelligent, Vige went everywhere with his master, more than once helping him to run down and kill an enemy. When he was badly wounded by a sword cut, Olav had him carried back on board his ship and took pains to see that he was nursed back to health.