by John Marsden
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.
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 t
he 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 Garðar 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.