by John Marsden
‘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.
So it was that Olaf set out for Norway with a force more than fourteen hundred strong, taking a north-westward route towards the border through Jærnberaland (the ‘iron-bearing land’, now the Swedish province of Dalarna) and was there joined by his half-brother Harald Sigurdsson with the seven hundred warriors whom he had raised in the Upplands on hearing the first tidings of Olaf’s return. Inevitably, of course, there were others in Norway who had also had word of his movements and the saga tells of chieftains who had pledged allegiance to Cnut and his jarl Hakon having learned the news from their own spies sent into Sweden and sending out a war-summons across the land. Already in the spring, Thore Hund had crewed a warship with his housecarls and called a levy of fighting-men in his far northern province around Tromsö. So too had his neighbour, Harek of Thjotta in Halogaland, and these two most powerful chieftains of the north were now bringing their forces to join the host of Olaf’s enemies gathering in the Trondelag.
Meanwhile Olaf was making his way through the woodland and moorland of the border country, offering rich rewards in lands and plunder to attract recruits from the rough folk of the forest and no small number of vagabonds besides. He had found another ally, and one of more promising military quality, in Dag Ringsson whose father is said to have been one of those Uppland kings banished for their part in the conspiracy against Olaf more than ten years before. Dag had followed his father into exile in Sweden and it was there that Olaf made contact on his own return from Russia, acknowledging him as kinsman (although, as just another of the numerous descendants of Harald Fair-hair, only a very distant one) and promising full restitution of his father’s lands in Norway if he would join him with all the warriors he could muster. Dag apparently agreed with enthusiasm and is said by the saga to have brought another ‘twelve hundred’ men to join Olaf’s forces before leading them off along his own line of march into Norway. While the Swedish contingent is said to have similarly taken its own route, the saga follows the progress of Olaf and his retinue by way of the Kjolen mountains.
When the visions and other hagiographical anecdotes encrusting these chapters of saga narrative are left aside, the plan of campaign comes quite clearly into focus as a westward advance into the Trondelag, presumably with Nidaros as the ultimate objective. The division of his forces into three contingents, each following its own route of march, can be recognised as an evasive strategy intended to outwit any watches set on the border passes, but the advance to Nidaros had evidently been anticipated by the enemy. When Olaf reached the head of Værdal a friendly bonder warned him of the great numbers of fighting-men being mustered in the Trondelag and as he moved on through the valley further intelligence confirmed that same army already on the move against him. At which point, Olaf halted his march and brought together all his forces in preparation for the conflict that would soon be upon them.
The principal concern of the saga narrative at this point appears to be the portrayal of a great Christian warrior king, even one in the mould of Charlemagne, insisting that all his warriors enter battle as Christians, chalking the symbol of a cross on their shields and advancing with the war-cry of ‘Forward, forward, Christ-men, cross men, king’s men!’ Other evidence casts doubt on the historical accuracy of some of these claims when Sigvat the skald’s verses supply a closely contemporary reference to pagans included in Olaf’s forces and a very similar battle-cry is attributed to the twelfth-century Norwegian king Sverri in his own saga, a work well known to Snorri Sturluson and his contemporaries. Indeed, evidence has also been found for another war-cry of ‘Press on, press on, king’s warriors, hard and hard on bonder men!’ used by Olaf’s followers at Stiklestad.5 Probably more reliable, and certainly more relevant here, is the saga’s estimate of the numbers of Olaf’s forces at something over three and a half thousand fighting-men.
Although of no very great significance, the doubts surrounding the details of that particular episode do point up the difficulties involved in filtering authentic military history from the account of Stiklestad in Snorri’s Heimskringla version of Olaf the Saint’s saga. Such difficulties are only to be expected when a warrior king is in the process of reinvention as a martyred saint, and are perhaps best resolved by disentangling the different sources from which the saga narrative was compiled. The more obviously hagiographical elements of Snorri’s account of the battle can be traced back to the monastery of Thingeyrar where earlier Lives of St Olaf had been composed with the sole purpose of fostering his cult. As to sources of a more secular character and origin, the skaldic verse which usually represents the most immediately contemporary evidence preserved in the sagas is less helpful on this occasion, even though three skalds were included among Olaf’s retinue at Stiklestad. The saga describes his special arrangements for their protection, in order that they should survive to record the battle for posterity, although to no avail when two of the skalds were slain in the battle and the third died very shortly afterwards of wounds he had suffered. Olaf’s favourite skald Sigvat Thordsson was not present at Stiklestad, being on pilgrimage to Rome at the time, so the references to the battle in his memorial lay Olafsdrápa, while undeniably closely contemporary, still cannot be considered as first-hand evidence. In fact, the only skaldic verses brought back from the field appear to have been those composed as exhortations to the troops on the eve of the battle, some of whom were able to commit the verses to memory and survived to pass them into oral tradition.
Other recollections of so momentous a conflict would have been preserved in a similar way and thus, even though denied the rigour which underwrites the authority of skaldic verse, eventually found their way into the saga record. Such soldiers’ stories, which almost always focus on particularly dramatic incidents, would have been brought home by the Icelandic warriors who are known to have served in Olaf’s retinue at Stiklestad. Assuredly these would have been among the sources informing Snorri’s account of the battle, much as his travels around Norway and Sweden would have given him access to local sources of oral tradition, while also acquainting him with the landscape which formed the setting for the events he was to describe. As to specifically military matters of arms and armour, strategy and tactics, the evidence supplied by Snorri’s account is consistent with what is known of other Scandinavian land battles of the period, almost all of which follow much the same relatively unsophisticated course.
The large-scale land battle was an uncharacteristic feature of warfare in Scandinavia during the earlier medieval period principally, if not entirely, by reason of landscapes dominated by dense forest and mountain ridge. In Norway especially, mountainous areas covered with forest were virtually impenetrable and communication between settlements predominantly located along the coasts was most effectively conducted by sea. So too, of course, was warfare, even to the extent of the warship and its fighting crew representing the primary unit of Scandinavian military organisation long after the forests had begun to be cleared and overland routes made more accessible to troop
movement.
Yet battles fought between fleets were not naval engagements in the more modern sense of the term, because the ships served initially as troop-transporters bringing the contending forces into contact and afterwards as floating platforms for the hand-to-hand fighting which was to decide the outcome of the engagement, usually when the principal commander of one side was slain. Battles on land were very similarly conducted, although close combat between sizeable forces long before the introduction of military uniforms posed the problem of differentiating between friend and foe, which would have been less likely to apply to a warrior crew of just a few dozen men who had shared shipboard accommodation. Thus it was important for a commander to arrange his more numerous troops into groups likely to be known to each other, and so the saga’s account rings true when it tells of Olaf organising his forces into three divisions, each one assembled around a banner where its members were instructed to group themselves together with their neighbours and kinsmen.
The king’s own retinue, or hirð, comprising his principal officers and his housecarls was to form the central division around his banner. The Upplanders were to stand with them and such local men of the Trondelag as could be rallied to the king’s forces should be placed there too, along with some of the vagabonds recruited during the march through the forests. Dag Ringsson’s warriors were to be deployed on the right around the second banner, while the Swedes would have a third banner and be placed on the left flank. The saga estimate of Olaf’s troop numbers at ‘over three thousand men’ is reckoned in ‘long hundreds’, and so would correspond to a force well in excess of three and a half thousand, a proportion of whom – his own housecarls and those of Dag Ringsson, as well as the select Swedish troops assigned to him by Onund – can be considered ‘professionals’ in respect of training and equipment. Those volunteers he had been able to recruit in Sweden and along the march through the borderlands, however, were unlikely to have been of any such quality, neither in terms of arms, armour and training nor as regards battle-readiness and morale.
Having set out that deployment of troops in readiness to move on down the valley, Olaf was brought word that there would be no local recruits to his ranks. Virtually every man able to carry a weapon had joined the ‘bonders’ army’ and those who had stayed in their homes had done so rather than join either side in the coming conflict. Finn Arnason was so angered at this news that he urged the king to plunder and burn the farms in the valley, with the intention of alarming the Trondelag men into fleeing back to their homes and thus thinning down the enemy ranks. Such would have been a tactic fully characteristic of Scandinavian warfaring, indeed one no less typical of Olaf’s own domestic policy in former years, and the authenticity of Finn’s proposal is reliably confirmed by the saga’s quotation of lines attributed to Thormod Kolbrunarskald who was present at the time; however, the king is said to have rejected the idea as an unnecessary provocation when he yet hoped to be able to negotiate a peace with the ‘bonders’ army’. The only pre-emptive action he would allow was the killing of any enemy spies they might come upon, and under those orders of engagement the advance into Værdal continued, with the king taking one country road and Dag with his people another way, intending to meet in the evening for encampment overnight.
It is at this point that the saga tells of the skalds in attendance upon Olaf: the aforementioned Thormod Kolbrunarskald, Gissur Gulbraaskald and Thorfinn Mudr, all three, of course, Icelanders. When the forces were drawn up in battle array, Olaf was to have a skjaldborg (or ‘shield-rampart’) formed around him by the strongest and bravest of his housecarls. This was a familiar tactic of northern warfaring and consisted of a body of armoured warriors formed up in close order with their shields overlapping on all sides and above, thus forming a shelter to protect the commander and his chosen companions from the onslaught of missile weapons which opened hostilities between contending forces as they closed upon each other. Calling his skalds together, Olaf commanded them to go inside the shield-rampart when action was about to begin and to stay within it so as to witness at first hand the battle which they were to commemorate in poetry. At this point the skalds composed their verses to fire up the warriors for the conflict expected on the following day, although not without sarcastic exchanges bearing on the absence of the celebrated Sigvat.
By nightfall Olaf’s forces were all gathered together further down the valley – where, according to the saga, a number of local men did come to join their ranks – and settled to sleep lain under their shields in the open. That particular reference in the saga draws attention to the variety of weaponry likely to have been found among so haphazard an array of fighting-men, because the one component of arms and armour which would have been carried by each and every one of them, from the fully equipped housecarl to the roughest vagabond, would most certainly have been his shield. The least expensive and yet most essential item in the armoury of the northmen, its traditional form was of a wooden disc, approximately a metre in diameter, with a metal boss at its centre covering an iron hand-grip, and such would have been the type most commonly found throughout all the forces engaged at Stiklestad. The tapered, triangular kite-shaped shield would not have reached Scandinavia as early as 1030, but heavy shields of the longer, rectangular Slav design were widely in use among the Rus and might very well have been included in the equipment supplied to Olaf’s retinue before leaving Jaroslav’s court.
At first light, the slumbering army was roused by Thormod the skald’s singing of Bjarkamal, the ancient ‘Lay of Bjarki’ celebrating one of the legendary champions who fought for the sixth-century Danish king Rolf Kraki. Thought to have had its origin as the work of a Danish poet in the tenth century, this song is one of the very few survivals from a great body of poetry about Rolf widely known in medieval Scandinavia. While Saxo Grammaticus supplies a Latin verse paraphrase of its content, the text of the poem is better preserved by Snorri Sturluson who quotes two strophes at this juncture in Heimskringla (and three more in his Edda), lending the authority of his own skaldic scholarship to the likelihood of a genuinely historical tradition recalling Bjarkamal sounding reveille for Olaf’s army before Stiklestad. When Thormod had been rewarded with a gold arm-ring as his token of royal gratitude, the army moved off to resume its advance through the valley, but once again Dag Ringsson’s contingent took its own separate route, although there is no explanation why it should have done so and the reference may be no more than a storytelling device to contrive his late arrival at a point of crisis in the conflict.
At which point the saga finally brings Olaf to Stiklestad, a place name which actually identified a farm in Værdal and one apparently located near the rising ground where the king chose to range his forces, and from where he now had his first sight of the bonders’ host assembling below. A spurious story of an attack on an enemy troop sent to spy on the king’s army and of its leader, recognised as ‘Rut of Viggia’, being slain by the Icelanders of Olaf’s retinue is very probably one of those occasional saga anecdotes contrived to accommodate a jest based on a personal name, especially when the king offers his Icelanders ‘a ram to slaughter’ and Rut is the Icelandic term for a young ram. There might be just one nugget of historical value to be found in the tale, however, if it can be taken to confirm the likelihood of Icelanders included among Olaf’s housecarls at Stiklestad. The passage immediately following in the saga narrative is another anecdote, but one of more particular significance here as the reference with which Olaf the Saint’s saga in Heimskringla specifically confirms Harald Hardrada’s having taken part in the battle.
The army has reached Stiklestad and been placed in battle array, although Dag Ringsson’s force has yet to arrive and so the king directs the Uppland contingent to go out on to the right wing and raise their banner there, but first he advises that ‘my brother Harald should not be in this battle, as he is still only a child in years’. To which Harald replies that he certainly will be in the battle ‘and if I am so weak as to be unable to wi
eld a sword, then let my hand be tied to the hilt. There is none keener than I to strike a blow against these bonders and so I shall go with my comrades.’ The saga goes on to quote a verse which it attributes to Harald himself, although in a form of words which distinctly betrays Snorri’s own suspicions regarding its authenticity: ‘We are told that Harald made this verse on that occasion . . . .
I shall guard the wing
on which I stand – and
my mother will hold worthy
my battering reddened shields.
Not fearful of the foemen
bonders’ spear-thrusts,
the young warrior will wage a manly
weapon-thing most murderous.6
‘And Harald had his way and was given leave to be in the battle.’
There is, of course, no doubt that Harald actually did fight at Stiklestad and so the story certainly cannot be dismissed as implausible, but it still does lack the ring of authenticity, and not least because Snorri’s use of the phrase ‘we are told that . . .’ is one of his customary forms of signalling his own doubts as to the reliability of his source material. It is very tempting to wonder whether Harald might have composed the verse some time after the battle, possibly even years later when he had succeeded his brother as king in Norway and the story elaborated as a frame in which to set it. Closer examination of the incident might even suggest as much because, while Olaf would have had a natural concern for his young kinsman’s safety, it is hardly likely that he would have considered him too young to take part in the battle, especially when there is so much evidence attesting Harald’s physical prowess and his quite exceptional height which would already have been apparent even in a fifteen-year-old. Neither would a prince already into his teens have been untrained in weapon-handling, especially one with a mother so ambitious for her sons to win battle-glory. This was precisely the form of induction into his warrior’s way for which Harald would have been schooled since infancy and, indeed, encouraged to long for by his immersion in a culture entirely infused with the heroic warrior ethos. In fact, Olaf himself was said to have been just twelve years of age when he embarked on his first viking expedition and still only fourteen when he was fighting in England as a warrior in the army of Thorkell the Tall.