by John Marsden
All of which might suggest the alternative explanation – which proposes 31 August as the true date of the battle and construes 29 July as a misreckoning – being the more likely; and that same likelihood is convincingly developed by the editor of a long-respected English translation of Olaf the Saint’s saga,10 who suggests the discrepancy may have derived from misinterpretation of an original text which would probably have given the date in a customary medieval form as ‘1029 years and two hundred and nine days since Christ’s birth’. Reckoning in ‘long hundreds’ (as 249 days) from 25 December would actually give a date of 31 August, while reckoning in ‘continental’ hundreds (or 209 days) from 1 January would give the date of 29 July which is found in Theodoric’s Historia and Snorri’s Heimskringla. The prime significance of the eclipse in the saga, as it is also in Sigvat’s verse referring to the same phenomenon, is its ominous portent, perhaps even making an implied allusion to Christ’s crucifixion, because it is at just this point that Olaf is about to meet his martyrdom.
In fact, the saga narrative itself reads as if abruptly distracted from Dag’s entry into the battle when it suddenly turns to identify the warriors who were at that moment closing with the king on the field. Kalv Arnason stood with two of his kinsmen, one of them also called Kalv (yet more precisely identified as Kalv Arnfinsson, and thus as Kalv Arnason’s cousin), while on his other side stood Thore Hund, clad in a reindeer-skin coat he had brought back from a trading voyage to Lapland and believed to have been rendered as weapon-proof as ring-mail by the witchcraft of the Lapps. This is clearly a reference to legend, and yet to one of closely contemporary provenance when Sigvat’s verses on the battle tell how ‘the mighty magic of the Finns sheltered Thore from maim’.11
It was Thore with whom Olaf first engaged when he hewed at shoulders protected by reindeer skin and found that his famously sharp sword had no effect. Turning to Bjorn his marshal, Olaf commanded him to ‘strike the dog whom steel will not bite’, but a great blow from Bjorn’s axe similarly bounced off the magic hide and allowed Thore to retaliate with a spear-thrust which killed the marshal outright, proclaiming that ‘this is how we hunt the bear’. It is, of course, quite characteristic of the Norse heroic tradition to engage in such name-play at the very edge of a death-dealing combat, and just such is reflected in Snorri’s narrative before it moves on to the specific detail of Olaf’s martyrdom.
Having slain one of Kalv Arnason’s kinsmen, Olaf next found himself facing Thorstein Knaresmed who struck with his axe to wound the king in the left thigh. Finn Arnason retaliated by slaying the shipwright, as Olaf staggered to support himself against a rock, dropping his sword as Thore Hund made another spear-thrust beneath the king’s mail-coat to wound him in the stomach and Kalv inflicted a third wound, this to the left side of his neck. While Snorri’s narrative confirms that ‘those three wounds were King Olaf’s death’, he goes on to say that not all are agreed as to which of the two Kalvs delivered the wound to the neck. Theodoric the Monk’s Historia, set down a century and a half after the event, tells of men still disagreed as to the number of wounds suffered by Olaf as well as the identity of those who dealt them, but there is evidence found in the saga record to confirm both Olaf’s son Magnus and half-brother Harald having reason to believe Kalv Arnason guilty. Perhaps most convincing of all is a story stamped with impressive authority – although preserved only in Orkneyinga saga – which tells of Kalv himself having ‘repented of his crime of killing King Olaf the Saint’ when confronted by Rognvald Brusason in Russia five years after the battle.
Meanwhile, there is more to be told of events on the field of Stiklestad in the immediate aftermath of the king’s death because, while the greater part of the force which had advanced with him fell with him also, Dag Ringsson is said to have kept up the battle with a fierce assault in which many bonders and lendermen fell and from which many others fled. This onset was apparently well remembered in tradition as ‘Dag’s Storm’, a byname which was to have the strangest echo in another battle fought thirty-six years later. Eventually, though, Dag Ringsson’s force was confronted by the greater strength of the bonders’ army with Kalv Arnason, Harek of Thjotta and Thore Hund in the forefront, and was so hopelessly overwhelmed by superior numbers that he and his surviving warriors were left with no course other than flight.
It may have been at this point – or, perhaps more probably, somewhat earlier – that the young Harald Sigurdsson escaped what must by now have been a scene of fearsome carnage. Whether he had been with the Upplanders or within the king’s skjaldborg, he would almost certainly have been drawn into the forces gathered around Olaf’s entry into the blood-fray. When Olaf’s sword is said to have been retrieved by a Swede who had lost his own weapon, it would appear that all three divisions of the initial battle order had come together around the king’s retinue when he emerged from his shield-rampart.
One who would assuredly have been found among the select company who formed Olaf’s bodyguard was the Orkneyman Rognvald Brusason. Through the years since his first arrival as a ten-year-old boy at the Norwegian court, he had grown into a formidable warrior who had demonstrated unswerving loyalty to the king, travelling with him to Russia and back to Scandinavia on the grim progress which led to Stiklestad.
The most comprehensive account of Rognvald’s life and career is preserved in the work now known as Orkneyinga saga and subtitled as ‘a history of the jarls of Orkney’. Completed in Iceland in 1234/5, it is effectively the updated version of an earlier text, usually referred to by the title Jarls’ saga, also the work of an Icelander and set down in the last years of the twelfth century. It was this Jarls’ saga which was known to Snorri Sturluson, providing his chief source of information on Rognvald Brusason (who was himself to become one of the most celebrated Orkney jarls after 1037), and thus representing one of the two principal sources for the opening chapter of his Harald’s saga in Heimskringla, which begins with Rognvald’s rescue of the young Harald from the carnage of Stiklestad. The other, and elder, of those sources was a strophe quoted by Snorri in the saga where it is attributed to Thjodolf Arnorsson, the skald authoritatively recognised as Harald’s ‘favourite poet . . . who spent many years in his company’.12
Thus when Thjodolf’s verse bearing on Stiklestad opens with the line ‘I have heard how the shield-storm raged near to Haug [a farm in Værdal]’, the likelihood is of his having heard all of this from Harald himself and so, even though the verses were composed at least sixteen years after the event, they can be considered to represent the most reliably informed evidence. In fact, it would seem to have been from Thjodolf’s reference in that same verse to ‘fifteen years a youth then’ that the saga (and the subsequent historical record) came to know of Harald’s precise age in the year 1030.
It was not from Thjodolf, however, but from Jarls’ saga that Snorri appears to have learned of Harald’s being ‘severely wounded’ in the battle and, although no source confides any such detail, he most probably suffered his injury in the maelstrom which would have undoubtedly followed the death of Olaf. As in many similar conflicts of that world and time, the death of a principal warlord was of decisive bearing on the outcome as the signal of defeat for his forces, and so it would have been at Stiklestad when such as remained of Olaf’s battle array crumbled and the survivors who were able to do so took flight from the field. Among those fugitives was Rognvald Brusason and with him the wounded Harald Sigurdsson whom ‘he had rescued from the battle’ (and who may well not otherwise have survived the fray).
Apparently so badly injured as to be unable to travel any greater distance, Harald was led by Rognvald to the steading of a farmer who lived in a remote part of the forest. On this particular point of detail, the evidence of Jarls’ saga is confirmed by Thjodolf’s reference to Harald as ‘fifteen years a youth then . . . hiding beyond the woods’. There he could be cared for in safety until his wounds were healed and he was sufficiently recovered to cross the Kjolen mountains into Jamtaland and on i
nto Sweden where Rognvald was awaiting him. When the time came to set out on that journey, Harald avoided more usually travelled paths and made his way along forest trails guided by the farmer’s son who (according to Snorri’s account and, apparently, no other) was unaware of the identity of his charge.
It was while they were riding through the wild woodland that Harald is said to have spoken the verse attributed to him by Snorri and by Orkneyinga saga:
Through endless woods I crawl
on my way now, with little honour.
Who knows but that my name may
yet be far and wide renowned.
II
Varangian
Russia, 1031–1034
The Baltic was known as Bahr Varank, or the ‘Varangian Sea’, to the authors of the tenth-century Arab writings which preserve some of the most colourful accounts of early medieval Russia. These sources were informed by traders and travellers among the Rus on the Volga and so their use of an Arabic form of ‘Varangian’ (which occurs as Væringjar in Old Norse and Varjazi in Slavonic) supplies its own testimony for the term having emerged in Russia, yet the word itself is of Scandinavian derivation and believed to stem from the Old Norse terms vár (‘oath’) or várar (‘trust’). The original meaning of ‘Varangians’, then, could be proposed as ‘men who pledge each other loyalty’, probably a group bound together by some form of oath along the lines of ‘all for one, one for all’.
Used in that sense, it is a name which would certainly have befitted the Scandinavian venturers – travelling in companies on the principle of ‘safety in numbers’ and sworn to mutual defence and protection of their selves, their craft and their cargoes – who had been crossing the Baltic since at least as early as the eighth century to penetrate the Russian river system along which furs from northern forests were to be traded for silver from the east. Before the mid-point of the following century, the kith and kin of these warrior-traders were recognised as the Rus and as men of power in the north of the land later to be named for them.
By the tenth century, and alike to their compatriots elsewhere in the Scandinavian expansion from the Hebrides to Normandy, these Rus had absorbed much of the culture and custom of neighbouring peoples whom they encountered along the east-way, and most evidently in their adoption of the Slavonic tongue. It may well be this new cultural identity which is reflected in a new application of the term ‘Varangian’ as a generic name for northmen (similar to the modern usage of the term ‘Viking’), in which sense it probably served to distinguish themselves from their Scandinavian cousins. At the same time, however, the occurrence of the term in the documentary record is almost invariably associated with warfare, and it is this usage which points to the later – and ultimately enduring – definition of Varangian as ‘mercenary warrior of Scandinavian origin’.
The history of the first centuries of the Rus, as recorded in the annals begun in the eleventh century and most usually known in English as the Russian Primary Chronicle,1 represents a catalogue of almost incessant warfare, in establishment of lordship over subject peoples, contention with predatory neighbours or internecine conflict between rival siblings of the ruling Rurikid kindred. For reasons which will bear further consideration here, Rus princes of the tenth and eleventh centuries were greatly dependent upon the services of mercenary fighting-men, of whom the most renowned were Scandinavians brought across the ‘Varangian Sea’. Just such were the fugitive survivors from the Norwegian king Olaf’s forces at the battle of Stiklestad who crossed the Baltic to Russia from Sweden in the summer of 1031, led by the Orkneyman Rognvald Brusason and including in their company Olaf’s half-brother, Harald Sigurdsson.
Having begun Harald’s saga in Heimskringla with Rognvald Brusason’s rescue of the young warrior from the field of Stiklestad, Snorri Sturluson goes on to tell how Harald crossed over into Sweden – possibly later in 1030, but more probably in the following spring – to join Rognvald and other survivors of Olaf’s defeated army on their passage across the Baltic. It must be said, though, that Snorri’s scant account of Harald’s warrior’s way through Russia does not represent the most convincing example of saga as historical record. Indeed, its value as a source of history rests almost entirely upon its quotation of two strophes from Harald’s court-poets, so it is fortunate that Snorri’s evidence can be supplemented by reference to other sources in order to attempt a reconstruction of three or four years which were to prove of key significance in the military education of a future warrior king.
Snorri’s account simply tells of Harald’s finding his way to meet Rognvald and others of Olaf’s warriors in Sweden and of their having assembled ships in the spring before sailing east to Russia in the summer. There he and Rognvald were welcomed by the Grand Prince Jaroslav who appointed Harald to share command of his ‘forces for defence of the country’ with Eilif, son of Rognvald Ulfsson, the former jarl of Gautland in Sweden who had been endowed with lordship of Staraja Ladoga after escorting Jaroslav’s Swedish bride to Russia. The suggestion that a Rus grand prince would delegate even joint command of his military to a Norwegian princeling scarcely sixteen years of age and on such brief acquaintance is itself unconvincing, but set into the military and political context of Jaroslav’s Russia in the early 1030s it lies entirely beyond the bounds of plausibility.
First of all, there was no national military force in early medieval Russia where the only semblance of a standing army was the druzhina, effectively the military retinue of a prince or lordly magnate and originally intended as his military escort for protection and enforcement on tribute-gathering expeditions. Although references in the Primary Chronicle most often indicate its strength at around the hundred mark, the size of a druzhina varied according to the wealth and status of its lord and ranged between a quarter and twice that number. However impressively armed and equipped, such a force could not have amounted to a realistic field army for a major campaign without substantial reinforcement and it was always preferable to expend the lives of lesser troops in action than to place the druzhina at unnecessary risk.
While there is one example of a Rus prince supplementing his forces with those of a foreign ally in the early eleventh century, other sources of auxiliary manpower are more frequently indicated by the historical record. Such were to be found in tribal levies, known as voi, which were being superseded by militias raised in urban centres that had grown up in size and importance from the fortified trading-posts established by the earlier warrior-traders along Russian river routes. The origin of these urban militias lay in the need for defence of towns while the lord’s druzhina was away, sometimes for months at a time, on expeditions conducted over the vast distances which posed the major logistical problem of warfaring among the Rus. It could often also present difficulties in recruiting militias for longer range campaigning when their principal concern was always for the security of their own territory, but so too could other factors. Urban militias were able to draw upon surrounding rural areas for additional manpower and thus field a force numbering in the few thousands, but their co-operation still depended upon the loyalty owed to their lord by independent-minded townsfolk who still expected payment (even, if needs be, in the form of plunder) for their services.
Of perhaps more crucial bearing is the fact that neither urban militias nor tribal levies were possessed of the same mettle and morale as was the truly professional fighting-man. For military of that quality, the Rus warlord would invariably turn to the mercenary forces who represented his other source of reinforcement – and for Jaroslav, as for his father Vladimir before him, mercenaries invariably meant Varangians. There is little doubt that Vladimir, returning to Russia from exile in Scandinavia in the 970s, owed his initial seizure of power from his brothers to the mercenary fighting-men he had brought with him, but his greatest contribution to the history of the Varangians rests on the sturdy shoulders of the six thousand warriors he sent to the aid of the Byzantine emperor Basil II, for whom they were to form the nucleus of the famous V
arangian Guard of Byzantium. The same enthusiasm was evidently shared by Vladimir’s son and eventual successor Jaroslav, whose deployment of Varangians is noticed on no less than six significant occasions by the Primary Chronicle and whose reign is said by a highly respected history of the period to have seen ‘both a flowering and a fading, though not a complete withering of the special relationship between the Varangians and the Rus princes’.2 Nonetheless, both Vladimir and Jaroslav are more often remembered in the sagas for their tardiness, and even parsimony, when payment was due. The Varangians were of undoubted, even incomparable, value in the heat of the action and would always be the first choice of their Russian employers (as also of the Byzantines) for the most unsavoury duties, but in the last analysis the mercenary was only the hired hand of warfaring, never held in the same regard as the druzhina and all too often a problem when the wineskins were opened after the fighting was done.
When the great Vladimir – revered for his conversion of the Rus to Christianity and creation of the Russian Orthodox Church – died at Kiev in the summer of 1015, Jaroslav was away in the north at Novgorod, which would seem always to have been his preferred power base. He had been endowed with the lordship of Novgorod by his father, but relations between the two had soured and Jaroslav felt himself so greatly under threat from Vladimir that he is said by the Primary Chronicle to have ‘sent across the sea and brought Varangians’ to bolster his forces early in 1015. In the event, he would have need of those Varangians, but against a sinister sibling instead of an angry father because his ambitious half-brother Sviatopolk had moved with speed to seize Kiev as soon as Vladimir was dead. Known in Russian tradition as ‘the Accursed’, not least because his Byzantine mother had formerly been a nun and even his true paternity was in doubt, Sviatopolk is said to have bribed the people of Kiev to accept his succession and thereafter arranged the assassination of two of Vladimir’s other sons, Boris and Gleb, who were soon to follow their father into the growing Russian calendar of saints.