by John Marsden
All the men of the Trondelag followed Einar and most of the other Norwegians followed them to make ready the fleet for the solemn journey home. Finding himself now with no army at his command, Harald had no option but to return with them to Norway, yet no sooner had he put into the Vik than he set out westward on a royal progress, summoning assemblies in every province to acclaim his kingship over all the land, while Einar led the Trondelag contingent home to bury Magnus in St Clement’s church where his father Olaf already lay enshrined. At which point in the saga narrative, Snorri pauses to enter his own obituary expressing full agreement with those of all the earlier sources in commemorating the nobility, courage and generosity of ‘the most popular of kings, praised by friend and foe alike’. Presumably those former foes included Svein Estridsson who had been about to abandon his claim to kingship of Denmark when he was brought news of Magnus’ dying wish that he should inherit the kingdom and also of the entire Norwegian host having now left the country. Vowing that so long as he should live he would never again flee the kingdom, Svein raised a force in Skaane to accompany his own royal progress accepting submission of his people.
By the following spring, then, there were two claimants convinced of their right to kingship of Denmark, and one of them already assembling the forces with which to assert his claim because Harald is said by the saga to have called a levy throughout Norway, mustering half those ships and men to sail south and spend the summer plundering and burning Jutland. Snorri quotes a half-strophe of Harald’s own composition, telling of his ships lying in Gothnafjord (now Randersfjord) while night-linened ladies lulled their husbands with song, and completes it with a half-strophe by Thjodolf promising to cast anchor further southward the following year. A further quotation, this one from the skald Bolverk describing ‘the sea-steed, plunder-laden . . . on the darkling deep’, apparently celebrates the same expedition, and lines ascribed to a lesser-known Icelandic skald called Grani exult in vengeance taken on the daughters of one Thorkel Geysa. These women, who had earlier mocked Harald’s threat to Denmark, were carried off from their father’s burning farmstead to the ships and returned only on Thorkel’s payment of a huge ransom.
Thjodolf’s lines foretelling repeat performances ‘further southward next summer’ are borne out by the saga when it goes on to record Harald’s leading another such expedition against Denmark in the following raiding season and in every subsequent summer for almost a decade and a half. ‘Each year the Danes trembled’ according to the skald Stúf, and yet Svein had sworn that he would never relinquish his rightful claim and neither were his people ever to accept Harald as their king. After the raid of 1048, Svein threatened to launch his own fleet against Norway and there wreak the same havoc Harald had been inflicting on Denmark, unless he would agree either to a peace treaty or to a battle which would finally decide the dispute.
The challenge was to meet in battle on the Gaut Elf river (which marked the borderline between Norway and Danish territory on the Scandinavian mainland) in the following summer and both kings spent the winter preparing their ships and men for the contest. In the event, Harald brought his forces to the appointed place only to find Svein’s fleet lying away to the south off Zealand. Perhaps suspecting that Svein had lured all the Norwegian forces into the Kattegat so as to leave Norway itself defenceless against his own fleet, Harald sent the greater part of his bonder levy home, while leading a select force made up of his own hird, his lendermen and the bonders with homes nearest to the Danish border on a raiding foray south of the Skagen headland to Thy province and across Jutland to plunder the great trading township of Hedeby. All of this is confirmed by the saga’s quotation of verses attributed to the skald Stúf and Thorleik the Fair, an Icelandic skald visiting Svein Estridsson’s court, but perhaps most vividly and certainly most immediately by lines attributed to an anonymous Norse warrior who tells of standing on the northern extremity of the town’s rampart before dawn and watching ‘high flames up out of houses whirling’.
Gwyn Jones suggests that destruction of Denmark’s principal marketplace ‘may appear a self-strangling exercise for a man ambitious for the Danish throne’, before adding that ‘burning towns came naturally to Harald . . . and if we can trust to Snorri the expedition of 1049 had terror and loot as its primary objectives’.3 Having plundered Hedeby and left it aflame, Harald’s fleet of sixty ships was sailing northwards laden with booty when Svein appeared on the coast of Thy with a large force and a challenge to do battle onshore. Realising his own crews were hopelessly outnumbered, Harald replied with a counter-challenge to a sea-fight (this exchange confirmed by a strophe from Thorleik quoted in the saga). By now it would seem to have been getting late in the day and a change in the wind left Harald’s ships lying off the island of Læso where thick sea-fog came down as night fell.
As the sun rose on the following morning, however, its light picked out the approaching dragon prows of a huge Danish fleet and Harald ordered his men to take to the oars and put out to sea, but their ships were waterlogged and heavy with the plunder from Hedeby while the enemy fleet was already threatening to overtake the best efforts of their oarsmen. So a new order was given to throw some plunder overboard to hinder the enemy’s progress by tempting them to retrieve abandoned booty from the water. Determined not to be cheated of his advantage by such a ruse, Svein urged his ships on in pursuit and Harald ordered heavier items of cargo thrown overboard to lighten the load and increase the speed of flight, but the enemy fleet was still gaining on them and it was then that Harald came up with his master-stroke of throwing Danish captives overboard. When he saw his own people floundering in the waves, Svein could do no other than break off the chase to let his crews rescue as many as possible of their countrymen from the water – and allow most of the Norwegian fleet to make their escape. Thus deprived of what might have been a decisive victory, Svein saved at least some face when he came upon just seven enemy vessels, manned by levied bonders and lagging behind the main fleet off Læso. Snorri’s story concludes with a quoted strophe from the skald Thorleik (in Svein’s service, of course) mocking the bonders as they begged for quarter and offered ransom, presumably to be paid out of plunder taken on the raiding, in exchange for their lives.
While there is no doubt as to the historicity of Harald’s onslaught against Hedeby in 1049 – and especially when archaeological evidence confirms the burning of the town – the account of his fleet’s escape as preserved in the sagas depends largely on two strophes of Thorleik’s verse. It is curious, then, that Saxo Grammaticus records a suspiciously similar encounter, also dated to 1049 but located on the Djurså river, where Svein had managed to muster an army against the raiders, but one scarcely adequate either in numbers or experience to face a battle-hardened enemy. So terrified were they of the approaching Norwegians that the Danes jumped into the river rather than face the oncoming foe and, indeed, many of them were drowned. Saxo was the son of a distinguished Danish military family, so there is reason to respect his authority in this instance and yet it is possible that his account refers to a quite different incident, even though it seems unlikely that such an extraordinary encounter would have passed unnoticed by Harald’s skalds and thus escaped the attention of the saga-makers.
This regular raiding of Denmark apparently continued, presumably on an annual basis, for another thirteen years and yet it takes up very little further space in the saga record. In terms of strictly military history, the 1050s might even be considered the least interesting decade of Harald’s warrior’s way if his transition from Varangian mercenary to Scandinavian warlord resulted in little more than a reversion to the piratical custom of his viking forebears.
In which case, his years of experience in Russia and throughout the Byzantine Empire would seem to have made the least impression on his early performance as a warrior king and yet their influence is rather more evident in other spheres of his governance. His fiscal policy – assuredly inspired by the Byzantine example – is credited with devel
oping a true coin economy in Norway and archaeological evidence from coin-hoards attests the numerous mints established during his reign. The famous wealth he had brought back from the east was quite certainly the source of the Byzantine coins struck for emperors from Basil II through to Constantine IX and imitated on Danish currency of the eleventh century. Of which the outstanding example is a Danish silver penny of Svein Estridsson dated to c. 1047 and carefully copied from a rare gold histamenon of Michael IV, part of a limited issue and thought to have reached Scandinavia in Harald’s treasury where it was probably a part of his reward for services rendered on the Bulgarian campaign of 1041.4
Similarly also, his network of contacts in Russia must have facilitated the expansion of Norway’s trade along the east way in his reign and the example of the Russian traders he had known in Novgorod and Kiev may well have inspired the expansion of Norwegian trading around the North Atlantic. Into that context must be placed a curious remark made by Adam of Bremen in his Description of the Islands of the North. Describing the frozen sea ‘beyond Thule [Iceland]’, he writes of ‘Harald, the well-informed prince of the Norwegians, [having] lately attempted this sea. After he had explored the expanse of the Northern Ocean in his ships, at length there lay before his eyes the darksome bounds of the world’s edge and by retracing his course he barely escaped the vast pit of the abyss in safety.’
The skaldic verses which represent immediately contemporary evidence for Norsemen reaching the North American continent have been dated to the early eleventh century and Harald’s contact with Iceland would assuredly have kept him informed of exploration to Greenland and beyond, so it is not impossible that he might have been tempted to follow in the wake of the Vinland voyagers. Had he actually done so, of course, his skalds would have surely celebrated the adventure and yet no such verses have survived even long enough to reach the attention of the saga-makers. Thus Adam of Bremen’s claim for Harald’s North Atlantic venturing rests entirely upon his own authority and yet his writings demonstrate a well-informed interest in the subject and so cannot be dismissed entirely out of hand.
It is in the ecclesiastical orbit, however, that the eastern influence is best recorded and here the saga account of Harald’s church-building at Nidaros is not only rich in detail but reliably supported by more recent archaeological investigation. Snorri tells of Harald having completed construction of the church dedicated to Olaf by Magnus but left unfinished at the time of his death, and building two churches of his own, one dedicated to St Gregory beside his royal residence on the banks of the River Nid and a St Mary’s church (interestingly bearing the same dedication as the earliest Varangian chapel in Constantinople) on the site where Olaf’s remains had lain through the winter following his martyrdom.
There is every reason, of course, to assume Harald’s genuine interest in memorials to his kinsman Olaf, who was already effectively established as Norway’s patron saint and whose cult was ever more widely revered throughout the Scandinavian world within a few decades of his martyrdom. Yet it would be fully characteristic of Harald to have had a more political motive when every opportunity of association with the saint would more securely establish himself as a worthy successor in the kingship. In so doing, he would surely have been inspired by the example of Jaroslav and particularly by his magnificent Hagia Sophia which Harald had seen under construction in Kiev and in which he would have recognised a reflection of the prestige of the Grand Prince no less clearly than a monumental dedication to the Holy Wisdom.
While the reverence of Olaf as saint and martyr had finally established Christianity in Norway by the mid-eleventh century, the Christian tradition with which Harald himself would have been most familiar after spending so much of his adult life in Russia and Byzantium would have been the eastern Orthodox faith, so it is unsurprising that he invited eastern churchmen to his Norwegian court and arranged for them to visit Iceland also. Their presence in Scandinavia evidently incurred disapproval not only from the archbishop of Hamburg (which met with a typically defiant response), but evidently also on the part of the papacy itself when a papal legation was sent in protest to Harald’s court and promptly thrown out. All of which would very well correspond to the closing line of the account of Araltes in the Book of Advice to an Emperor in which he is complimented on having ‘maintained faith and friendship towards the Rhomaioi [the Byzantines] when he was ruling in his own land’.
Curiously, Snorri makes no reference to eastern churchmen in Iceland, but he does pay full tribute to Harald as ‘a great friend to all Icelanders’, telling of his sending four ships with cargoes of flour to a famine-stricken Iceland (thus dating the voyage to 1056) and of his gift of a bell for the church at Thingvellir. It has been suggested that Harald’s generosity to the Icelanders was still more generously repaid by the accounts of him in Icelandic sources, and it may well have been so, especially in view of his patronage of so many court-poets from that country. This was very probably what Snorri meant by ‘his great many acts of generosity to the people who stayed with him’, and yet the only Icelanders mentioned by name in this passage are Harald’s long-standing lieutenants, Halldor Snorrason and Ulf Ospaksson.
Both had served with Harald throughout most of his time in Byzantine service and both returned with him to Norway. Ulf came of an old Icelandic family (ultimately descended from Ketil Bjornsson, called ‘Flatnose’, a Norse king in the Hebrides in the mid-ninth century whose offspring were among the earliest settlers in Iceland) and was a nephew of Gudrun Osvifsdottir, heroine of Laxdæla saga. His remarkable loyalty to Harald through some three decades in his service was justly rewarded in Norway where he was appointed the king’s marshal, made a lenderman in the Trondelag and given Jorunn, daughter of Thorberg Arnason, as his wife. Snorri makes particular mention of Ulf’s shrewd judgement, which is most evident in military matters and even to the extent that had he not died so early in the year 1066 Harald’s warrior’s way might not have come to an end in the manner that it did.
Ulf’s comrade-in-arms, Halldor Snorrason, was a man of very different personality. Snorri tells of his huge build and powerful strength, yet frankly admits his personality to have been ‘blunt, outspoken, sullen and obstinate’. Clearly Halldor was never going to be the most diplomatic of courtiers and so it is hardly surprising that some five years at the Norwegian court were to prove quite long enough and sometime around 1051 he returned to Iceland where he lived to a great age on his farm at Hjardarholt enjoying celebrity as a famous storyteller. Even while in retirement in Iceland, Halldor would still seem to have been in contact with Harald, even though his departure from the Norwegian court is said to have involved a dispute with the king over payment due (according to the Tale of Halldor Snorrason in Morkinskinna), a tradition not unconnected with Harald’s increasingly imperious conduct reported in the saga. Even his favourite skald told how the king would brook no opposition to his demands and Snorri quotes a full strophe from Thjodolf telling how ‘neither could the king’s own men go against his wishes’.
If it was this aspect of his regal personality which prompted Adam of Bremen to call Harald a ‘tyrant’ and allowed later historians to endow him with the cognomen harðraði – whether translated as ‘hard counsel’ or as ‘ruthless’ – the same autocratic mind-set was to prove his first line of defence against the hostile native elements who had challenged Norwegian kings throughout the first decades of the eleventh century and brought down his half-brother Olaf as they had Olaf Tryggvason before him. The focal point of that hostility still lay around the Trondelag, long the heartland of the jarls of Lade and where now Einar Tambarskelve, himself son-in-law to the mighty Jarl Hakon, represented their effective successor in all but title. Although most often hostile and only nominally conciliatory to Olaf, Einar had reclaimed the kingship of Norway for Olaf’s son in 1035 and remained staunchly loyal to ‘Magnus the Good’ thereafter, yet he clearly had no similar regard for his successor (even though Einar’s son Eindridi was married to a daughter
of Harald’s sister, Gunnhild).
Skilled in law-dealing, Einar took any and every opportunity to speak for the Trondelag bonders against the royal officers at assemblies, even in the presence of the king himself. That attitude of defiance soon developed into a policy of deliberate provocation as the saga tells of his building ‘a great following of men on his estates and bringing a still greater force with him when he came to Nidaros’. On one occasion, he is said to have brought eight or nine longships with a force five hundred strong which he boldly disembarked and marched through the town in full view of the king’s residence. This scarcely veiled challenge prompted Harald to compose some lines of verse proclaiming his response to ‘the mighty chieftain who means to fill the throne-seat’:
Einar with his flailing blade
will drive me from my kingdom
unless he is forced to kiss
the axe’s thin-lipped edge.
Here, then, was a king who intended to take no prisoners and awaited only the opportunity to arrange the axe-kissing he had promised in his poetry.
While there is no doubt as to Harald having arranged the killing of Einar, and of his son Eindridi with him, the saga record supplies two quite different accounts of how it happened. The version found similarly in Morkinskinna and Flateyjarbók tells of Einar being invited to a feast at Nidaros where he falls into a drunken sleep while a skald is celebrating the king’s adventures. Harald has a kinsman suddenly wake him with a straw applied to his nostrils and in a state of embarrassment so acute that Einar takes revenge by killing the offender the next morning, providing the king with just reason to put both him and his son to death.