Harald Hardrada

by John Marsden

  The compressed chronology of Snorri’s saga narrative places the full story of Hakon’s Danish exile and homecoming before the account of Kalv Arnason’s return and demise, thus distorting a more realistic sequence of events. If Hakon truly had stayed aboard his warships ‘winter and summer’, it is hardly possible that he could have left Norway in umbrage before Kalv’s arrival in the later months of 1050, become established in Svein’s service and then overreached himself in time to return to Norway before Kalv was killed on Fyn some time in the summer of 1051. It would be more reasonable, then, to sacrifice the convenience of the saga-maker’s storytelling and propose Hakon’s homecoming, appointment as jarl of the Upplands and marriage to Ragnhild somewhat later in the 1050s – although quite certainly before the year 1062 when he makes his next and most significant appearance in the saga as the hero of the great battle on the River Nissa.

  Although Snorri claims that Harald continued his raiding of Denmark ‘every summer’ after his succession to the kingship, the saga describes no further raids through a full decade after the attack on Fyn island in 1051. Exactly ten years, in fact, because the next account of such an expedition is quite firmly placed in the summer of 1061 and after Harald’s ‘founding’ of the town of Oslo on the northernmost shore of the Vik estuary (now Oslofjord). The key importance of Oslo – at least, as suggested by the saga – would seem to have been as a forward base for the assembly and provisioning of the fleets about to sail for Denmark or held in ready proximity against Danish attack. The fleet of 1061, however, was made up of lighter craft manned by very much smaller forces than the full battle-fleet levied in 1049. The reason for this more modest operation would appear to have been the expectation of little, if any, resistance – even though fairly effective opposition had evidently been ready to resist the landing on Fyn island in 1051. It is, of course, possible that the raid on Fyn was planned in full knowledge of the hostile reception it was to encounter and with the deliberate purpose of committing Kalv Arnason to a suicide mission, and yet the expedition of 1061 would seem to have been caught unawares on Jutland where ‘the inhabitants mustered forces and defended their homeland’.

  Unprepared for so serious a confrontation, Harald sailed on into Limfjord to begin raiding settlements along its banks, but wherever his forces landed they came up against determined opposition – and then his spies brought news that Svein had arrived at the mouth of the fjord with a large warfleet. Fortunately for the Norwegians, the enemy pursuit was delayed by the narrow channel into Limfjord which allowed entry for only one ship at a time, so Harald sailed up to a wider point where just a narrow strip of land lay between the fjord and the North Sea. Waiting until nightfall, the Norwegian craft were brought on to land, unloaded of their plunder and carried across to the seashore where they were loaded up again and ready to put to sea by dawn.

  Having escaped Svein’s fleet, Harald’s ships sailed homeward past Jutland while he swore that he would bring a bigger fleet and greater forces the next time he came to Denmark. Indeed, the story may well have been included in the saga purely by way of prelude to the events of the following year culminating in the epic sea-battle on the Nissa. All through the following winter of 1061/2 while Harald was at Nidaros, his new warship was being built at Eyrar and this was a vessel to rank with the very greatest launched in the northlands, even with Olaf Tryggvason’s famous ‘Long Serpent’ described in his saga as the ‘best-fitted and most costly ever to be built in Norway’. In fact, Harald’s ship would have been marginally larger than Olaf’s, built with thirty-five pair of benches when the ‘Long Serpent’ had thirty-four. Thus driven by seventy oars, it is described by the saga as much broader in the beam than the usual warship and so is thought to have been of a type called the búz, its design based on that of a large sea-going merchant vessel but adapted for the purpose of warfare. As flamboyant as it was formidable, its bows were inlaid with gold, its prow surmounted by a dragon’s head and its stern-post by the monster’s tail – these latter features inspiring the skald Thjodolf to an abundance of dragon imagery when he celebrated the ship in verse.

  That same winter Harald issued a challenge to Svein to meet him in battle on the Gaut Elf river in the coming spring and thus resolve which of them was to be king of both countries. Preparation of his forces was already under way and a full levy of all Norway brought together a great army, but the final flourish was the launching on to the Nid of Harald’s new capital ship, described – at first hand – by Thjodolf as ‘floating, with flaming mane and its sides all gilded, the dragon’. It would appear that Thjodolf accompanied his king when the fleet sailed, if only on the evidence of no less than six of his strophes quoted in the saga and describing the voyage south from Nidaros to the Vik where a storm blew up, scattering the ships to find shelter in the lee of islands and the safety of Oslofjord.

  As soon as the weather improved, the fleet formed up and sailed on to the Gaut Elf, only to discover that Svein’s ships and men were lying off to the south of Fyn and the Smalands. Once again, Harald is said to have assumed his old enemy was avoiding battle and so sent his ‘bonders’ levy’ home, thus reducing his fleet to 150 ships which he took ‘raiding far and wide’ along the coast of Halland. Coming into Laholms fjord, however, he sighted Svein’s fleet numbering some three hundred vessels and thus representing twice the strength of his own. It must be said that Snorri’s repetition of this same formula does little to support the credibility of his saga as historical record, and yet his source of information in this instance is impressively reliable when the figures are derived from poetry (Nisavísur, or ‘Nissa river verses’, of which as many as seven strophes survive) composed by the skald Stein Herdisason who was an eye-witness to the battle aboard Ulf Ospaksson’s ship.5

  The size of the enemy fleet so alarmed some of the Norwegian warriors that they urged Harald to pull back, but the king remained quite determined and his address to the troops is preserved in another strophe from Stein Herdisason: ‘Rather than flee shall each of us, unfaltering, fall dead heaped upon the other.’ At which his fleet drew up into battle array with Harald’s great dragon-ship at the centre and Ulf’s vessel alongside, while the Trondelag contingent lay on one side and Jarl Hakon Ivarsson’s flotilla on the other. Svein brought up the Danish fleet, including no less than six jarls among its commanders, and he set his own ship to face Harald’s with Finn Arnason beside him. Now all the ships in the central battle lines of both sides were roped together, but Svein’s fleet was so great in number that many vessels could not be lashed into his main formation and so were left free to engage with the enemy as their skippers felt inclined. Similarly on the Norwegian side, where Hakon Ivarsson’s flotilla was left untied and also free to engage with individual enemy craft, as indeed they did and with great success in clearing every ship that they were able to grapple.

  The manoeuvring and manhandling of so many oar-driven warships cannot have been easily or swiftly accomplished, and so it was late in the afternoon of 9 August 1062 by the time the fleets engaged around the mouth of the Nissa. Much of the saga account of the fighting relies on descriptive skaldic verse – two strophes by Stein Herdisason, two and a half strophes by Thjodolf, who was apparently also in attendance, and a single strophe by Arnor Jarlaskald who was almost certainly far away in Orkney while the battle was fought. As might be expected, they all tell of fierce fighting by heroic warriors on both sides and yet also securely confirm all the points of detail in Snorri’s narrative (for which, of course, they provided the principal source).

  The opposing formations, each of them apparently roped into a huge fighting-platform, seem not to have reached the stage of hand-to-hand action for some time, probably because they were made up of the largest high-hulled vessels, and so the lengthy opening phase of the conflict was conducted with projectile weaponry, with Harald himself wielding his bow for hours on end on the evidence of Thjodolf’s lines: ‘All night long, Norway’s lord let arrows fly from yew-bow to shining shields.’ The
free-ranging craft on both sides were better able to engage, of course, and it was in this sector of the fighting that Hakon Ivarsson is said to have most excelled himself. Danish ships tried to keep out of his path, but Hakon kept up the pursuit, clearing the decks of ship after ship until a skiff found its way through the mêlée to summon him over to a flank of Harald’s formation which was giving way under pressure and taking heavy casualties. Rowing to that sector of the action, Hakon attacked with such ferocity that the Danes fell back, and so he continued to fight all through the night, somehow always managing to be wherever there was the greatest need of his assistance.

  Before the night was over the principal Danish formation finally broke up into flight and Harald was able to lead his men aboard Svein’s capital ship, clearing its deck so thoroughly that the only members of its crew left alive were those who had jumped over the side and been lucky enough to be hauled aboard other ships as they fled the carnage. Svein’s banner was down now and no fewer than seventy of his vessels cleared, while all the rest of his ships and men were in flight, with the notable exception of Finn Arnason, Svein’s jarl of Halland but now an old man with failing eyesight, who had stayed till the very last – ‘in mid-column fighting, too proud to flee’ according to Thjodolf – and was finally made captive. Yet there was nowhere any sign of the king himself.

  While Harald and his ships rowed off in pursuit of the escaping enemy, Jarl Hakon stayed with his ship which was so densely surrounded by damaged and deserted craft that he could scarcely force his way out through the tangle of ship-timber, and it was then that a small boat rowed up alongside and a tall stranger wearing a heavy cowl called out, asking for the jarl by name. Hakon was helping tend the wounds of one of his warriors and turned to ask who it was that called him. ‘This is Vandrað (a cognomen used elsewhere in the sagas for one in difficulties) who wants to speak with you,’ adding in a whisper, ‘I would accept my life from you if you would grant it me.’ Hakon called men to take the fellow aboard a skiff and serve as his safe conduct past Norwegian vessels, then to take him ashore to a named farmer who was to give him a horse and his son to go as his escort. They did just as they were bid and delivered the stranger to the farmer who likewise followed Hakon’s instruction, although the farmer’s wife was less welcoming. On learning the outcome of the battle, she expressed little surprise because she knew the Danish king Svein to be a coward as well as lame. Hakon’s men took their boat and returned to the ships, while ‘Vandrad’ went on his own way, but there is a further point of particular interest in Snorri’s anecdote, because the skeleton of Svein Estridsson – exhumed and scientifically examined in more recent times – has shown that, if not actually lame, he certainly would have walked with a limp.

  Meanwhile, Harald had abandoned pursuit of the enemy and was back aboard Svein’s ship sharing out the spoils, quite certain now that the Danish king must be dead elsewhere or drowned overboard when his body was nowhere to be found on deck – and it was only afterwards that he learned of Svein’s reappearance on Zealand where he was gathering together his surviving troops. More immediately though, Harald had a prisoner of war to deal with because Finn Arnason had been brought before him. With the mocking complaint that the Norwegians would now have the nuisance of dragging an old blind man around with them, he asked Finn if he was ready to ask for his life to be spared.

  ‘Not by a dog like you!’ ‘Then perhaps by your kinsman Magnus?’ Harald’s son (by Thora and thus Finn’s great-nephew) was in command of one of the Norwegian warships, but Finn would not ask it of a puppy. ‘Will you accept it from your niece, Thora, for she is here also?’ ‘Ah! Then it is no wonder you fought so lustily if the mare was with you!’

  Harald spared Finn’s life, of course, and kept the old man with him for a while until his surly temper became so very wearying that he was given leave to return to his king Svein and put ashore on Halland. Harald then sailed north to Oslo and it was there he passed the winter.

  What had befallen in the battle was the talk of his court throughout that winter of 1062/3. Surely the skalds celebrated the king’s victory, but when the warriors spoke of what they had seen it was generally agreed that Hakon Ivarsson had been the bravest, the shrewdest and the luckiest of the heroes, even to the point where it was said that it was he who had really won the battle.

  Hakon himself, meanwhile, had returned to his jarldom of the Upplands before winter, but his exploits on the Nissa were still the most popular topic of conversation in Oslo in the following spring when someone recalled speaking with the men who had ferried ‘Vandrad’ ashore and declared Hakon’s luckiest escapade to have been his rescue of Svein Estridsson. Just one remark among many passed over the drinking horns, of course, but the saga quotes a proverb in the northlands to the effect that ‘Many are the king’s ears’ and, indeed, the story was very soon brought to Harald, who assembled a troop of some two hundred housecarls to ride out to the Upplands that very same night. Even then, it would seem that Hakon’s luck still held, because a friendlier soul bribed a farmer to hasten ahead of the king and warn the jarl of his coming, so when Harald reached Hakon’s house he found it empty. The warning had been brought to Hakon late in the night, yet there was just enough time to see all his valuables hidden safely away in the woods before he and his retinue took horse over the border into Sweden. There he was welcomed by King Steinkel (who had succeeded Onund-Jacob in 1056) and stayed with him at court into the summer.

  Harald having returned north to pass the summer in Nidaros, Hakon was able to return to the Upplands in his absence and when the king returned south in the autumn Hakon crossed back again into the Swedish province of Vermaland where Steinkel had endowed him with the lordship. So it was that when Harald’s officers were despatched to the Upplands that winter for the customary collection of revenues, the Upplanders refused payment, saying they would gladly pay their taxes but only to their own jarl Hakon.

  As it happened, the king had greater affairs of state on hand in the winter of 1063/4, because emissaries were already in negotiation with Denmark. After some fifteen years of battle and raiding, both peoples now wanted peace and pressure was growing upon their kings to come to some form of settlement. Thus in the spring of 1064 Harald and Svein arrived, each with his own force of ships and men, at a pre-arranged meeting on the Gaut Elf river where, after lengthy and tortuous argument, a treaty was eventually agreed. Each king was to hold his own kingdom within its own ancient borders, no compensation was to be paid for injuries and depredations suffered through the long years of conflict, prisoners were to be exchanged and the kings were to remain at peace as long as they both should live.

  Curiously though, Snorri is alone among the saga-makers in setting out so much detail of the peace-making and the six strophes of verse which he quotes in support of his account are suspiciously attributed to an anonymous skald. Still more curiously, Saxo Grammaticus’ history supplies no account whatsoever of any treaty, recording only that Svein rebuilt his forces for the defence of Denmark after the defeat of 1062, while Harald’s ambitions were already being drawn in other directions. There is no doubt that a settlement of some kind was reached and almost certainly in 1064, when Snorri later dates the treaty between Harald and Svein to the second year after the battle on the Nissa which had been fought ‘fifteen years after the death of King Magnus [in 1047]’.

  In fact, a peace settlement had become the only realistic option on both sides, because the wasteful warfare which had drained the resources of two nations for a decade and half had achieved nothing. Even though Svein had lost every battle he fought and despite all the intimidation of Harald’s relentless raiding, the Danes had remained loyal to their king for more than twenty years and left not a trace of doubt as to the man whom they preferred as their ruler. As to Harald’s own intentions, it has been suggested that Saxo is correct and that he may already have been thinking of further-flung conquest, but the immediate course of events would indicate his concern more urgently focused on
the rumbling dissension within his own kingdom and the threat still posed by the last representative of the line of an ancient enemy. The same Hakon Ivarsson who had become the effective figurehead of dissension in the Upplands was the great-grandson – and, indeed, the very namesake – of the mighty jarl of Lade who had ruled Norway for fully twenty years before the advent of Olaf Tryggvason.

  Harald returned to Oslo after the peace-making and passed the summer there while his officers went again into the Upplands and were again refused their dues, payment still being held back for the return of Jarl Hakon who was said to have already assembled a great force of Gautlanders. That news apparently prompted Harald to action and by the end of the summer he had sailed to Konungahella where he assembled a fleet of light craft to carry his troops up the Gaut Elf river. Snorri tells of these vessels being hauled ashore and carried overland around the waterfalls (now called the Trollhätten Falls) as the expedition made its way upriver – a passage which would have been reminiscent for Harald of the Dnieper rapids on his voyage to Miklagard some thirty years before – and thus they eventually came to the wide expanse of Lake Vanern. Rowing eastward across the lake, Harald came ashore on the far side and there learned of Hakon’s whereabouts, but the jarl had already had word of the Norwegian advance and was bringing a sizeable force of Gautlanders to meet it, apparently expecting to repel a plunder raid.