Harald Hardrada

by John Marsden

  I have been using the cautious term ‘attributed to’ in this context because there is no confirmation of the author’s identity in any of the numerous medieval manuscripts of the work – most of them dating from the fourteenth century – even though the great weight of later evidence recognising him as Snorri Sturluson (and the total absence of any suggested rival claimant) puts the question almost entirely beyond doubt. Although there is no known original manuscript, there is one single leaf surviving from a copy set down before 1275 and believed to be the closest to Snorri’s original on the evidence of its full text, which is preserved in at least three good transcripts. The title Heimskringla (‘the world’s orb’), which is derived from the work’s opening line (‘The orb of the world on which mankind dwells . . .’) and has been applied since the seventeenth century, has a cosmic resonance well befitting the scope of its cycle of sixteen sagas extending from the mythic origins and legendary ancestry of the Norwegian royal house through to the last quarter of the twelfth century.

  Snorri Sturluson himself was one of the most prominent figures in the Iceland of his time, a man of wealth and power as well as literature and learning. Although born into one of the most powerful Icelandic kindreds around the year 1179, he was to acquire much of his wealth and land through marriage, while also seeking to extend his influence by marrying his daughters into other important Icelandic families. He made two extended visits to the Scandinavian mainland where he is said to have been honoured with the title of jarl, as well as twice holding the presidential post of lawspeaker in the Althing, the Icelanders’ parliament. In his later years, however, Snorri fell victim to a poisonous blend of family feud and political intrigue when offence caused to his resentful in-laws and to the Norwegian king Hakon Hakonsson resulted in an attack on his home by an armed band led by one of his sons-in-law. They found Iceland’s most eminent man of letters, sixty-two years of age and utterly defenceless, taking refuge in his cellar and there they murdered him on a September night in the year 1241. Other than that lightly sketched outline, Snorri Sturluson’s remarkable life story lies beyond the scope of these pages and yet there are some aspects with such significant bearing upon his authority as Harald Hardrada’s saga-maker as to demand due notice here.

  When his father, Sturla Thordason of Hvamm, died Snorri was only five years old and was passed into the foster-care of Jon Loptsson, the most cultivated of Icelandic chieftains, whose home at Oddi was the foremost cultural centre in Iceland at a time when Icelanders could genuinely boast the pre-eminent literary culture of the Scandinavian world. There can be little doubt that the civilised ambience of Oddi, and especially its fine library, offered an exceptional stimulus to the literary inclinations of a youngster who might well be thought to have inherited a gift for poetry by way of his mother’s descent from the warrior-poet Egil Skalla-Grimsson, who is now best known as the hero of the famous Egil’s saga, another work often attributed to Snorri’s authorship. In fact, there can be no question of Snorri’s accomplishment and learning in the art of the skáld (the Old Norse term for a ‘court-poet’), not only because one work of which he is firmly identified as author is the outstanding medieval treatise on skaldic verse known as the Snorra Edda (although more usually in the English-speaking world as the Prose Edda), but because his own youthful praise-poetry sent to the Norwegian court made so great an impression that he was invited to visit Norway. He was to take up that invitation in 1218 and spent the next two years on the Scandinavian mainland, much of that time in the service of Jarl Skuli, who held the office of regent to the young king Hakon Hakonsson.

  The decade following his return from Norway in 1220 represented a period of peace in Icelandic society, a lull before the storm of internecine violence that erupted in the later 1230s. Snorri was already a man of great wealth, perhaps even the richest in Iceland, and settled on the farm at Reykjaholt to which he had moved from his wife’s estate in 1206. There he would undoubtedly have built up his own library and there too he apparently had the assistance of an amanuensis, so it was at Reykjaholt that he is thought to have written most, if not all, of his surviving works – not only Heimskringla, but also his Edda and, quite possibly, Egil’s saga too – between the years 1220 and 1230. The key item of evidence supporting this unusually precise dating is a passage found in Íslendinga saga (‘Saga of the Icelanders’, a history of his own Sturlung kindred written within living memory of Snorri’s lifetime by his nephew, Sturla Thordason) which tells how another nephew, Sturla Sigvatsson, spent the winter of 1230–1 at Reykjaholt where he ‘had saga-books copied from the works which Snorri had composed’.

  While the writing of Heimskringla can be convincingly placed at Reykjaholt in the 1220s, the gathering together of all the history and tradition upon which it draws must have represented the work of a lifetime for a man who had by then entered into his fifth decade. It was a pursuit upon which Snorri had probably first embarked in his foster-home at Oddi and continued throughout the following years, especially when his travels around Norway and Sweden during the first sojourn on the Scandinavian mainland would have allowed visits to historic sites associated with Norwegian kings and introduced him also to oral traditions which were to inform his sagas.

  As to his documentary sources, Snorri’s own prologue to Heimskringla acknowledges a debt to an earlier historian, the esteemed Icelander Ari Thorgilsson, and to his ‘lives of the kings’, presumably a saga-history but a work now long since lost. He does, however, make passing reference to other written sources which have survived into modern times and of these an early version of Orkneyinga saga – known to Snorri as Jarls’ saga – will be of special importance here by reason of its bearing on Harald Hardrada. Meticulous scholarly research into the text of Heimskringla has identified further documentary sources, notably Ágrip and Morkinskinna, upon which he appears to have drawn but does not mention by name. There is, however, another body of historical record, quite independent of the narrative histories, and this is the wealth of skaldic verse which represented a key primary source for the saga-maker, having been used first by the author of Ágrip, to a greater extent by those who composed Morkinskinna and Fagrskinna, but most extensively of all by Snorri in Heimskringla.

  These court-poets known as skálds, almost all of them firmly identified as Icelanders, had been in richly rewarded attendance on Norwegian kings since the time of Harald Fair-hair in the later ninth century. Usually informed at first hand and sometimes even themselves eye-witness to the events they described, their poetry can be taken to represent an immediately contemporary source of history. Before the battle of Stiklestad, Olaf insisted on his skalds sheltering within a shield-wall in order that they should see the conflict and survive to commemorate its deeds in verse for posterity. So too, Thjodolf Arnorsson, who was Harald Hardrada’s favourite among his own court-poets, fought beside his king at Stamford Bridge and is thought to have been slain in the battle or to have died soon afterwards of wounds suffered there. Heimskringla contains very many more examples of the first-hand authority of skaldic verse, as Snorri himself confirms in his prologue when he acknowledges having ‘gathered the best of our information from what we are told in these poems which were recited before the chieftains themselves or their sons’.

  The contemporaneity of such information thus lies almost entirely beyond dispute, and yet reasonable doubt might still be cast on its objectivity when, as Snorri admitted, ‘it is the way of the court-poet to lavish greatest praise on those for whom the poems were composed’. Even so, he was still able to ‘regard as the truth everything which is found in those poems concerning their expeditions or their battles . . . because none would dare tell the king of deeds which everyone present would know to be nonsense and untruth. To do so would have been mockery, not praise.’ Clearly, then, the skald addressing his praise-poetry to the king in the company of a warrior nobility, at least some of whom could have witnessed the events he was celebrating, might be expected to aggrandise or exaggerate, but he cert
ainly could not lie.

  The art of the skald was highly sophisticated in terms of poetic form as well as being a style of writing dominated by the kenning, a compound word-form found throughout the early medieval literatures of the northern world and characterised by idiomatic imagery often alluding to pagan tradition. While such allusions are often elaborate to the point of obscurity for the modern reader, there are more straightforward illustrative examples of the kenning such as the skald Thjodolf’s calling Harald Hardrada ‘feeder of ravens’ to signify his battle prowess and likewise referring to his warships as ‘ocean dragons’. Scarcely less complex than the most elaborate kennings were the strict forms of stanza, metre and rhyme which defined the structure of skaldic verse and also served to protect it from the corruption which afflicted the folk-tale and similar material preserved in oral tradition. Such was evidently Snorri’s own opinion expressed in his prologue to Heimskringla, where he suggests that ‘these poems are the least likely to be distorted, if properly composed and sensibly interpreted’.

  Interpretation was of crucial importance when skaldic verse was used as a source of history, as is demonstrated by examples of misconstrued skaldic references leading to erroneous conclusions found elsewhere in the saga literature. Snorri’s own extensive knowledge of the art of the skald is so impressively confirmed by his Edda that his interpretation of skaldic verse as historical record must be accounted more reliable than that of other saga-makers, and especially so in his meticulous identification of the skalds whose work he quotes and in his subtle indications as to the authority of their evidence. It is a sphere of expertise of most especial value for Harald’s saga, as Snorri himself implied when he wrote of ‘a great deal of information about King Harald found in the verses which Icelandic poets presented to him and to his sons. Because of his own great interest in poetry, he was one of their very best friends.’ Not only was Harald the patron of poets, but he was also a skald in his own right and some number of his verses are preserved in Snorri’s saga. ‘No king of Norway was a better poet’, in the opinion of the eminent authority Gabriel Turville-Petre, ‘and none showed a deeper appreciation of the art than Harald did, nor expressed his views in more forthright terms.’2

  While Snorri recognised the legacy of skaldic verse as the most reliable of his sources, he makes a point of emphasising his caution in selecting information about Harald from elsewhere in the oral tradition: ‘Although we have been told various tales and heard about other deeds . . . many of his feats and triumphs have not been included here, partly because of our lack of knowledge and partly because we are reluctant to place on record stories which are not substantiated.’

  As well as the evidence he had gleaned from the skalds and earlier saga-makers, Snorri Sturluson was singularly fortunate in his access to an important source bearing on Harald Hardrada within his own family, because he himself was directly descended from a daughter of Halldor Snorrason who had been one of Harald’s two principal lieutenants throughout his years as a Varangian in Byzantine service. A formidable character in his own right – and one who will make further appearances in these pages – Halldor is recognised by the most authoritative modern work on the subject as ‘the Icelandic Varangian who is most popular in Norse sources, being in this respect close to King Harald himself . . . [and] almost certainly the source for the bulk of the Icelandic tradition in respect of the King’s Varangian career’.3 Halldor returned to Norway with Harald and apparently remained for a time at court after his accession to the kingship, but relations between the two were not often the most harmonious and eventually Halldor made his way home to Iceland where he earned great renown as a tale-spinner, principally on the strength of his adventuring in the east. His stories may even have been worked into a saga, albeit one which survived only in oral tradition and was probably never set down in writing, although Halldor himself is the subject of two tales preserved in the Morkinskinna and Flateyjarbók manuscript collections. It was probably inevitable that Halldor’s original stories should have become corrupted during more than a century of oral transmission, even had they not been greatly elaborated already in the course of Halldor’s own repeated retellings, and yet Snorri’s family connection can still be said to have provided him with privileged access to material for his Harald’s saga which had its origin – even if no more than that – in genuinely first-hand recollections of Harald Hardrada’s Varangian years.

  The word saga is sometimes translated into English as ‘history’; however, for all the care with which Snorri Sturluson claims to have handled his sources, the Harald’s saga in Heimskringla still cannot really be read as history in the modern sense of the term. It does offer the most comprehensive medieval account of three and a half decades of Harald’s career and yet its narrative, inevitably uneven over so wide a compass, sometimes falling short on plausibility and on occasion quite inaccurate on points of detail, must be constantly checked against other records, most especially those bearing on Russian, Byzantine and Anglo-Saxon contexts. While its principal authority as an historical document must rest upon its preservation of the closely contemporary skaldic poetry – a total of more than ninety strophes (eight-line stanza form) or half-strophes from a dozen different skalds – it also deserves credit for its preservation of other evidence, ultimately deriving from oral tradition and however degraded, which might otherwise have been entirely lost to history.

  In many respects, Snorri’s sagas bear a resemblance to medieval hagiographies (or lives of saints), which themselves derive from oral traditions preserved in monastic communities. Indeed, his Olaf Tryggvason’s saga and Olaf the Saint’s saga in Heimskringla were almost certainly informed by lives of those two fiercely evangelistic warrior kings written in the Icelandic monastery of Thingeyrar, and his Harald’s saga might be recognised as their secular counterpart with the similar intention of preserving a reputation held high in the folk memory of his own time. If such was his purpose, then Snorri can surely be said to have succeeded because the portrait of Harald Hardrada which emerges from the pages of his saga quite unmistakably reflects the reputation of the most feared warrior of the northern world.

  In his obituary of Harald in the closing pages of the saga, Snorri writes of having ‘no particular accounts of his youth until he took part in the battle of Stiklestad at the age of fifteen’. Now that is a puzzling statement indeed because there is one anecdote, however historically dubious, which is specifically concerned with Harald in early childhood and must have been known to Snorri when it was included in his Olaf the Saint’s saga, the longest of all sixteen in the Heimskringla collection and almost certainly written before Harald’s saga. Moreover, a fairly full account of Harald’s parentage, ancestry and background can be pieced together, principally from Olaf the Saint’s saga but also from other sagas in the Heimskringla collection, and might be usefully surveyed to conclude this introduction.

  First of all, though, there is a question of nomenclature. Thus far, as also in the title, I have used the name-form ‘Harald Hardrada’ simply because it is probably the one most immediately recognisable to an English-speaking readership and even though no form of ‘Hardrada’ is found applied to Harald in any of the skaldic poetry or other closely contemporary sources and so would seem not to have been used in his own time. ‘Hardrada’, while often taken to mean ‘the hard ruler’, represents the anglicised form of the Norse term harðraði, literally ‘hard counsel’ although perhaps better translated as ‘ruthless’. As to how Harald might have been known to his contemporaries, it is hardly unexpected to find Adam of Bremen calling him malus (‘evil’ or ‘wicked’), although rather more curious is the cognomen har fagera applied to him by the northern recension of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. If har fagera represents an Old English corruption of hárfagri, the cognomen borne by Harald’s celebrated ancestor Harald Fair-hair, it is hardly likely that a late eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon chronicler would have confused the Norwegian king killed in England as recently as 1066 with a na
mesake who had died some hundred and twenty years earlier, but perhaps it is just possible that he took hárfagri to have been a family surname.

  The earliest known association of harðraði with Harald in a Scandinavian source occurs in the verse treatise Háttalykill attributed to Orkney/Icelandic authorship in the mid-twelfth century, but it is there applied to him and to other warlords simply as an adjective. Its application to Harald as a specifically personal byname does not appear until more than a century later when, as Turville-Petre explains, ‘Norwegians and Icelanders of a much later age developed the suitable nickname harðraði . . . [which] seems to creep into chapter-headings and regnal lists probably during the latter half of the thirteenth century’.4

  What can be said with confidence is that Harald was not known to Snorri Sturluson as harðraði because, while other saga titles in Heimskringla – such as Olaf the Saint’s saga and Magnus the Good’s saga, to name those of Harald’s half-brother and nephew as just two examples – incorporate bynames established and current in the early thirteenth century, his own saga is headed with the straightforward patronymic as Harald Sigurdsson’s saga, which will conveniently serve here to introduce the subject of his parentage. Harald’s father was Sigurd Halfdansson, a great-grandson of Harald Fair-hair and king of Ringerike in the Uppland region north of Oslofjord. Sigurd’s very practical interest in farming earned him the less than kingly nickname of syr (or ‘sow’ because he ‘nosed about rooting up the ground’) from the saga-makers. While Sigurd Syr appears on occasion as the full equal of his peers and a respected voice often tempered with wise caution, other anecdotes in Snorri’s Olaf the Saint’s saga seem to delight in portraying him as the harassed second husband of the formidable Ásta Gudbrondsdottir, the wife who bore him two daughters and three sons, of whom the youngest was Harald.