by John Marsden
The course of the battle of Stamford Bridge as described in the sagas corresponds in most essentials to the traditional sequence of assaults on the shield-wall repulsed by arrow and spear until at last the defending formation breaks out in a charge and the day is decided by hand-to-hand combat. None of which would surprise the military historian were it not for the sagas’ clear statement of the English attacking as cavalry, because while the Anglo-Saxon warrior is known to have ridden to battle on horseback he is always believed to have dismounted on reaching the field where he invariably fought on foot. Numerous contributors to a long-running scholarly debate have suggested various other battles as the model followed by the saga-makers, but it is the one fought at Hastings where Harold Godwinson was defeated and slain just nineteen days after his own defeat of Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge which is usually suggested as the likely exemplar.
The most unhelpful factor in this debate is the absence from other accounts of Stamford Bridge of any detail which might confirm or deny the saga-makers’ version of events, and this has enabled the suggestion from at least one quarter that the saga version might, at least to some extent, be historically accurate. Nor can such a proposal be dismissed out of hand, because it is certainly not impossible that Harold Godwinson might have taken advantage of so many of his housecarls having been mounted for the northward march to order them into battle on horseback against a shield-wall such as he himself may not have encountered before. He might even have been inspired to do so by the Norman cavalry he would have seen while in service with Duke William some two years earlier – and yet cavalry warfare of the quality perfected by the Normans is a rather more sophisticated technique than simply fighting on horseback and it is inconceivable that Anglo-Saxon warriors armed to fight on foot as heavy infantry could have gone into battle on horseback with anything akin to the expertise of Norman cavalry highly trained to charge with couched lance in squadron formation.
Whatever might have been the source of the saga accounts, the suggestion of waves of mounted spearmen flung against a shield-wall flies in the face of everything that is known about Anglo-Saxon warfaring and so the most that might be allowed – if the saga-makers are to be given some benefit of doubt in the absence of any decisive evidence to the contrary – is the possibility of just some housecarls having led the English attack on horseback, even if not strictly as ‘cavalry’. Nonetheless, the Norwegian defensive formation held firm and drove off each wave of assailants, although Snorri indicates mounted warriors riding in circles around a loose defensive formation and seeking for any openings into the ranks. After some duration of this onslaught – and probably very much later in the afternoon, because it is unlikely that the armies had reached the field before midday – there came the crucial moment when the shield-wall broke open to allow the headlong charge in pursuit of a retreating enemy.
Yet here the saga-makers are at variance, because Snorri indicates this as an unwise Norwegian response to a deliberately feigned retreat by the English intended to draw them out from behind a solid wall formed of iron, oak and muscle before turning around to unleash a maelstrom of spears and arrows against a headlong disordered pursuit. This proposal bears such a distinct similarity to the later course of battle at Hastings as to arouse suspicion and so the rather different interpretation offered by the other versions of the saga in Morkinskinna, Fagrskinna and Flateyjarbók – all of them indicating the sudden charge as a counter-attack against a particularly fierce mounted offensive around the defensive circle – is probably to be preferred. Understandably provoked by the sheer aggravation of relentless attack suffered in close and cramped formation, the northmen at last broke out of their shield-wall to launch a ferocious charge against an enemy thrown into sudden retreat ‘and there was a great slaughter among both armies’. When the Norwegian king saw what was happening, he led his own retinue into the greatest heat of the fighting, much as Olaf had done at this stage in his own last battle. Quite unlike his half-brother, however, Harald was consumed by an uncontrolled warrior-fury – seemingly akin to that of the berserkers of viking legend – when he rushed ahead of his companion warriors, slashing with both hands so that neither helmet nor mail-coat could withstand his onslaught and all in his path fell back before him.
In the death-song he had promised to compose for Harald some twenty years before, Arnor Jarlaskald tells how ‘Norway’s king had nothing to shield his breast in the battling, and yet his war-hardened heart never wavered, while Norway’s warriors were watching the bloodied sword of their bravest leader slicing down their foemen’. So perhaps it was just as he had always known it would be – with his battle-rage at white heat and no mail-coat to stem his stride nor shield-grip to hamper his wielding a weapon in each hand – that Harald Hardrada came at last to the end of his warrior’s way, because the saga tells how it seemed that the enemy were about to be routed when the king was struck by an arrow in the throat.
‘And this was his death-wound.’
There is no reason to doubt the wound-site, because the exposed throat and face offered the obvious target area for an archer aiming to kill a fully mailed warrior. The saga-maker may even have been right in believing the victory to have been within grasp when the king fell because a berserker charge must have been one of the most fearsome experiences of early medieval warfare. Even so, the odds were still stacked against a Norwegian victory when the northmen without armour or heavier war-gear had been caught entirely unawares by an enemy host of apparently superior numbers.
Beyond such straightforward pragmatic considerations, there is another factor of bearing and it lies in the claims made by the skalds and saga-makers for Harald’s ‘great victory-luck’. Indeed, the English Harold would seem also to have known of it, if he truly did suspect that it might be about to run out when he saw his enemy fall from a horse on that Monday afternoon – as did Harald himself, and at much the same time, when he spoke of a ‘farewell to fortune’. Yet a skald steeped in the ancient legends of the northland might have read those same runes differently, because he would have known Odin as the least trustworthy of battle-gods who would sustain and shield one of his chosen through years of warfaring before suddenly failing him, and for no other reason than to summon another hero home to Valhalla.
On the field of Stamford Bridge meanwhile, the king was dead and his fall is said to have been followed by a lengthy pause in the fighting. Tostig still stood beside the royal standard in the place where the main force had earlier held their formation and there began to re-form the shield-wall while the skald Thjodolf – possibly already wounded and not long to outlive his lord – composed the grim lines of what was to be his last strophe:
Upon evil days has
the host now fallen;
needless and for nothing out
of northland Harald brought us;
badly bested we are now
and ended in the life of he
who boldly bade us battle
here in England.
It was then that the English Harold found his way towards earshot of his brother and again offered quarter both to him and to those survivors who stood with him. But the northmen shouted back that they would sooner die than yield and roared out their war-cry to begin the slaughter once again. It must have been during this phase of the battle – which cannot have lasted long with so few left alive to fill up gaps in the shield-wall – that Tostig was slain, although Snorri makes no further mention of him and the saga record of his fighting bravely until finally struck down is preserved only in Morkinskinna, Fagrskinna and Flateyjarbók.
Yet the blood-fray was still not done, because at this point Harald’s marshal Eystein Orri arrived and with him a force of warriors who had remained at the ships that morning. These men had not left their armour behind, of course, and so were exhausted after running so many miles from Riccall in full war-gear, yet when Eystein found Land-ravager and raised it up again, they summoned up the energy to renew the onset with such greater ferocity th
at it was long remembered – according to the saga – as ‘Orri’s Battle’. As the heat of battle rose to match the heat of the day, many of Eystein’s men are said to have thrown off the weight of their mail-coats, thus offering softer targets to the English blades that cut them down. ‘Almost all the leading Norwegians were killed there.’
Those who survived apparently attempted to flee back to Riccall, because the Worcester Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells of many killed by drowning or burning and indicates the English pursuit having extended even to an attack on at least some of the ships, which would well correspond to Snorri’s statement that ‘it had grown dark before the carnage was ended’. Nonetheless, there were some of ‘the leading Norwegians’ who had not fallen with Eystein, because other saga sources record that the young prince Olaf (who is known to have fought at Fulford) had stayed with the two Orkney jarls to guard the ships while Eystein answered the call to battle. Thus these three represented the surviving principals of the Norwegian army when, according to the same Chronicle, Harold Godwinson of England gave ‘quarter to Olaf, the son of the king of the Norwegians . . . to the jarl[s] of Orkney and to all those who were left aboard the ships’. Harold Godwinson must have had more than enough of killing when, despite his best efforts at peacemaking, he had found his own brother’s remains among the thousands lying on the battlefield at Stamford Bridge and afterwards arranged for Tostig’s burial at York, but not so very long before he himself was to fall in battle at Hastings against the Norman duke to whom he was said to have sworn fealty two years earlier.
By which time, Olaf, Paul and Erlend had taken ship – or, more precisely, just two dozen ships, which are said by the Chronicle to have been all that were needed to carry home the survivors of the Norwegian army – from Ravenspur back to Orkney. There Olaf was reunited with his father’s queen Ellisif and his half-sister Ingigerd, but alas not with her sister Maria, who is said by the sagas to have died on the day – and, indeed, at the very hour – when her father had fallen in battle.
The three of them passed the winter in Orkney and in the following summer returned to Norway where Olaf shared the kingship with his brother Magnus. On Magnus’ death, just two years later in 1069, he succeeded as sole king of Norway and is remembered as Olaf kyrra, or ‘Olaf the Quiet’. For whatever reason (unexplained in any of the sources), his father’s remains were not brought back to Norway until later in the year following the battle, when Harald Sigurdsson was buried, according to his saga, ‘at Nidaros in Saint Mary’s church which he himself had founded’.
Land-ravager
AN AFTERWORD FROM WEST-OVER-SEA
Nothing further is told of Harald’s famous standard in the saga after Eystein Orri had retrieved the banner from wherever it had been abandoned when Tostig was slain and raised it up again to lead his warriors in the last desperate stand remembered as ‘Orri’s Battle’. At which point Landeyðuna disappears entirely from the saga record and might be thought to have been lost for ever amid the blood-stained debris left lying along the bank of the Derwent water. Yet it need not be so, because there is reason to believe that the celebrated Land-ravager was not only rescued from the field of Stamford Bridge but eventually found its way to a westward region of the Scandinavian expansion where Harald himself had no occasion to travel but where his grandson, Magnus Olafsson – called ‘Bareleg’ on account of his adoption of the garb of the Gael – is well remembered as the warrior king who finally and formally claimed the Hebrides (or Suðreyjar) for Norway in 1098.
In the room thought to have been the original Great Hall of Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye is displayed a broad fragment of textile known in the Gaelic as Am Bratach Sidhe (or ‘The Fairy Flag’) and long regarded as the most treasured possession of the Clan Macleod, whose principal stronghold this fortress is said to have been since the fourteenth century when the name Macleod made its first entry into the historical record. At least half a dozen stories are told of how this ‘Fairy Flag’ came into the possession of the Macleods of Dunvegan – some claiming it to have been a gift of the fairy folk (and, indeed, the bridge where that gift was made is clearly signalled to any modern visitor who might pass that way), while others say it was brought from the Holy Land by a clansman returning from a crusade. There are problems with both of these traditions, firstly by reason of the unreliable historicity of fairies and secondly because there appears to be no record of any Macleod known to have been on any of the crusades.
Another feature of the traditions surrounding this Bratach Sidhe is the belief in its power to save the clan in times of danger and Macleod chieftains are said to have twice unfurled the flag when hard-pressed in battle and thus to have won the victory. It is this claim – and the possibility of its association with the Fairy Flag long before it came into the hands of the Macleods – which points toward the genuinely historical proposal that Am Bratach Sidhe is, in fact, Harald Hardrada’s Landeyðuna.
Clan Macleod has always been proud of its Gaelic-Norse origins and justly so because their line has been convincingly traced all the way back to Olaf Cuaran, Norse king of York and of Dublin, who died the ‘straw death’ in monastic retirement on Iona in 981. The Leod for whom the clan is named, however, was directly descended from the line of the Norse kings of Man and the Isles through one Helga ‘of the beautiful hair’ who was the sister of the same Godred Crovan who fought with the Norwegian army at Stamford Bridge and survived the battle to become the founding dynast of the royal house of Man.
The entry under the year 1066 in the thirteenth-century Chronicle of Man refers to the ‘very great slaughter of the Norwegians’ at Stamford Bridge and tells of ‘Godred, called Crovan, son of Harald the Black from Island [thought to mean the Isle of Islay], fleeing from the rout’ and making his escape (probably overland by way of North Wales or the Solway) to the Isle of Man. The saga account of the phases of the conflict would almost certainly indicate the ‘rout’ referred to by the Chronicle as ‘Orri’s Battle’, in the course of which Land-ravager disappears from the historical record. If Godred had brought a banner, probably made of silk and assuredly of Byzantine origin, back from Stamford Bridge, he could very well have made a gift of it to his sister and assuredly also spoken of the legendary powers associated with its service as Harald’s battle-flag.
All of which might be thought to correspond quite impressively to the proposal of Land-ravager having been handed down the generations of Helga’s descendants even to the present Macleod of Macleod in whose castle at Dunvegan it is revered as Am Bratach Sidhe. Still more impressive, though, are the results of a modern forensic examination of the fabric of the Fairy Flag identifying it as a silk at least as old as the seventh century and of eastern origin, probably from Rhodes or possibly from Syria, both of which were sources supplying this greatly prized textile to the Byzantines.
If the Fairy Flag of the Macleods really is the same Land-ravager banner which Harald is said to have valued above all other treasures in his possession, then its location on Skye offers a quite remarkable coincidence, because to the south-east of Dunvegan stands the magnificent mountain range known as the Cuillin.
Once again, the claims of ‘Celtic’ tradition might stand accused of clouding the issue and not least through the efforts of Sir Walter Scott who played a great part in associating ‘Cuillin’ with the legendary Irish hero Cuchullain. In fact, the true origin of the name, alike to that of the other Cuillin on the neighbouring island of Rum, derives from the Old Norse – kjolr (‘the keel’) or kiolen (‘high rocks’) – and so the Cuillin of Skye can be said to share its name with the Kjolen range over which the young Harald Sigurdsson, having recovered from wounds suffered at Stiklestad, crossed from Norway into Sweden along that early passage of his warrior’s way.
Genealogies
There is just one abbreviation: HH = Harald Hardrada
DESCENT OF HARALD HARDRADA AND HIS SUCCESORS FROM HARALD FAIR-HAIR
THE ARNASONS AND THEIR NETWORK OF MARITAL KINSHIP
&n
bsp; THE JARLS OF LADE AND THEIR DESCENDANTS
Notes and References
Introduction
1. Magnusson & Pálsson (ed.), King Harald’s Saga, p. 31.
2. Turville-Petre, Haraldr the Hard-ruler and his Poets, p. 5.
3. Blöndal & Benedikz, The Varangians of Byzantium, p. 210.
4. Turville-Petre, Haraldr the Hard-ruler and his Poets, pp. 3–4.
Stiklestad
1. Turville-Petre, The Heroic Age of Scandinavia, p. 156.
2. Jones, A History of the Vikings, p. 382.
3. In the twelfth-century saga texts, however, Russia is identified by the later Icelandic name-form of Garðaríki.
4. While the saga actually specifies ‘four hundred chosen men’, such references are calculated in ‘long hundreds’, or 120 in modern reckoning, and so the reinforcement would have amounted to 480 of Onund’s warriors. That same formula is applied here to all troop and ship numbers found in the saga texts, although such figures should usually be considered only as approximations.
5. Foote & Wilson, The Viking Achievement, p. 284.
6. ‘Weapon thing’ is one of many skaldic kennings for ‘battle’.
7. Foote & Wilson, The Viking Achievement, p. 80.
8. Although usually translated as ‘paunch-shaker’, the original meaning may have been ‘he who twangs the bow-string’ and a reference to his part in the battle of Svold where the young Einar fought as an archer aboard Olaf Tryggvason’s ship.
