Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (45 page)

Exile and death

Harald’s authority was not confined to Denmark. Through an alliance with Håkon Sigurdsson, jarl of Lade (now a suburb of Trondheim), Harald overthrew Norway’s King Harald Greycloak
c.
970, taking the south of the country for himself and giving the north to Håkon. Harald also won control of a Wendish port called Jumne or Jomsborg, which is probably the modern Polish port of Wolin near the mouth of the Oder River. In the tenth century, Wolin was a strongly fortified trading and manufacturing centre with a large and well-constructed harbour. The well-travelled Córdoban merchant, al-Tartushi, thought it a more impressive place than Hedeby. Significant numbers of typically Scandinavian artefacts, such as Thor’s hammer amulets, Norwegian soapstone bowls and runic inscriptions, point to the presence of a permanent Scandinavian community in the Slavic town. This may have given rise to the legend of the Jomsvikings, an elite band of Viking mercenaries who, according to romantic Icelandic saga traditions, used Jomsborg as their base.

Despite his achievements Harald’s reign ended badly. Harald suffered his first setback in 975 when he lost control of Hedeby to the Germans. The previous year, Danish Vikings had raided northern Germany and, rightly or wrongly, the new emperor, Otto II, held Harald responsible and invaded Denmark in response. Harald, aided by jarl Håkon, tried to hold the Germans at the Danevirke, but was eventually forced back. Harald surrendered Hedeby, and its revenues, to Otto, who built and garrisoned a fort at nearby Schleswig to guard it. Under pressure from Otto, Harald tried to introduce Christianity to Norway. Unfortunately for Harald, this alienated jarl Håkon, a devout pagan, who rebelled and seized control of the whole of Norway.

In 982, Otto II suffered a severe defeat while campaigning in Italy. This was too good an opportunity to let pass and a Danish army under Svein Forkbeard recaptured Hedeby from the Germans, while Harald’s father-in-law Mistivoj burned Hamburg. By now, however, Harald had made himself many enemies at home. Local chieftains had seen their traditional autonomy curtailed as Harald tightened royal authority and devout pagans resented the imposition of Christianity. In 987, Svein overthrew his father, who fled across the Baltic to Jomsborg, where he died soon after from wounds inflicted during the fighting. According to Adam of Bremen, Svein had never taken his baptism seriously and he was able to win power with the support of disgruntled pagans. While Svein may well have benefited from such disaffection, it is unlikely that he ever renounced Christianity. There is strong evidence that he continued his father’s Christianisation policy, founding many churches during his reign, and had he really been hostile to Christianity he would hardly have allowed his father’s retainers to bring his body back from Jomsborg and bury it in the church he had founded at Roskilde.

The real reason for Adam’s hostility was probably that Svein rejected the authority of the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen. In medieval Europe, the modern distinction between church and state did not exist. Kings relied heavily on bishops to help them govern their kingdoms and always sought to influence appointments to bishoprics. The Danish church and its bishops in Harald’s time were ultimately responsible to the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, who were appointed by the German emperors. No medieval king would have liked this situation as it represented a limitation on his sovereignty. And it was often the case that where the church led, secular authority followed. Harald was probably willing to put up with this situation because it kept the emperors off his back while he consolidated royal authority in Denmark. Svein may have overthrown his father because he saw all too clearly that a German claim to rule the Danish church might ultimately be used to support a German claim to sovereignty over the state. Throughout his reign, Svein avoided contacts with Hamburg-Bremen and when he needed priests he brought them over from England.

Svein seized power at a time of resurgent Viking raiding, mainly against England, now seen as a soft target thanks to the weak rule of Æthelred the Unready. Svein knew that returning Viking leaders, with their newly won wealth and status, could challenge royal authority so he kept them in the shade by leading his own tribute-gathering raids (see ch. 9). Two Viking leaders who must have caused Svein much anxiety were the exiled Norwegian sea-king Olaf Tryggvason and the Danish nobleman Thorkell the Tall. According to saga traditions, Thorkell was the son of Strút Harald, jarl of Sjælland, and the brother of Sigvaldi, the supposed leader of the Jomsvikings. In other words, he was a member of the class that had lost most from Harald’s centralisation of royal authority. In 1011, Thorkell received the enormous payment of 48,000 pounds (21,772 kg) of silver from Æthelred, whose service he later entered, fighting for him against Svein. Thanks to his lack of royal blood, Thorkell’s threat to Svein was limited. Thorkell might be an overmighty subject but it would have been hard for him to replace Svein on the throne, and he was eventually found a role in the new order (by Svein’s son Cnut). The same was not true of Olaf Tryggvason. Olaf used the proceeds of his raids on England in 991 – 4 to fund a successful attempt to win control of Norway in 995. However, Svein claimed to be Norway’s true ruler by right of inheritance from his father Harald. This made conflict inevitable.

Harald Fairhair unites Norway

Danish ambitions to rule Norway were nothing new. Back in 813 the Frankish annals recorded that kings Harald Klak and Reginfred were fighting in Vestfold, west of Oslo Fjord, trying to impose their rule on an unwilling population. The outcome of the struggle is not recorded but they probably failed to subjugate the area for long. Two decades later two high-status women, one elderly, the other middle aged, were buried with lavish grave goods in a richly decorated longship under a barrow at Oseberg, in the heart of Vestfold. As such a burial would only have been afforded to a powerful queen, it is clear that Vestfold was at the heart of an independent kingdom. It is not known which of the two women buried in the barrow was the queen and which the sacrificial companion to join her in the afterlife – both were well-dressed – but local traditions had a name for her: Åsa, known from saga traditions as the grandmother of Harald Fairhair, the first king to rule all of Norway.

Despite Harald’s importance in Norwegian history, it is not known for certain when he actually lived. The fullest account of Harald’s life is his saga in
Heimskringla
(‘The Circle of the World’), an epic saga history of the kings of Norway by the thirteenth-century Icelander Snorri Sturluson, but this certainly contains much legendary material. According to Snorri, Harald was a descendent of the proto-historical Swedish Yngling dynasty and through them of the fertility god Freyr. Harald’s father, Halfdan the Black, was the son of Åsa and her husband King Gudrød of Vestfold. Harald inherited the kingship of Vestfold at the age of ten after his father drowned accidentally by falling through a hole in a frozen lake. It is unlikely that this could have happened much before
c.
870. Harald’s ambition was to rule all of Norway and he vowed not to cut or comb his hair until he had achieved his goal, hence his nickname ‘fairhair’ (
hárfagri
).

Unity was never going to come easily to Norway. The country’s rugged topography and long coastline made internal communications difficult, promoting localism: at the beginning of the Viking Age almost every valley had its chief or petty king. Two areas, however, were particularly favourable for the development of regional power centres. One of these was Viken, the sheltered Oslo Fjord region in the south-east of the country, which included Harald’s kingdom of Vestfold. Lying in the rain shadow of Norway’s central spine of mountains, Viken has a relatively dry and sunny climate favourable to arable farming. The other was the Trøndelag, the fertile region around Trondheim Fjord, over 300 miles away across the mountains to the north. This region was dominated by Håkon Grjotgardsson, the jarl of Lade, whose pedigree was no less illustrious than Harald’s. After some indecisive hostilities, Harald and Håkon became allies, the king recognising the jarl’s autonomy in the north in return for his support fighting the dozens of other local kings. Harald’s campaign ended with his victory around 885 (it is hard to be precise) over a coalition of seven local kings and jarls at the sea battle of Hafrsfjord, near modern Stavanger, after which opposition to his rule collapsed. Icelandic traditions claim that some of the survivors from Hafrsfjord fled to the Scottish isles from where they raided Norway. Harald led an expedition west to bring the area under Norwegian control, establishing the Earldom of Orkney under his ally Rognvald of Møre.

Harald’s tyranny

Icelandic historical traditions, epitomised by Snorri, present Harald Fairhair as a tyrannical ruler. After his victory at Hafrsfjord, Harald is said to have confiscated all the
óðal
land from the bonders (free peasant farmers), forcing them to become royal tenants, and to have imposed heavy taxation. It was to escape this oppression that medieval Icelanders like Snorri believed that their ancestors had emigrated to Iceland. However, there is no evidence that Harald attempted any such expropriation of
óðal
land: the reduction of most free peasants to tenant status seems actually to have been a phenomenon of Snorri’s own age. It is also certain that the settlement of Iceland began before the Battle of Hafrsfjord is likely to have taken place. Some historians also doubt that Harald ever made an expedition to the isles because the Earldom of Orkney was established before Harald became king (see ch. 4). It is, therefore, likely that the Icelanders invented the story in order to explain why so many of the first settlers came not from Norway but from the Scottish isles. In reality, Harald’s rule was much less than absolute. The jarls of Lade ruled in Trøndelag and Hålogaland in virtual independence and it is only in their title that they were anything less than kings. Harald certainly did reduce many local kingdoms to jarldoms but there were still dozens of ‘valley kings’ in Norway even a century later. Nor did such unity as Harald imposed survive his death some time between 930 and 940.

During his long life, he is supposed to have been eighty when he died, Harald fathered over twenty sons by at least eight different women. According to Snorri, Harald divided the kingdom between his sons three years before his death, appointing his favourite son Erik Bloodaxe as high king over them all. This did not go down well with Erik’s brothers, who all believed, as possessors of royal blood, that they were entitled to the dignity of full kingship. No sooner was Harald dead than his sons, predictably enough, sought power for themselves in the many local kingdoms their father had controlled. Thanks to his lurid nickname – earned because of his brutal rulership rather than his prowess in battle – Erik Bloodaxe is probably the most famous of all Viking leaders. Scarcely less notorious, in saga traditions at least, was Erik’s wife Gunnhild, who was reputed to be a
völva
or seeress. Even before Harald died, she had been accused of encompassing the death of Erik’s half-brother Halfdan by magic. No statesman, Erik tried to maintain the unity of the kingdom by violence. Egged on by Gunnhild, Erik seriously depleted the numbers of his brothers before the Norwegians tired of him and invited his younger half-brother Håkon the Good (d. 960) to come home from England, where he had been fostered by king Æthelstan, and take the throne. With the support of Sigurd Håkonarson, the jarl of Lade, Håkon was proclaimed king in the Trøndelag. When Håkon began to advance on Viken, Erik’s support evaporated and he fled to Orkney. From there Erik embarked on a career as a Viking raider, which won him the kingship of York in 948 and a violent death on Stainmore six years later (see ch. 2).

Paganism prevails

Håkon could have known little about his kingdom when he arrived home. He was still an infant when his father had sent him to England, and he had never been back to Norway. Håkon’s position in Norway was never strong because he lacked the local connections, friendships and prestige that would have accrued to him naturally if he had been brought up there. In most respects he was a weak ruler who exercised direct authority only in the west of the country. His nephews Gudrød Bjørnsson and Tryggvi Olafsson ruled as kings in Vestfold and Østfold, while jarl Sigurd ruled in complete autonomy in Trøndelag and Halogaland. Æthelstan had brought Håkon up as a Christian and he began his reign hoping to spread the faith in Norway. Although there had been no recorded missionary activity, many Norwegians must have been familiar with Christianity by this time thanks to their long-standing contacts with Britain and Ireland. There are likely to have been considerable numbers of Christian slaves living in Norway and many Norwegians will have had Christian relations living in the Viking colonies in Britain and Ireland. Many a homecoming warrior may have been a nominal Christian after accepting baptism for pragmatic reasons while serving Christian rulers as a mercenary or to smooth negotiations of tribute payments. However, apart from a few inscribed crosses, there is no archaeological evidence of any Christian communities in Norway before Håkon’s reign.

To help him spread the faith, Håkon invited missionaries to come over from England. While a few of Håkon’s personal retinue did accept baptism, they did so more out of loyalty than conviction, and most Norwegians were willing to tolerate their king’s Christianity only as long as he kept his worship private. The issue came to a head when Håkon announced at the Frostathing assembly in the Trøndelag that he wished the people to be baptised and to end pagan sacrifices. This provoked an immediate rebellion by the bonders, who sincerely feared for the prosperity of the land if they were not able to perform the traditional sacrifices. Most chieftains also opposed Christianity, partly, at least, because they feared a loss of status and authority: the Norse pagan religion had no priesthood and it was the chieftains who conducted the sacrificial rituals. Supported, it seems, by jarl Sigurd, the bonders threatened that if the king did not perform the sacrifices as his father had done they would choose another king. At the harvest festival at Lade later that year, Håkon attempted a compromise by placing a linen cloth between his mouth and the sacrificial horse flesh he had been offered, but this satisfied no one. Four local chiefs in the district of Møre began killing priests and burning the churches Håkon had founded, while another group of chiefs resolved to force him to take part in the midwinter Yule sacrifice, threatening violence if he refused. Under this intense pressure Håkon finally gave in and ate some small pieces of horse liver. This token sacrifice seems to have satisfied the pagans and, after this humiliation, Håkon gave up his attempt to make the Norwegians Christian.