King Harald’s Saga

In Norway, King Harald Sigurdsson – Harald Hardradi, Harald the Ruthless, as later historians were to dub him – had fled into exile in 1030 at the age of fifteen when Norway was torn by civil war and his half-brother, King Olaf the Saint, was killed in battle by an army of his own rebellious subjects. After years of plundering in the Mediterranean and Asia Minor as a Viking mercenary in the service of the Byzantine emperors, Harald returned to claim the throne of Norway his brother had lost; and for the next twenty years he ruled Norway by iron discipline and force of arms, and terrorized neighbouring Denmark by constant raiding expeditions. By 1066 he was the most feared warrior in northern Europe, the last of the formidable Viking kings of Scandinavia; and at the age of fifty-one he embarked on the most ambitious enterprise of his relentless career – the conquest of England.

In France, Duke William of Normandy – William the Bastard as his contemporaries called him, William the Conqueror as he was to prove himself – had succeeded to a turbulent province as an illegitimate orphan at the age of seven, in 1035. His boyhood was a nightmare of treachery and danger; and even when he reached manhood he had to survive seven years of incessant warfare and rebellion between 1047 and 1054 before he was able to establish his authority over Normandy beyond serious dispute. By 1066, he was the battle-hardened leader of the most brilliant new secular and ecclesiastical aristocracy in Europe; and in his late thirties he was ready to claim by force what he regarded as a moral inheritance – the throne of England.

In England, Earl Harold Godwinsson – Harold of Wessex, later to become Harold II of England – was born into one of the most thrustful and ambitious family dynasties in Anglo-Saxon England. During the uneasy reign of Edward the Confessor (1042–66) he survived exile, and then returned to prove his military ability with crushing campaigns against the Welsh, and also his statesmanship by averting civil war between north and south over his brother, Earl Tostig. On 6 January 1066, at the age of forty-four, he was elected and crowned king of England – an England whose throne was threatened by rival claims from Scandinavia and Normandy, and weakened by lingering disaffection in the north. For the next nine months, Harold was busy organizing the nation’s defences against the challenge he knew must come; what he could not know was from where it would come first.

In the event, it came from the north. In September 1066 Harald of Norway sailed across the North Sea with an invasion armada of over 300 ships and came prowling down the coast of Yorkshire. On 20 September, he landed his army of some 9,000 men and destroyed the northern army that barred his way to York at Fulford. But five days later, on Monday, 25 September, Harold of England arrived with another army after a forced march of 190 miles from London, and fell upon the surprised Norwegian invaders at Stamford Bridge. The slaughter that ensued was remembered with awe for generations; by nightfall, the Norwegian army was all but wiped out, and Harald of Norway lay dead. His death marked the end, to all intents and purposes, of the Viking era that so coloured the politics of medieval Europe, the end of 350 years, of Scandinavian harassment of England.

But when Harald of Norway died, his victor, Harold of England, himself had only nineteen more days to live. Three days after the Battle of Stamford Bridge, William of Normandy, descendant of the Viking invaders who had settled in France 150 years earlier, landed on the south coast of England with an army of 7,000 men; and Harold of England set off on a forced march once again, to fight the last battle to be fought on English soil against an invasion army, on the Downs above Hastings on 14 October 1066.

Just as the Battle of Stamford Bridge finally settled the Scandinavian threat, so the Battle of Hastings was to decide the fate and future destiny of Great Britain; and had it not been for the Norwegian invasion in the north of England some three weeks earlier, the Norman invasion in the south might well have ended very differently. In these three autumn weeks of 1066, the tension of the triangle formed by Norway, England, and Normandy, was decisively resolved. And it is one of the sides of that triangle – the conflict between Norway and England, between Viking Harald and Anglo-Saxon Harold – that forms the climax of King Harold’s Saga.

Heimskringla is truly an immense work, nothing more nor less than a complete history of Norway from prehistoric times down to 1177, told in a series of royal biographies of all the kings who occupied the throne of Norway. The vastness of its scope and conception is implicit in the very first words, the words that gave it its name – ‘Heims kringla,…’ ‘The orb of the world, on which mankind dwells…’. It starts far back in the remotest past, in a world of mythology peopled by shadowy legendary figures, the world of Odin and the Norse gods from whom sprang the royal house of Sweden and Norway (Ynglinga Saga); it continues through the semi-legendary decades of the ninth century, the era of Halfdan the Black, first of the Ynglings to establish royal authority in Norway (Halfdan the Black’s Saga).

It is only with King Harald Fine-Hair, Halfdan’s son, that history proper begins. He succeeded his father c. 860 at the age of ten, and it was he who unified all Norway under one crown during his long reign (he died in 933). It was during Harald’s reign that Iceland was discovered and settled by the Norsemen, partly at least as a result of Harald’s policy of subjugating all the independent chieftains to his authority: emigration became the only alternative to submission. The Icelandic historians who documented the history of Norway seem to have had extremely vague ideas about what happened in Norway before the settlement of Iceland (870–930); from then on, it is to the Icelanders, and particularly Snorri Sturluson, that we owe our detailed knowledge of the history of medieval Norway.

Snorri’s great gallery of kings sweeps through the tenth century and culminates in the reign of King Olaf Tryggvason (995–1000), the iron king who forced many of the pagan Scandinavian lands to adopt Christianity. This completes the first section of Heimskringla.

The second section, which takes up about two fifths of the whole work, is a self-contained biography of King Olaf the Saint (1016–30), St Olaf’s Saga. This work, in fact, was written first, as a separate saga-history, complete in itself, although it had an Introduction and Appendix summarizing Norway’s history before and after St Olaf’s reign, and these later formed the framework of sections I and III of Heimskringla. St Olaf’s Saga is deservedly considered the greatest of the saga-histories in Heimskringla; and it was the model on which Snorri Sturluson based all his later historical writings.

After St Olaf’s death in battle in 1030, section III of Heimskringla takes the history of Norway’s kings onwards down to 1177, starting with the biography of King Magnus the Good, St Olaf’s illegitimate son, who came to the throne in 1035. King Magnus the Good’s Saga overlaps and merges into King Harald’s Saga; and after King Harald’s death at Stamford Bridge in 1066, Snorri takes the story on through the succession of kings who ruled Norway more or less effectively, more or less violently, for the next century, ending half-way through the reign of King Magnus Erlingsson (1161–84).

It is primarily the vastness of the conception of Heimskringla, the sweep and range of its scope, that marks it out from all the many other Icelandic saga-histories. There had been individual sagas before Snorri, and there were many after him; there had been synoptic histories and summaries before him; but no one, before or after, attempted anything on such a grand scale. A number of earlier historians had tackled individual kings and individual periods, using different sources; Snorri determined to synthesize the whole history of Norway.

Snorri Sturluson was essentially an explorer of the past He did not allow himself to be deterred by the fact that the landmarks in the remotest area of history were so few and far between; where his information failed, he rationalized and deduced. When he emerged into the more familiar landscape of the late ninth century, he could build on the work of earlier historians, he could accept and reject, and add from sources of his own. But his primary purpose was not so much to correct earlier works of history, as to cultivate history for its own sake, to improve the writing of history; he wanted to illuminate the past, not merely to record it.

Snorri Sturluson has always been the most celebrated figure in Icelandic literature (principally, perhaps, because so few of the saga-authors are now known by name), and Heimskringla, particularly abroad, has remained the best-known of all the major works in Icelandic saga literature; it was the first saga work to be printed (in a summary in a Danish translation in 1594). In Norway especially, its popularity and influence have been enormous, and it was a potent factor in awakening Norway’s desire for independence in the nineteenth century, by reminding Norwegians of their heroic past.

And yet Heimskringla is not a work of history at all, in the modem sense of the term. It is a series of saga-histories – and the distinction is a vital one. Snorri Sturluson saw history as a continual flow, and in Heimskringla he tried to convey this to his readers; but it was not so much a matter of historical evolution as a long chain of events, and these events he saw in terms, almost exclusively, of individual personalities. He saw politics in terms of personal motivation, of human aspirations and failings. Heimskringla is a composite, a portrait gallery of these individuals; and each individual king’s saga is conceived partly as a self-contained entity and partly as a link in this chain of events.

In the past, Heimskringla has been accepted, uncritically, as the gospel of Scandinavian history, as unassailable as Holy Writ. Modern scholarship, however, has shown how misleading this view has been; yet this has by no means diminished the importance of Heimskringla. Indeed, by putting its historical value into truer perspective, we can now concentrate more attention on Snorri Sturluson’s artistry as a saga-writer. The great Family Sagas of Iceland, like Njal’s Saga or Egil’s Saga or Laxdœla Saga, were more concerned with the character and fate of individuals than with strict historical accuracy; historical truth and plausible fiction were often so thoroughly fused that it is hardly possible to separate the one from the other.

Precisely the same is true of the History Sagas. The historical facts, so far as they were known, were used chiefly to portray the personalities and characters involved in them. The ‘success’ of a saga does not depend on its historical accuracy so much as on the skill with which its individual characters are portrayed, and Snorri Sturluson’s greatest achievement, perhaps, was to have created such an immense gallery of brilliantly executed royal portraits from the past. The Harald of King Harald’s Saga is one of the most impressive of these portraits; but fascinating and convincing as he appears in Snorri’s pages, he may have been a very different person in real life. Even where we know, from a comparison with other sources (especially English sources where events in England in 1066 are concerned), that Snorri Sturluson’s facts are considerably inaccurate, his account is always eminently plausible.

Although part of Snorri’s purpose was to preserve for posterity a truthful account of past events, he was also guided by aesthetic principles; above all, he was trying to create a work of literature, and it is essential to distinguish the literary and historical aspects if we are to understand and evaluate King Harold’s Saga properly. In Snorri Sturluson’s case, we are fortunate in that we know so much about the author; for all the Icelandic saga-histories were created by individual writers who had their own reasons for treating their subject-matter in the particular way they did, and who were writing for a particular audience. Snorri Sturluson’s life and times are extremely relevant to any interpretation of the sagas he wrote.

His life was just as extraordinary and full of drama as any of the Norwegian kings he depicted in Heimskringla, his own character just as complex and ambiguous. He was a man of astonishing contradictions: a man who fought and schemed all his life to become the most powerful chieftain in Iceland, yet who still found time to write some of the greatest masterpieces in Icelandic literature; a greedy, covetous man who was none the less capable of great generosity; a patriot so fascinated by the royal court of Norway that he could harbour secret thoughts of treason; a farmer who wanted to be an aristocrat, a prose-writer who wanted to be a poet, a scholar who cared more about owning property; a worldly, cultivated man who loved all the good things of life – wealth, women, wine, good company – yet who died a squalid, tragic death in the cellar of his own home.

He was born to wealth and authority in 1179 at Hvamm, an estate in the west of Iceland, a descendant of some of the greatest and most talented figures in Iceland’s early history. On his father’s side he was descended from influential chieftains like Snorri the Priest (d. 1031), whose son Halldor Snorrason fought at the side of King Harald Sigurdsson of Norway (cf. King Harold’s Saga), and from Gudmund the Powerful, another of Iceland’s leading chieftains, who figures prominently in many of the Icelandic Sagas, including Njal’s Saga.

On his mother’s side, he was descended from Markus Skeggjason, poet and Law-Speaker to the Icelandic Althing (d. 1107), and from the great Icelandic viking-poet, Egil Skalla-Grimsson, eponymous hero of Egil’s Saga (which many scholars are convinced was written by Snorri Sturluson himself).

His life was to be conditioned by the traits he inherited: the sense of grandeur, of dynastic pride, of political destiny – and the artistic creativeness. And it was to be shaped, too, by his upbringing; for at the age of two, in 1181, Snorri was sent to be fostered at Oddi, the outstanding centre of culture and learning in Iceland at that time, the home of the most cultivated chieftain in the country, Jon Loptsson (1124–97). It was here that Snorri was to come into close contact with the writing of history, and particularly with the royal court of Norway; for Jon Loptsson was the grandson of the first Icelandic historian, Saemund Sigfusson the Learned (1056–1133), who was educated in France and who wrote a Latin summary (now lost) of the history of the kings of Norway.

But more importantly, Jon Loptsson was the grandson of King Magnus Bare-Legs of Norway, that violent man who reigned for a lurid decade between 1093 and 1103 and who died at the age of thirty on a military expedition in Ireland. Jon Loptsson’s mother, Thora, was one of King Magnus’s illegitimate children, and the men of Oddi were inordinately proud of the fact. So proud were they that a eulogy was composed in honour of Jon Loptsson round about the year 1190 (when Snorri was about eleven years old), tracing his descent right down through the royal house of Norway from King Halfdan the Black. This poem, Noregs Konunga Tal (‘List of Norwegian Kings’), which is eighty-three strophes long, is in effect a summarized history of Norway.

Jon Loptsson himself had been fostered in Norway, and had attended many state occasions there. So young Snorri Sturluson was reared on a diet of learning and scholarship, with particular reference to the royal house of Norway. At Oddi he had access to the Icelandic saga and historical literature that was slowly accumulating throughout the twelfth century; but he was also gaining experience of the royal courts of Scandinavia, which were later to play such a significant part in his life.

After Jon Loptsson’s death in 1197, Snorri immediately threw himself zealously into the pursuit of power and position. He married into money, and thereby inherited the estate of Borg, which had been the home of his ancestor Egil Skalla-Grimsson. A few years later he moved to Reykholt, an estate in Borgarfjord in the west of Iceland, which seems to have been a seat of learning even before Snorri’s time and was now to be his home for the rest of his life.

In the first two decades of the thirteenth century, Snorri Sturluson quickly pushed himself to the forefront of national life in Iceland. He was amassing wealth and power, and soon owned vast estates and lands in many parts of the country by taking over the chieftaincies into which Iceland had originally been divided. His life was an intricate pattern of shifting alliances and friendships, and in 1215, at the age of thirty-six, he was elected to his first three-year period as Law-Speaker of the Althing (he was to serve as Law-Speaker again, from 1222 to 1231). His chief literary interest during this period was not prose but poetry; he was already well known as a poet, writing in the sophisticated but dying art of the so-called court-metre, the style used by all the Icelanders who had become professional Court Poets to the royal courts of Scandinavia. But as well as writing poetry, he was collecting it assiduously; when he came to write his history-sagas, it was his prodigious stock of remembered Court Poetry on which he drew as one of his chief sources of historical material.

In 1218 he paid his first visit to Scandinavia. He stayed at the court of King Hakon Hakonsson, that shrewd and wily king who eventually succeeded in annexing Iceland to the Norwegian throne, in 1262, and who died in Orkney the following year after his campaign against Scotland had been foiled at the Battle of Largs in 1263. Snorri also visited Sweden, where he was given an honoured reception at the court of the late Earl Hakon the Mad, in whose honour he had already composed a poem for which he had received handsome gifts (he now wrote another poem, in honour of the widow, entitled Andvaka – ‘Sleeplessness’).

Snorri’s first visit to Scandinavia was in every way a triumph. He was held in high esteem at the Norwegian court, and was appointed a gentleman-in-waiting. He was an undoubted favourite with young King Hakon and his regent and mentor, Duke Skuli. And on his return to Iceland, he thanked his patrons by composing in their honour a poem of 102 strophes, Háttatal (‘List of Metres’), a tour de force of technical proficiency, illustrating the various court-metres. This poem formed the final section of Snorri Sturluson’s first major work, the Prose Edda, a textbook of poetry and poetic diction whose lavish examples have preserved for us a great deal of information about early Norse mythology and heroic legend.

He was not to return to Norway for fifteen years – and then it was to be in rather different circumstances. During this intervening period, Snorri was engaged in an incredible series of feuds and intrigues, sometimes against members of his own family. The Icelandic republic was now entering the start of its death throes, and Snorri’s family was to lend its own name to this era – the Sturlung Age, an age of flagrant lawlessness, of pledges broken and honour cynically ignored, of pitched battles between chieftains and their changing supporters, of cruelty and treachery and arson and murder.

And all the while, King Hakon in Norway watched and waited, playing off one chieftain against another, only awaiting his opportunity to step in decisively when the nation had become exhausted by this savage civil strife. Like most of the other leading men in Iceland, Snorri Sturluson was drawn helplessly into this political vortex; the dark forces of self-destruction had got out of hand and the state was doomed.

And yet, throughout this period of intrigue and slaughter, somehow Snorri Sturluson found time to write, to dictate to his secretary in the privacy of his library a steady stream of sagas. We cannot now be sure exactly what he wrote; the sixteenth-century Annals of Oddi say of him, laconically, ‘He composed Edda and many other books of learning, Icelandic sagas.’ His nephew, the writer Sturla Thordarson (1214–84), wrote in his Íslendinga Saga (‘Saga of the Icelanders’) that in the winter of 1230–1, another of Snorri’s nephews, Sturla Sighvatsson, ‘spent a long time at Reykholt and paid much attention to having books of sagas written up from the books which Snorri had composed’.

Hindsight casts an almost wistful light on this peaceful winter of 1230–1, when this great man of letters entertained his nephew and the talk was all of saga-writing; for within a very few years the same nephew, Sturla Sighvatsson, had become King Hakon’s agent and was determined to gain supreme power for himself, even at his uncle’s expense. Snorri was now in considerable danger, and in 1237 he prudently went abroad; he was no longer the high favourite he had once been, at least not with King Hakon. Hakon’s former regent, Duke Skuli, was now at odds with the king, and it was with Duke Skuli that Snorri took refuge.

In Iceland, the balance of power had shifted once again. Snorri’s nephew, Sturla Sighvatsson, who had been threatening Snorri’s very life, had himself been killed by yet another contender for supreme power – Gissur Thorvaldsson, another of King Hakon’s agents.

In 1239, Snorri decided to return to Iceland. King Hakon banned all Icelanders from leaving Norway, but Snorri left none the less, bearing with him the title – the empty title – of ‘Earl’ bestowed on him by the discredited Earl Skuli. Snorri Sturluson was now a spent force in Icelandic politics, little capable of either helping or hindering the king’s cause, or of proving a stumbling-block to Gissur Thorvaldsson’s ambitions; but Gissur was determined to smash the powerful Sturlung family for good.

Gissur’s excuse came with a letter from King Hakon demanding that Snorri Sturluson should be brought to Norway – or killed if he refused to go. Snorri was never to be given the option. On the night of 23 September 1241, seventy unannounced visitors led by Gissur Thorvaldsson arrived at Reykholt. The house was unguarded. They went unchallenged through the sturdy stockade that Snorri had built around the farmhouse for just such an emergency, and then forced their way into the house. Snorri was asleep in his bed-closet, but managed to get away as they were breaking into it. Eventually they found him hiding in a cellar underneath the buildings. Five men went down into the cellar; and there, unarmed and defenceless, Iceland’s most distinguished man of letters was struck down and killed. He was sixty-two years old.

He was also a man of his age in his literary philosophy, in his theories of literary craftsmanship. Behind Snorri Sturluson lay a century of saga-writing in Iceland, covering a wide variety of subjects in a considerable diversity of styles. The Danish historian, Saxo Grammaticus (d. 1216), writing his Latin Gesta Danorum at the end of the twelfth century, acknowledged his debt to the Icelandic historians and saga-writers with this tribute:

Snorri Sturluson had a considerable body of historical work to build on, stretching back a century to the works of Ari Thorgilsson the Learned (1067–1148), whom Snorri singled out for praise in his Introduction to Heimskringla: