17
Writing some two centuries after the conversion of Iceland and the reign in Norway of Olaf Tryggvason, Snorri includes in his biography a vignette from the latter days of that king’s short life:
Once when King Olaf was at a feast at Avaldsnes he was visited by an old man who wore a broad-brimmed hat on his head. He was one-eyed, and very eloquent and had something to tell of every land. He entered into conversation with the king; and as the king found much pleasure in the guest’s speech, he asked him concerning many things, to which the guest gave good answers: and the king sat up late in the evening. Among other things, the king asked him if he knew who the Avaldi had been who had given his name both to the ness and to the house. The guest replied, that this Avaldi was a king, and a very valiant man, and that he made great sacrifices to a cow which he had with him wherever he went, and considered it good for his health to drink her milk. This same king Avaldi had a battle with a king called Varin, in which battle Avaldi fell. He was buried under a mound close to the house; ‘and there stands his stone over him, and close to it his cow also is laid’. Such and many other things, and ancient events, the king inquired after. Now, when the king had sat late into the night, the bishop reminded him that it was time to go to bed, and the king did so. But after the king was undressed, and had laid himself in bed, the guest sat upon the foot-stool before the bed, and still spoke long with the king; for after one tale was ended, he still wanted a new one. Then the bishop observed to the king, it was time to go to sleep, and the king did so; and the guest went out. Soon after the king awoke, asked for the guest, and ordered him to be called, but the guest was not to be found. The morning after, the king ordered his cook and cellar-master to be called, and asked if any strange person had been with them. They said, that as they were making ready the meat a man came to them, and observed that they were cooking very poor meat for the king’s table; whereupon he gave them two thick and fat pieces of beef, which they boiled with the rest of the meat. Then the king ordered that all the meat should be thrown away, and said this man can be no other than the Odin whom the heathens have so long worshipped; and added, ‘but Odin shall not deceive us’.1
The picture of Odin as a solitary old tramp wandering through the forest alone is very different from the one Snorri gave us at the beginning of Heimskringla, in the Ynglingasaga, where Odin was in the infancy of his godhood, the human at the centre of an adoring tribe: ‘when he sat with his friends he was so fair and noble in looks’. It is part of Snorri’s literary genius to present the persistence and the enduring power of the old faith in this way, showing us how even the passionately Christian king was loath to stop listening to the old man’s stories. Of all the early post-Christian historians in Scandinavia, Snorri was the one most palpably nostalgic for the vanishing indigenous culture of the north. But this was not a noble appearance, and this Odin was clearly on the run.
Olaf contented himself in throwing away the horse-meat steaks that the wily old god had tried to slip him. He might have been better advised to hunt him down and kill him, for in the aftermath of his own death at the battle of Svold both the Ágrip and Theodoricus Monachus describe a Heathen revival in Norway. Politically, the results of the battle were that King Sven reasserted the direct rule of Danish kings over the Vik that they had exercised at least since the end of the eighth century. Olaf Sköttkonung of Sweden was allowed to control the eastern shores of the Vik. The long tradition of alliance between Lade earls and the Danish kings which had been disrupted during the reigns of Håkon the Bad and Olaf Tryggvason was revived. One of Håkon’s sons, Sven Håkonarson, became effective ruler of the four eastern provinces of the Trondheim region. His brother Erik ruled in the west of the province.2 The Ágrip claims that ‘as much pain and effort as Olaf Tryggvason had put into forwarding Christianity - and he spared nothing which was to the honour of God and the strengthening of the Christian faith - so Eric and his son put all their strength into quelling it’.3 All four rulers were, as far as we know, baptized Christians and a respectful deconstruction of this might lead us to suggest that Sven and Erik, aware how many enemies Olaf Tryggvason’s coercion had made him, practised a tolerance that turned a blind eye to sacrificing, necromancy and the eating of horse flesh. Theodoricus Monachus notes merely that under Erik’s rule ‘many Christians had turned aside from the true faith’.4
The medieval concern with the legitimacy of royal lines was inevitably largely a retrospective affair, and in view of King Olav Haraldson’s huge subsequent historical and cultural importance for Norway, it became a cultural necessity for Norwegian and Icelandic historians to furnish him with an appropriately distinguished ancestry. Working in the twelfth century, both Ari and a younger contemporary Sæmund, known as the Learned, compiled genealogies for the Norwegian kings which reached back some thirty generations into the earliest times of the Heathen gods, along the way plotting in Olav as the great-great-great-grandson of Harald Finehair. The extant evidence adduced for their genealogies are the two stray references to a ‘Harald’ in poems by Ottar the Black and Sigvat, skalds who sang his praises during the period of his reign. It seems almost certain, however, that the ‘Harald’ they were referring to was not the architect of the first Norwegian unification but Harald Grenske, one of a number of tributary kings based in the Vik.5 These are the origins Snorri gives him in his Saga of St Olav. After Harald Grenske’s death, Olav’s mother, Åsta, married another minor Norwegian aristocrat and produced a son, Olav’s half-brother Harald. He later became a king himself and acquired the nickname Hardrada, or the Hard-Ruler. The date of Olav’s birth is traditionally set at 995, though it may have been unknown and set at this by later historians as a way of establishing a narrative connection with Olaf Tryggvason, who came to power in Norway in that year. Accepting the dating means that he was no more than twelve years old at the time of the first Viking adventures in the Baltic that are referred to in the praise poems concerning him, and only fourteen when he came to England as a soldier in the army of Thorkel the Tall in 1009. Sigvat’s ‘Víkingarvísur’, or ‘Viking Verses’ (the title is modern), celebrate nine battles from Olav’s Viking days, of which the sixth was that attack on London Bridge which gave rise to one of the more surprising legacies of the Viking Age, the English nursery rhyme ‘London Bridge is falling down’. The enormous gelds this army took from the English, including the 48,000 pounds in 1012, must have laid the foundations of Olav’s fortune. The point is expressly made by Ottar the Black in the ‘Head-Ransom’, a poem of reparation composed after Ottar had angered his master by making a verse about Olav’s wife:
Lord wide-renowned, the people of the English race
might not stand against you,
undaunted one,
when you took tribute.
Not seldom
did man pay gold to the gracious prince.
I learn that great treasures went ever and again
Down to the shore.6
The same poet in the same poem refers to Olav’s participation in the taking of Canterbury, where ‘fire and smoke played fiercely upon the dwellings,’ and hails Olav as the destroyer of the lives of men. In the light of Olav’s later beatification there is irony in the fact that, in his Viking youth, this saint-king was a member of the army responsible for the murder of St Alphege in 1012.7
Upon the break-up of this army, Olav’s skalds praise him for the part he took in the raids in France and al-Andalus, along what is now the Atlantic coast of Portugal, which we looked at in an earlier chapter. It seems that, on his return, Olav made his way to the Norman court of Richard II, where Ethelred and other members of the English royal family had sought refuge after Sven Forkbeard’s conquest in 1013. According to Theodoricus, Olav was baptized in Rouen,8 though several Icelandic sagas, including Snorri’sSaga of Olaf Tryggvason, savour the symmetrical possibility that he was baptized at the age of about three by Olaf Tryggvason himself, during a missionary trip to Ringerike, the home of Olav’s stepfather. It seems that, during this visit to Normandy, he entered into some kind of alliance with Ethelred.
Olav’s baptism in Rouen must have taken place at about the same time as Sven Forkbeard’s death, and from this sudden change in the political scene he emerged as a pretender with serious designs on the crown of his native Norway. Two contrasting scenarios exist to describe what happened next. One takes its reasoning and psychology from the narrative in Snorri Sturluson’s saga, in which Olav abandoned his alliance with the Danish kings and assisted at the restoration of Ethelred and in driving Cnut out of England in 1013. As we saw earlier, Cnut returned the following year, and the Lade earl Erik Håkonson fought alongside his Danish brother-in-law in his attempt to regain the crown of England from Ethelred and, after Ethelred’s death, deal with the challenge of Edmund Ironside. Following the death of Edmund Ironside in 1016, Erik was rewarded for his loyalty with the earldom of Northumbria. From 1018 until 1023, when he bled to death after his uvula was cut,9 his name appears regularly as a signatory of various of Cnut’s charters granting lands to church institutions.10 In Norway, he was succeeded as earl of Lade by his son, Håkon.
With Cnut and Erik fighting for the larger prize of England, this left the west coast of Norway vulnerable to attack. Olav Haraldson wasted no time and, in 1015, in a peculiarly low-key adventure that involved the use of only two ships that were not even longships but trading knarr and an army of as few as 200 men, he sailed to Norway. According to Snorri, this small force landed on the island of Selja. In keeping with the mysteriously low-budget nature of the whole enterprise, Håkon came against him with a single ship, and with some ease Olav captured it. Snorri invents dialogue for their encounter, in which Håkon explains the feebleness of his defence by describing himself as ‘newly come out of my childhood’, a curious excuse, bearing in mind that Olaf himself was probably only about twenty years old at the time. Ágrip gives Håkon’s age as fifteen. Whatever the difference in years between them, it was enough for Olav to make an avuncular offer of release to the boy, on condition that he leave the country at once and make no attempt to reclaim it. Håkon agreed and sailed to England where, as his father’s son, he found immediate favour and was given the earldom of Worcester.
The alternative scenario ignores Snorri’s interpretation of events and looks instead to other sources for a rational and credible explanation for the remarkable ease of Olav’s arrival in Norway - for it seems hardly appropriate to call his landing an invasion. Ágripis unequivocal on the score: ‘At this time Cnut ruled in England, which he had won with the help and support of St Olav.’11 Adam of Bremen, William of Jumièges and the Historia Norwegie all take the same line. Claus Krag suggests that Cnut may have prised Olav away from any putative agreement entered into in Rouen with Ethelred by offering him power over all, or a large part, of Norway, with Erik, earl of Lade, being persuaded to agree to the plan by the offer of the much more wealthy English earldom of Northumbria. His son Håkon would likewise have been persuaded that a better future awaited him in the affluent west. In the Hofudlausn or ‘Head-ransom’ verses, Ottar the Black seems specifically to credit Olav with restoring Ethelred to the throne. Krag’s suggestion is that the saga writers who made this assumption exaggerated Olav’s role; in saying that Olav ‘gave land’ to Ethelred, the poet meant only to convey that Olav had won control of certain regions for him, not the whole country. This hypothesis of a deal struck between all the parties involved eliminates the anomalies in Snorri’s story, from Olav’s use of two trading vessels to the oddly amicable tone of the meeting between Olav and Håkon.12
The authentic opposition to Olav came in a battle fought on 25 March 1016, at Nesjar (now Brunlanes) in Vestfold, on the western shore of the Vik. In the Nesjavísur, or ‘Nesjar Verses’, Sigvat celebrated his master’s victory over an army gathered by the last remaining of the three Lade earls, Sven, Erik’s brother and uncle of the exiled boy-ruler Håkon. If Krag’s hypothesis is correct, then Sven must have rejected the terms offered by Cnut and accepted by both Erik and Håkon. Though it may only be poetic licence, Sigvat attributes Olav’s victory in part at least to his generosity as a gift-giver, which suggests that his danegeld fortune must have been still largely intact. Sven, by contrast, was miserly and so unable to attract support. The anonymous, thirteenth-centuryLegendary Saga of St Olav adds a credible account of Olav’s visiting his parents’ home in Ringerike before the battle, summoning all the petty kings to meet him there, and offering them the choice between abandoning their claims to descent from Harald Finehair and their allegiance to a Danish overlord and becoming his men, or being killed. Most chose the former.13 Sven lost a great many men in the battle but escaped with his life and made his way to Russia.
In 1019 Olav had entered into an alliance with his neighbour in the east, King Olof Sköttkonung, and married his daughter Astrid. The alliance was not weakened when Olof died in 1022 and was succeeded by Astrid’s brother, Anund Jakob. With the death in 1019 of his brother Harald, Cnut was now also king of Denmark, and from a political point of view Olav’s marriage may have been a response to the alarm felt among Cnut’s neighbours at the relatively sudden appearance among them of an emperor with the most powerful army in northern Europe at his disposal. If Olav did indeed come to power in Norway with the blessings and connivance of King Cnut, then we may be sure that Cnut intended any agreement between them to be along the traditional lines of the tributary relationship that had existed as long ago as 813, when Klak-Harald and his brother Reginfrid crossed the waters of the Vik to put down a rebellion in Vestfold, and one which Cnut’s grandfather Harald Bluetooth had confirmed on the Jelling stone boast of a century and a half later, to have won for himself ‘all of Norway’. In the ecclesiastical law code I Cnut, dated to before 1023, Cnut had described himself as ‘king of the Norwegians’, and as time passed it must have seemed to him that Olav was conducting himself with far too much independence for a tributary king.14 At about this time he sent a letter to Olav in which he reminded him of the realities of their relationship and asserted his legitimate right to Norway. He assured Olav that he did not wish to assert his rights by force, but he was insistent that Olav should travel to England and formally accept Cnut as his lord.15
Olav declined the offer. He may have hoped that the demands of Cnut’s empire were stretching him too far and that it would be possible to exploit this, for shortly afterwards he and Anund Jakob launched a strike against Denmark. Cnut sailed to meet them with a fleet and a major battle took place at a site on the Holy River in Skåne. The result appears to have been inconclusive. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported heavy losses on Cnut’s side and that the Swedes and Norwegians ‘had control of the field’, but Ottar the Black in the ‘Knúts drápa’ praised King Cnut, ‘bold in attack, you smote the Swedes in the place called Holy River, and there the she-wolf got much wolf’s food. Terrible staff of battle, you held the land against two princes, and the raven did not go hungry there. You are swift to deal with the race of men.’16 In his celebratory verses Sigvat, too, awarded the victory to Cnut.
Cnut was aware that Olav had made himself many enemies during his years on the throne and he seems to have sponsored the discontent of the chief among them, Erling Skjalgsson, from Sola in Rogaland. In an occasional verse, Sigvat lamented the fact that ‘the king’s enemies are walking about with open purses; men offer the heavy metal for the priceless head of the king’. But when Erling was defeated and killed in battle at sea off the south-west tip of Norway, Cnut took matters into his own hands, assembled a fleet of fifty ships and in 1028 crossed the North Sea himself. Olav had no chance against such a force and fled the country to Russia. Cnut was content to resume the traditional relationship and allow the next Lade earl, another Håkon, to rule in Norway for him. He took hostages to England with him, the conventional form of insurance. Håkon drowned in 1029, however, and with him the powerful line of Lade earls died out. Olav was encouraged to return from Russia and try his luck again. The popularity of his cause had not improved in his absence and at the battle of Stiklestad in 1030 he was defeated and killed.
From the start of his reign in 1015, Olav’s task as a missionary king had been to complete the work begun twenty years earlier by Olaf Tryggvason. Olaf’s successes had been mostly on the coastal fringes of Norway over which he had control; Olav made it his business to bring the men and the women of the remote interior to Christianity. As described by Snorri, his methods did not differ greatly from those of his predecessor, involving coercion and the threat and use of violence against those who resisted him. Adam of Bremen relates that he upset many by having their womenfolk killed as witches. The twin impositions of monarchy and monotheism angered local chieftains, who preferred the long-distance relationship with a Danish overlord that gave them greater autonomy. Snorri describes at length a rebellion against Olav’s rule planned by five minor kings from the central district of the country known as Uppland. Their plans were betrayed and Olav surprised them in their sleep. One had his tongue cut out and another was blinded. The rest were sent into exile. Modern sensibilities are surprised, some perhaps even affronted, at the claim of such a man to be spreading the word of Christ, but where Olav was truly modern and Christian was in his law-making. He succeeded where Håkon the Good had failed in his attempt to introduce Christian law to Norway. The Kuli-stone inscription from Nordmøre dated itself to a time when ‘Christendom had been twelve winters in the realm’, and we mentioned earlier the possibility that the runemaster’s reference point was the Thing meeting held at Moster in 1024, at which Olav introduced his revolutionary innovations, acting on the advice of his English bishop, Grimkel. Fragments of the contributions attributed to Olav and known as the ‘Olav texts’ dating from the end of the twelfth century are known, but the earliest surviving manuscript copy of the complete Gulathing Law dates from about 1250.17 Section ten of this stated a communal obligation ‘to maintain all the churches and uphold the Christian religion as St Olav and Bishop Grimkel laid down at the Moster Thing’. Section fifteen carried three important institutional stipulations: that ‘our bishop shall have authority over the churches, just as St Olav promised bishop Grimkel at the MosterThing’; that the people would ‘provide the priests with a living as decreed by St Olav and Grimkel at the Moster Thing’; and that the feast and fast days introduced by Olav and Grimkel at Moster should continue to be observed. These new laws of Olav were then carried to the various assemblies throughout the country, read aloud and adopted with the assent of the communities.
Thus began the long and irreversible process of the institutional replacement by law of Viking Age, Heathen culture with modern, Christian culture. At the heart of the legislation lay the enforcement of certain crucial Christian practices: the fast and feast days that were to be observed; the baptism that would enrol all healthy, normal infants into the Church; the adoption of Christian rules concerning marriage, including regulations governing the degree of consanguinity permitted by the Church between the bridal pair; and the burial of the dead in Christian ground. The Church’s urgent need was for a way of imposing these practices with only a rudimentary institutional clerical structure at its disposal. As the founders of Islam in the seventh century, the French Revolutionaries of 1789, and Josef Stalin in the Soviet era in Russia all show in their different ways, a reform of the calendar is a perennially popular way of announcing a revolution that at the same time facilitates the large-scale social control of people. Across the Heathens’ loose conception of a year that followed the seasons and rhythms of nature, Olav and his successors and their clerical advisers imposed a calendar that was as man-made as was practicable, austerely stamped throughout with the demand for discipline in the form of fasting. There was to be fasting during Lent, and the other Quadragesimal fasts that preceded Christmas, St John’s Day and Assumption Day; the four, three-day fasts spread across the year known as the Quatember fasts were to be observed, as were the three Rogation Day fasts. The Church also required that each Friday be a day of fasting, and with the demand that Sunday be held a day of rest there remained hardly more than a hundred days in the calendar which had not, in one way or other, been requisitioned in the name of the new religion.18 So that the demands should not be hollow, the law required priests to send out reminders of imminent fasts and feast days, in the form of a marked wooden calendar which was carried on a fixed round from farm to farm.
By embedding detailed aspects of Christian culture in the law in this way, these early legislators were able to ensure that it was manifest in every aspect of the daily lives of the individuals and families who made up the community. None of the laws specifically addressed the issue of Christian belief, but the numerous laws on fasting encouraged a resistance to the demands of appetite and instinct that was seen to be essential to the practice of Christianity at the individual level.
For five years following Olav’s death Norway was ruled by Cnut’s thirteen-year-old son Sven, with his English mother Ælfgifu acting as his regent.19 The regime quickly revealed itself as a colonial exploitation. New laws were introduced that made the testimony of a single Dane enough to outweigh that of ten Norwegians. No one was allowed to leave the country without the king’s permission, and anyone who did so would forfeit his or her possessions to the crown. New taxes were introduced. At Christmas a measure of malt was due to the king from every household, a ham from a three-year-old ox, and a unit of butter. Five fish from every catch were the king’s part, and on each ship leaving the country a space was reserved for the king’s use. For the levy seven men were to provide a complete set of equipment for one able-bodied man, defined as anyone over the age of five. Women were to contribute a separate tax, a measure known as a ‘lady’s tow’ that was as much clean flax as could be held between thumb and forefinger.20 The hostages held by the crown were enough to discourage any thought of revolt. To hard laws were added the burden of harsh seasons when people had to eat cattle fodder. Sigvat’s poem easily conjures a syncretic connection between the good luck associated with the sacral kingship of Heathen times and Olav’s Christian kingship:
Ælfgifu’s time
long will the young man remember,
when they at home ate ox’s food,
and like the goats, ate rind;
Different it was when Olav,
the warrior, ruled the land,
then everyone could enjoy
stacks of dry corn.21
As discontent with direct Danish-English rule grew, those farmers and chieftains who had opposed and killed Olav began to regret their actions. The burgeoning store of legends and miracles associated with the dead king added to their unease, and at some point word was sent to Bishop Grimkel. He obtained permission to open the grave and, having exhumed the body, declared, according to Snorri, with the assent of the king and the people, that Olav was a saint.22 This was powerful medicine indeed, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported on these happenings in Norway with quiet bewilderment. The scribes who began the work in the reign of Alfred over a hundred years earlier can scarcely have imagined the development that was reported in the C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1030: ‘In this year King Olav was killed in Norway by his own people, and was afterwards holy.’23
Among the enigmas of Olav’s beatification are the fact that the men who defeated and killed him were themselves Christians; that they were neither Danes nor Englishmen but his fellow-Norwegians; and that his own army at Stiklestad was largely made up of foreigners, many of them Heathens. In the first instance, the cult fed on reports of miracles associated with his name. The evidence of the ‘Erfidrápa’, composed by his friend and skald Sigvat in about 1040 and so only about ten years after his death, is that the cult was already well established by that time. In the poem, Sigvat refers to a St Olav’s mass, to the existence of a reliquary containing the saint’s remains, and to a miracle said to have taken place almost immediately after Olav’s death, concerning a blind man who stumbled and fell at the spot where the blood-tinged water used to wash the king’s body had been thrown. The water splashed up into his eyes, and he regained his sight. A century later another skald, Einar Skulesson, enumerated fourteen miracles worked by Olav, and by the end of the century and the time of the Passio Olavi, a hagiography written in Norway around 1170, the number had risen to twenty-five.24 Well before that date, there were churches dedicated to Olav in Iceland, England, Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man.25 The reference on a memorial rune-stone from Sjusta in Uppland, Sweden, to a man who ‘daudr i Holmgardi i Olafs kirkiu’ (‘died in Holmgard in Olav’s church’) shows that, within decades of his death, his cult had established itself in the Byzantine east.26By succeeding in their efforts to present Olav’s death on the battlefield at Stiklestad as a triumph, the Church was able to suggest a parallel with the death of Christ which, in time, was reinforced by a claim that Olav had faced his killers unarmed. To make a hero and an exemplar out of a beaten man who had refused even to defend himself at the moment of his death turned every tenet of Viking Age Heathen ethics on its head. In a later and final posthumous transformation, this remarkable Norwegian Viking adventurer became his country’s patron saint and its Rex Perpetuum Norvegiæ, its king in all perpetuity.
In response to a groundswell of despair at the misrule of Sven and Ælfgifu and hope aroused by the fact that they now had a saint of their own to look to, a group of leading Norwegians made the journey to the court of Prince Jaroslav in Kiev, where Olav had taken his young son Magnus when he fled the country in 1028, and brought the eleven-year-old prince back with them to be their new figurehead. Even the boy’s name was another sign that the Viking Age in Norway was over. It was given to him at his christening by Sigvat in honour of Charlemagne, Karla Magnus in Norwegian, the man who had once wept as he contemplated the trouble the inhabitants of this most northerly part of the known world would visit on his descendants and their peoples. With the same curious ease and dispatch with which Olav had taken power in 1015, Magnus found himself accepted as king of Norway in 1035. Sven and his mother fled to Denmark.
At the start of his reign Magnus almost compromised the large amount of good-will he enjoyed as the native son of a saint with a verbal attack on the men of the Trøndelag at the Nidaros assembly. The Ágrip conveys a vivid impression of the reception given to the eleven-year-old boy’s speech: ‘They all stuck their noses in their cloaks, and were silent and gave no answer. Then a man named Atli stood up and said no more words than these: “So shrinks the shoe on my foot that I cannot move” ’. Sigvat, his godfather, rebuked the boy in verse:
Dangerous is the threat
- this must first be dealt with -
when all the elders, whom I hear,
would rise against their king.
It is dangerous too
when the assembled men bow their heads
and stick their noses in their cloaks;
the thanes are struck silent.
There were at least fifteen more of these Bersoglisvísur, or ‘Plain-Speaking Verses’. The boy-king is said to have retired for the night, chastened by his godfather’s words. In the morning he delivered a second and much more successful speech to the gathering in which he ‘promised all men kindness and kept what he had promised, or better’.27
And yet he remained a boy. His own accession in 1035 and the death of Cnut in the same year created an unstable situation in the region which he and his advisers attempted to exploit. Though it offers no circumstantial detail, the thirteenth-century Icelandic collection of kings’ sagas known as Morkinskinna describes a period with a ‘great deal of strife and warfare’ that preceded an encounter at the mouth of the Göta river between fleets led by Magnus and by Cnut’s successor in Denmark, Harthacnut, who at fifteen years of age was about four years Magnus’s senior.28 Theodoricus Monachus offers a devastat ingly clear analysis of how hostilities were avoided:
Whereupon the leading men, seeing that the two kings, still immature, could easily be swayed in any direction, and that they themselves would more likely bear the blame for anything the kings might do amiss, fell back on the more sensible plan of negotiating peace.29
As a result of these negotiations it was agreed that, if one of them died without leaving an obvious heir, the survivor of the pact should inherit both kingdoms. Twelve of the leading men on each side swore on oath to observe the terms of the agreement. According to the Morkinskinna, the treaty was modelled on that made between Cnut and Edmund Ironside at Alney in 1016.
Cnut’s and Emma’s son, Harthacnut, had added the crown of England to his Danish crown in 1040. Following his death just two years later the treaty came into operation, and Magnus of Norway was elected king of Denmark without opposition. Snorri tells us that this ready acceptance was in part because ‘King Olav’s saintliness and his miracles were then known all over the land.’30 In a dramatically rapid inversion of a long-established tradition, it was now the turn of a Norwegian king to appoint a tributary ruler to run his affairs in Denmark. Snorri also claims that Magnus addressed a letter to Harthacnut’s successor in England, Edward, later the Confessor, telling him that, as far as he was concerned, the treaty between Harthacnut and himself also made him the legitimate ruler of England: ‘I will that you give up the kingdom to me or otherwise I shall seek it with forces from both Denmark and Norway.’31 In 1044 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that Edward ‘sailed out to Sandwich with thirty-five ships’.32 No reason is given for the mustering, but Florence of Worcester assumed that it was a response to this threat by Magnus to invade England.33
Though Magnus did not act on his threat, the existence of the Norwegian claim would prove a fateful element in the chain of events that led to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. It was at about this time that the late King Olav’s half-brother Harald, later Hardrada or ‘the Hard-Ruler’, returned to the region. Having fought alongside Olav as a fifteen-year-old at Stiklestad, he had fled to Sweden and thence to Jaroslav’s court at Novgorod, where he remained for three years before travelling south to join the Byzantine emperor’s Varangian Guard. During his ten years in Constantinople he had amassed a fortune, and by the time he returned to Scandinavia he was still only thirty years old. His first move was to strike up an alliance with Sven Estrithson, Magnus’s tributary king in Denmark, who was not at all pleased at the humiliations imposed on him by the recent inversion of the status quo.
Harald played off his nephew Magnus and his ally Sven against each other. When Magnus asked for his help in bringing Sven back into line, Harald offered to do so on condition that Magnus cede half the kingdom to him, as he claimed was his hereditary right. After some hard and acrimonious dealings, an agreement was reached: Magnus would indeed share Norway with his uncle, but remain sole monarch of Denmark. Harald, content with his prospects, duly took a fleet to Denmark to re-impose Norwegian overlordship on Sven. Magnus was killed fighting in Jutland in the year following their agreement and Harald Hardrada inherited all of Norway.
Harald also inherited the Norwegian claim to Denmark, which Sven never ceased to dispute throughout the twenty years of Harald’s reign. Finally, in 1064, Harald recognized him as king of the Danes. Turning his attention to another and richer prize he then resurrected the claim to England that derived from the earlier agreement between Magnus and Harthacnut. He spent the next two years preparing an invasion fleet, and in 1066 crossed the North Sea and sailed up the Humber. The army that came out to meet him was defeated at Fulford Gate, York was captured by a Norwegian king and for a moment it looked as though Viking history, this time with a cross rather than a hammer around its neck, might be about to repeat itself. Edward had died early in the year, to be succeeded by Harold Godwinson, and only a few days after the occupation of York Harald’s men were surprised by Harold’s English army at Stamford Bridge, some seven miles east of the city. Harald himself was killed, along with a huge number of his followers. Three hundred ships had been required to bring his army over; a mere twenty-four sufficed to take what was left of it back across the sea to Norway. On 27 September 1066, two days after Harold’s victory, the Norman Duke William, later ‘the Conqueror’, landed with an army at Pevensey in Sussex. About four days later, news of his arrival reached Harold Godwinson in the north. He at once turned his troops about and set off for the south again. Four days later, on 5 October, he was in London. After a week of rest the army was on the move again, still marching south, still tired, as they headed for Hastings to a confrontation that would lead to yet another cultural upheaval for the English - whoever ‘the English’ were by this time - with the introduction of the names, language and mores of William’s Franco-Norman aristocrats. But that is another story, and it is not a Viking story.