The Vikings (55 page)

 

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.
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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:

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.
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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,
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though several Icelandic sagas, including Snorri’s
Saga 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,
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his name appears regularly as a signatory of various of Cnut’s charters granting lands to church institutions.
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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.
Ágrip
is unequivocal on the score: ‘At this time Cnut ruled in England, which he had won with the help and support of St Olav.’
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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.
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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-century
Legendary 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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 Moster
Thing
’; 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.