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secured Hakon’s submission and surrender, Olaf released the young jarl unharmed and allowed his departure to join his father in the service of Cnut in England, before setting out on his own progress eastward through Norway seeking support for his cause. In fact, as just one among numerous descendants of Harald Fair-hair, Olaf cannot be said to have had any outstanding claim to the kingship of Norway, but his burly physique (he was known as ‘Olaf the Stout’ in his lifetime) and warfaring experience, his sheer self-assurance and persuasive oratory would have offered him as an impressive candidate for kingship. He was almost certainly also in possession of a substantial treasury, accumulated in the course of his viking career and not least from sharing in payments of danegeld with which Anglo-Saxon England regularly bought off Scandinavian raiding armies in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
    Nonetheless, he was to find opinion in Norway sharply divided between himself and Hakon’s uncle, Jarl Svein, who had already fled inland to marshal his own support, and so Olaf turned south to Ringerike where he sought the advice and assistance of Sigurd Syr, who solemnly warned his stepson of the formidable powers whom he sought to challenge. Nonetheless, Sigurd was still ready to help his stepson and brought together an assembly of provincial kings and chieftains of the Upplands which was eventually won over by Olaf’s oratory and acclaimed him king. As men of central Norway began flocking to his standard, Olaf made his way north into the Trondelag, heartland of the jarls of Lade, and even there opposition had not the strength to withstand him, at least until Jarl Svein launched a counter-attack on Nidaros which drove Olaf back to the south. There he mustered his forces and assembled a warfleet for the inevitable decisive battle which was fought off Nesjar, a headland on the western shore of Oslofjord, on Palm Sunday in the year 1016.
    The victory went to Olaf and with it the kingship of all Norway; the defeated Jarl Svein fled east into Sweden, where he died of sickness the following autumn, and the jarls Erik and Hakon became otherwise engaged with Cnut who was now king in England. In the customary way of victorious warrior kings, Olaf bestowed generous gifts on his supporters, and especially upon the stepfather who had not only helped bring the Uppland kings to Olaf’s cause but also, according to the saga, brought with him ‘a great body of men’ when he joined his stepson’s forces in the decisive battle. It seems likely that Olaf’s gift-giving to Sigurd Syr was to be the last meeting of the two men, because when the saga next tells of Olaf at Ringerike, some two years after the victory at Nesjar, it mentions that Sigurd had died the previous winter. In fact, that account of Olaf’s visit to his mother is of particular significance here because it represents the very first appearance of Harald Hardrada in the Heimskringla cycle.
    In celebration of her son’s homecoming, the proud Ásta prepared a great banquet for Olaf who ‘alone now bore the title of king in Norway’ and after the feast brought her three young sons (by Sigurd) to meet their royal half-brother. The saga account of that meeting, while hardly to be considered other than an apocryphal anecdote, does at least have the ring of plausibility when it tells how the king sought to test the character of the three young princes by pretending to become suddenly and thunderously angry. While Guthorm the eldest and Halfdan the second son drew back in fear, the reaction of Harald the youngest was simply to give a tug to his tormentor’s beard. If, as the saga claims, Olaf really did respond to Harald’s bold gesture by telling the three-year-old that ‘You will be vengeful one day, my kinsman’, history was to prove him no poor judge of character.
    The following day, as Olaf walked with his mother around