Harald Hardrada Read Online Free PDF

the farm they saw the three boys at play, Guthorm and Halfdan building farmhouses and barns which they imagined stocking with cattle and sheep, while Harald was nearby at the edge of a pool floating chips of wood into the water. When asked what they were, Harald said these were his warships and Olaf replied: ‘It may well be that you will have command of warships one day, kinsman.’
    Calling the three boys over to him, Olaf asked each in turn what he would most like to own. ‘Cornfields’ was Guthorm’s choice, while Halfdan chose ‘cattle’ and so many as would surround the lake when they were watered, but when it came to Harald’s turn he had no hesitation in demanding ‘housecarls’, the fighting men who formed a king’s retinue. ‘And how many housecarls would you wish to have?’ asked the king. ‘As many as would eat all my brother Halfdan’s cattle at a single meal!’ came the reply. Olaf was laughing when he turned to Ásta saying, ‘In this one, mother, you are raising a warrior king’, and, indeed, there is good reason to believe that such had been her intention from the first. The saga relates more than one anecdote bearing on Ásta’s ambitions for her sons and it would seem likely that it was she rather than her husband Sigurd who had chosen the name given to their youngest boy. If so, then her choice carries its own remarkable significance because the name Haraldr derives from the Old Norse term her-valdr , ‘ruler of warriors’.
    Some dozen years had passed before there is any saga reference to Harald meeting again with Olaf, although this time it was to be in very different circumstances because much had changed since 1018. Driven from power in Norway, Olaf had found refuge in Russia and it was from there that he returned in 1030 in a doomed attempt to reclaim his kingdom by the sword. News of his coming had apparently reached Ringerike even before he had passed through Sweden and the first to meet him as he approached the border was his half-brother Harald – now fifteen years old and described by the saga as ‘so manly as if he were already full-grown’ – who brought some seven hundred Upplanders to join Olaf’s modest army on its westward advance into the Trondelag.
    Ahead of them in Værdal lay the battle which was to mark the beginning of Harald Hardrada’s warrior’s way when the sun turned black in the summer sky above Stiklestad . . . .

I
Stiklestad

Norway, 1030
    I n the greater historical scheme of things, the presence of the young Harald Sigurdsson at Stiklestad might be thought to represent little more than a footnote to the epic drama centred upon the death in battle of the king who was soon to become Norway’s national patron saint. Such might even be the inference of the saga record when the first chapter of Harald’s saga in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla , which takes Stiklestad as the beginning of Harald’s story, actually expends just a few paragraphs on his presence at the battle which had already taken up some thirty-eight chapters of Olaf the Saint’s saga in the same collection.
    From the perspective being taken here, however, Stiklestad offers a range of interest which extends beyond its selection as the starting-point of Harald’s warrior’s way and even beyond an attempt to deduce something more about his own part in the battle than is made explicit in the saga. Not only does the conflict provide an early opportunity to survey the arms, armour, and tactics involved in an eleventh-century Scandinavian land-battle, but in so doing might also offer some insight into the warrior culture within which Harald had been raised to the threshold of his manhood.
    Of no less significance for his personal destiny, however, will be a portrait of the man who stood and fell at the centre of the blood-fray of Stiklestad, because there is every reason to