Chapter 4

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became king in Haakon's stead, but once again Norway was plunged into a turmoil of civil war. Harald himself was a fine man, a brave and adventurous viking whose most notable exploit as king was a brilliant attack upon the territories of the Düna mouth and the Archangel country in the White Sea; but in his own realm he had naturally to admit Harald Gormsson of Denmark as his overlord and to delegate much of his authority to his mother and brothers, while many of Haakon's staunchest friends, such as the powerful Jarl Sigurd of Lade in the Tröndelag, lived in open rebellion against the new regime. There was, in consequence, much fighting and discontent in Norway during this supremacy of the sons of Gunnhild and Eric, and the end of nine years of unrest was that Jarl Haakon Sigurdsson of Lade, whose father had been burnt alive by Harald Greycloak, excited the Norwegians to the pitch of rebellion. Jarl Haakon went to Denmark and won over Harald Gormsson to his side; then he engineered the murder of Harald Greycloak and had himself appointed regent of Norway with the king of Denmark as his master and with Svein, Harald Gormsson's heir and the future conqueror of England, as temporary lord of the Vik provinces.
       Jarl Haakon, not even of the blood royal, was unquestionably a usurper, but his personal influence and authority were sufficient to restore order in the land, and, like Haakon the Good before him, he ruled wisely and well; he was not afraid to delegate the duties of government to other jarls and even to petty kings such as Harald Grenske of Vestfold and Agder, a powerful man since Svein's return to Denmark, and in consequence of this there was but little opposition to the benevolent supremacy of so brave and distinguished a nobleman. In 971 he crushed the last revolt of the sons of Gunnhild and so gave peace to the land; but after the Battle of the Danevirke in 974, where he and a Norwegian army fought on the side of Harald Gormsson against the Emperor Otto II, he quarrelled with the king of Denmark, who subsequently invaded Norway and took outright possession of the Vik lands. It was because of this quarrel that the Jomsvikings (p. 182) swore to King Svein, Harald's son, that they would kill Jarl Haakon and fared forth in the winter of 986 to the stirring battle of Jörundfjord, where Haakon routed these famous fighters. The long reign of the Jarl of Lade nevertheless ended disastrously, for as he grew old he began to offend his people by his increasing tyranny and loose-living, so that there was a revolt against him and Norway hailed gladly as her king, after Haakon's




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ignominious death in 995, a young Christian prince who was lately returned from a viking expedition in England and the western seas. This was Olaf Tryggvason.
       The new king was of the line of Harald Fairhair, his father, Harald's grandson, being King Tryggve of the Vik whom the sons of Gunnhild had put to death, and his short reign of five years is memorable for one of the most remarkable missionary enterprises in the history of northern Europe. For this young giant, a man of immense physical strength and endowed with a most masterful personality, by sheer force and persistence made his realm a Christian state, and not only converted the unwilling heathen masses of Norway, but saw to it that the even more stubborn Norse colonists of the Faroes, of Iceland, and of Greenland, likewise accepted the new faith. In reality, Olaf's robust methods of conversion and his complete failure to organize a proper teaching of the Christian doctrines left Norway as much heathen at heart after these wholesale compulsory baptisms as before them, so that his achievement is admirable less because of its effect than because of its grandiose scale and the uncompromising thoroughness whereby it was carried out; for with Olaf his own zest and energy were sufficient to win the respect of his subjects, to ensure obedience to his strange whim of ordering the baptism of all and sundry, and to make of him a brilliant and successful king; but of the art of government, of the way to consolidate and preserve his great-grandfather's mighty kingdom as a lasting and law-abiding state, he knew and cared nothing.
       Thus when he fell in the year A.D. 1000 at the tragic sea-fight of Svold (p. 184), betrayed by the Jarl of Jomsborg into the hands of his enemies, the jealous kings of Sweden and Denmark and the rebel Jarl Eric Haakonsson of Norway, his realm, ill-organized and defenceless, was divided, unresisting, among the victors. Svein I of Denmark took the southern provinces and Opland, Olof Skotkonung of Sweden the southeast lands of Bohuslän from the Göta River to Svinesund together with the west-coast provinces of Möre and central and southern Tröndelag, while Jarl Eric and his brother Svein, the sons of Jarl Haakon, ruled over the rest of the country. But in 1015, when Eric left the country in order to fight for Cnut the Great in England, a new claimant to the throne of Norway appeared, another prince of Harald Fairhair's line. This was Olaf Haraldsson the Stout, son of Harald Grenske of Vestfold. He, like Olaf Tryggvason before him, came to Norway from the west where he had been on a viking




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expedition, having fought in England first against the forces of Æthelred the Unready and afterwards on the English side against the Danes. There was opposition to his seizing the throne of Olaf Tryggvason, but the armies of Denmark were too fully occupied in England to take the field against him in the north, and after he had defeated Jarl Svein in battle in the same year of that victory, 1016, he was acclaimed as king throughout all Norway.
       Olaf showed himself to be an earnest and not unenlightened statesman. Early in his reign he recovered Opland and the other territories ceded to the kings of Sweden and Denmark, and this important task done, he soon revealed his intention of turning his still reluctant country into a properly Christian state, supplying priests and churches throughout all the land and insisting upon the universal observance of a Christian code of behaviour. He did much to strengthen his own power by installing priests who looked directly to him, and to him alone, as their master; but he tried further to consolidate his own kingly authority by suppressing the remaining sub-kings and generally undermining the powers of the aristocracy, taking away from them their titles to govern locally and bestowing the offices they held by an almost hereditary right upon officials of common birth who were chosen by himself. Even the dignitaries of his own simple court were deliberately selected from among the Icelanders and from the lower ranks of Norwegian society rather than from among the leading nobles of the land.
       It was not long, then, when once this policy was established, before Olaf found himself with many enemies among the aristocratic families, and it was this general discontent among the chief land-holders that emboldened Cnut the Great, after he had become king of England, to assert that he was entitled, as ruler of Denmark, also to be the overlord of Norway. Olaf refused even to consider Cnut's claim, and, having successfully made an ally of the Swedish king, he rashly threatened to attack the all-powerful Danish realm. Cnut prevented their contemplated invasion of Denmark by fighting the allied fleets near Holy River off the coast of Scania, and in the year 1028 he sailed at the head of 1,400 warships for Norway where he was enthusiastically welcomed by the Norwegians, for they had lately been outraged by the murder of one of the best-loved members of the old nobility, Erling Skjalgsson, and they respected Cnut as lord of the great trade-routes to the west; at thing after thing he was hailed as king of Norway, and Olaf, seeing that the whole country was turned against him, fled to Russia. He




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remained for a year at the court of Yaroslav, the Swedish Grand Prince of Kiev, but when he heard that Cnut's regent in Norway, another Jarl of Lade by the name of Haakon, had been summoned to England, Olaf thereupon returned through Sweden to the Tröndelag, where his remaining friends, some Icelanders and many Norwegians of the poorer classes, joined themselves to the little band of Swedish auxiliaries, mostly adventurers and outlaws, that the exiled monarch had collected. It was with this ill-armed and undisciplined force that the king confronted in Verdal the large peasant-army of the rich Norwegian landed proprietors that had been gathered to oppose his further progress. The renowned Battle of Stiklestad took place on the 29th July, 1030, and there Olaf the Stout fell after an heroic struggle against better and more numerous troops.
       Olaf died, having lost the kingdom that he had governed too strictly, despised and rejected by the majority of his countrymen; but his labours had not been in vain and already a national consciousness was stirring. Yet it was above all of his piety and his constant championing of the Christian faith that men first of all thought, and when a year after the battle they disinterred his wonder-working body and found it lying in uncorrupted beauty, then they knew that he was indeed a man of God whose spirit would forever comfort and encourage his people. They gave him a new and honourable burial at Nidaros and henceforward this failure of a king has lived on immortal in the memory of his countrymen, Olaf the Holy, the patron saint of Norway.
       King Cnut put young Svein, his son, to rule Norway after Olaf's death, but it was really Aelfgifu of Northampton, the prince's mother, who held the power. Very quickly these two made themselves unpopular, for now Danish taxes were introduced, Danish laws enforced, and preference was everywhere given to Danish interests. This was the chief reason for the awakening of the national sentiment that made the fallen Olaf into a saint and the explanation of the recall from Russia, as soon as Cnut was dead, of Olaf's son, the boy Magnus. Upon the return of Magnus Olaf's son in 1035 and the rising of the people against them, Svein and Aelfgifu fled, so that Magnus was elected king of Norway unopposed. And now prosperity returned to the country, for the supremacy of Denmark was ended and in 1042, according to an amicable arrangement between the two countries, Magnus the Good was appointed to fill the Danish throne left vacant by the death of Hardecnut. In 1043, after the destruc-




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tion of the independent Danish fortress of Jomsborg and the routing of the Wends, for the first time in the history of Scandinavia the king of Norway was beyond all dispute the mightiest monarch of the north.
       But Denmark did not long submit to Norwegian rule, for the regent whom Magnus in all good faith, but most unwisely, had entrusted with the government of his new kingdom was Svein Estridsson of the Danish royal family, and this prince, who made only a temporary show of loyalty, was soon striving to throw off the Norwegian yoke. And in Norway, too, the tenure of the king was no longer secure, for in 1046 Olaf's half-brother had returned, that most glorious prince of adventurers, the great viking Harald Hardradi (p. 172). In the end Magnus shared his kingdom with Harald, but himself died in the following year (1047), and until 1066 Harald ruled alone, a great king who, by virtue of his complete victory over the always rebellious Opland and Tröndelag folks, was more truly the master of a united Norway than any other sovereign before him. These were turbulent years of war and excitement; a desperate and nearly successful attempt to wrest Denmark back from Svein Estridsson, a daring voyage of discovery made by the king into the polar waters, the expedition to aid Tostig of Northumbria against the English Harald, and that last adventure, the winning of a grave's length of England for Hardradi at Stamford Bridge, where this most amazing viking fell.
       A long period of peace followed under Olaf Kyrre, Harald Hardradi's son, who reigned over Norway until 1093. By this time, as also in Denmark, the restlessness of the viking age seemed to be over, and in these thirty years the Norwegians, under a generous and enlightened government, found time to copy many fashions and customs of England and the Continent, to build churches, to establish at the king's prompting the merchant-port of Bergen as a centre for the now important cod-fisheries of the west coast of Norway, and to develop the towns of Nidaros and Oslo. But Magnus Barefoot (1093- 1103), Olaf's son and successor, had the old viking temperament and planned conquests abroad on a noble scale, hoping to win both Scotland and Ireland for Norway. He commanded three naval expeditions in the western seas and re-affirmed the sovereignty of the Norwegian crown over the unstable Norse colonies in the Scottish islands and Man, added a part of Anglesey to his dominion, and died fighting in Ireland.
       After Magnus's death Norway was divided among his three