Harald Hardrada (8 page)

At which point the saga finally brings Olaf to Stiklestad, a place name which actually identified a farm in Værdal and one apparently located near the rising ground where the king chose to range his forces, and from where he now had his first sight of the bonders' host assembling below. A spurious story of an attack on an enemy troop sent to spy on the king's army and of its leader, recognised as ‘Rut of Viggia', being slain by the Icelanders of Olaf's retinue is very probably one of those occasional saga anecdotes contrived to accommodate a jest based on a personal name, especially when the king offers his Icelanders ‘a ram to slaughter' and
Rut
is the Icelandic term for a young ram. There might be just one nugget of historical value to be found in the tale, however, if it can be taken to confirm the likelihood of Icelanders included among Olaf's housecarls at Stiklestad. The passage immediately following in the saga narrative is another anecdote, but one of more particular significance here as the reference with which
Olaf the Saint's saga
in
Heimskringla
specifically confirms Harald Hardrada's having taken part in the battle.

The army has reached Stiklestad and been placed in battle array, although Dag Ringsson's force has yet to arrive and so the king directs the Uppland contingent to go out on to the right wing and raise their banner there, but first he advises that ‘my brother Harald should not be in this battle, as he is still only a child in years'. To which Harald replies that he certainly will be in the battle ‘and if I am so weak as to be unable to wield a sword, then let my hand be tied to the hilt. There is none keener than I to strike a blow against these bonders and so I shall go with my comrades.' The saga goes on to quote a verse which it attributes to Harald himself, although in a form of words which distinctly betrays Snorri's own suspicions regarding its authenticity: ‘We are told that Harald made this verse on that occasion . . . .

I shall guard the wing
on which I stand – and
my mother will hold worthy
my battering reddened shields.
Not fearful of the foemen
bonders' spear-thrusts,
the young warrior will wage a manly
weapon-thing most murderous.
⁶

‘And Harald had his way and was given leave to be in the battle.'

There is, of course, no doubt that Harald actually did fight at Stiklestad and so the story certainly cannot be dismissed as implausible, but it still does lack the ring of authenticity, and not least because Snorri's use of the phrase ‘we are told that . . .' is one of his customary forms of signalling his own doubts as to the reliability of his source material. It is very tempting to wonder whether Harald might have composed the verse some time after the battle, possibly even years later when he had succeeded his brother as king in Norway and the story elaborated as a frame in which to set it. Closer examination of the incident might even suggest as much because, while Olaf would have had a natural concern for his young kinsman's safety, it is hardly likely that he would have considered him too young to take part in the battle, especially when there is so much evidence attesting Harald's physical prowess and his quite exceptional height which would already have been apparent even in a fifteen-year-old. Neither would a prince already into his teens have been untrained in weapon-handling, especially one with a mother so ambitious for her sons to win battle-glory. This was precisely the form of induction into his warrior's way for which Harald would have been schooled since infancy and, indeed, encouraged to long for by his immersion in a culture entirely infused with the heroic warrior ethos. In fact, Olaf himself was said to have been just twelve years of age when he embarked on his first viking expedition and still only fourteen when he was fighting in England as a warrior in the army of Thorkell the Tall.

It is worth remembering, though, that the young Olaf was placed under the guardianship and guidance of his late father's principal lieutenant, Rani the Far-travelled, when he first went a-viking, and is similarly thought to have had no less a warrior than the famous Thorkell himself as his mentor in England. So it is perhaps more likely that Olaf would not have advised against his young kinsman taking part in the battle at Stiklestad, but against his being placed on the right wing with the Uppland contingent when the king would more probably have wanted to keep him closer to his own most trusted warriors, even within the shelter of his
skjaldborg
where he intended to place the skalds. There is, in fact, other evidence bearing on Harald's survival at Stiklestad – which will be considered in detail later – to suggest his having been guarded on the battlefield by one of the most trusted members of the king's personal retinue.

One other aspect of the story of timely significance here is Harald's quoted remark about wielding a sword, because this might be the most convenient point at which to expand upon the subject of weaponry at Stiklestad. While the shield, as aforementioned, was the least expensive and most essential item in the armoury of the northman, the sword was not only the most expensive but also the most prestigious, and the weapon most often celebrated by skald and saga-maker. The most famous swords were given their own names, as was Olaf's weapon, called ‘Neite' (
Hneitir
in the Norse), which served him through his many battles before its gold-worked hilt fell at last from his hand at Stiklestad. Retrieved from the field by a Swedish warrior who had lost his own sword, it was kept in the man's family for some three generations until the early twelfth century when one of his descendants became a Varangian mercenary in Byzantine service and brought it with him to the east. A closely contemporary account, which was known to Snorri Sturluson, tells how its identity was revealed to the emperor John II Comnenus and how he paid a great price in gold for the sword, which was thereafter enshrined in the Varangian chapel dedicated to Saint Olaf in Constantinople.

While unlikely to have been all so richly decorated as Neite, swords of quality would usually have blades of foreign manufacture, the best of them imported from the Rhineland, double-edged, pattern-welded and more than 70 centimetres in length. Recognised as the aristocrat of the armoury in the old northern world, the sword was the weapon of the superior class of warrior, of the housecarl, the chieftain and the king, and yet it was the axe which still represents the most characteristic weapon of the northman. It was, of course, equally useful as a working tool and would have been more widely distributed, as also would the spear, especially the lighter throwing-spear as distinct from the heavier type fitted with a broader blade which was used as a thrusting weapon in hand-to-hand combat.

Thus an army as diverse as the one which Olaf brought to Stiklestad would have gone into battle bearing a disparate range of weaponry. The professional fighting-man would have his sword and shield, possibly a war-axe, probably a spear, or even a bow and arrows when no less an authority than Saxo Grammaticus acknowledged the fame of Norse archery. Those of humbler status would have been armed with the essential shield, probably with an axe and perhaps a spear – even in so basic a form as a sharpened stake – or possibly a hunting bow, while some of the very roughest recruits of the vagabond type might have wielded nothing more sophisticated than a heavy wooden club.

Social divisions would have been still more obviously apparent in respect of helmets and protective armour or, in the great majority of cases, by their absence. The saga has a lavishly detailed account of Olaf's arms and armour comprising a gold-mounted helmet and a white shield inlaid with a golden cross, his spear (which Snorri had certainly seen beside the altar in Christ Church at Nidaros) and, of course, his keen-edged Neite. Yet the one item of his war-gear specifically confirmed by a quoted verse from Sigvat is his coat of ring-mail. This ‘burnished byrnie' was probably singled out for the skald's attention by reason of its extreme rarity, because while iron was plentiful (and plate armour completely unknown) in eleventh-century Scandinavia, the laborious craftsmanship involved in the production of ring-mail made it the most prohibitively expensive item of war-gear and thus available only to the most affluent on the battlefield. It would also have been extremely hot and heavy to wear while fighting on foot, so leather may often have been preferred by those who were fortunate enough to enjoy the luxury of choice.

Helmets too, although simpler and thus less costly to produce than mail, are thought not to have been so widespread in Scandinavian warfare as is sometimes imagined. The ‘winged' or ‘horned' helmet of ‘the Viking' has long been confidently dismissed as a fantasy, but helmets of the
spangenhelm
type – a construction of triangular iron plates held together at the base by a circular headband sometimes mounted with a nose-guard – would have represented standard equipment for the professional fighting-men in a lordly or royal retinue. Again, however, neither helmet nor mail-coat would have been likely to be found among the rougher elements in Olaf's forces, among whom a leather cap and a heavy woollen or leathern coat would have represented the most common protective clothing behind a shield.

The saga's customary reference to the enemy host as the ‘bonders' army' must not be taken to indicate a seething peasant rabble, especially when the evidence for selected soldiery gifted by the Swedish king allied with vagabonds recruited from the borderland forests suggests Olaf's forces representing rather greater extremes of warrior type. The ‘bonders' army' was evidently recruited across the entire social range of the free and unfree, but was led by prominent chieftains, some of them exalted to the rank of lenderman, accompanied by their own companies of housecarls, while the bonders themselves, although lower in the social order, were still free farmers recognised by a respected modern authority on the subject as ‘yeomen [who] were the staple of society'.
⁷

Despite there being nowhere any reference to the inclusion of any foreign element, the possibility of at least some Danish involvement cannot be discounted. When Cnut left his newly acquired Norwegian dominions under the governance of his jarl Hakon, he assigned to him a ‘court-bishop' in the person of a Danish priest, Sigurd, who is said by the saga to have ‘been long with Cnut', of whose cause he was assuredly an ardent advocate. This Bishop Sigurd seems to have assumed the roles of principal chaplain and political commissar to the bonders' army, inciting all possible hostility to Olaf in the speech of exhortation he is said to have delivered to the forces before the battle. It would have been quite unthinkable for any Scandinavian churchman of the time, especially one given such an assignment by the all-powerful Cnut, to have been without his own escort of housecarls. Sigurd himself is described as exceptionally haughty and hot-tempered, so there would be every reason to expect his demanding a formidable warrior retinue which would undoubtedly have been present, to whatever extent it was actively engaged, at Stiklestad.

On balance, then, there is no reason to imagine this ‘bonders' army' as any the worse equipped or accomplished than Olaf's forces, and yet there is nowhere any trace of doubt as to their massive superiority in numbers. Snorri Sturluson is almost certainly drawing upon a deep and ancient well of folk-memory when he describes the muster in the Trondelag as ‘a host so great that there was nobody in Norway at that time who had ever seen so large a force assembled', but as to any more precise estimate of numbers, he would seem to signal his doubts as to the accuracy of the figure he mentions in his usual form of words: ‘We are told that the bonders' army was not less than a hundred times a hundred on that day'. Reckoning in ‘long hundreds', that figure would represent a strength of almost fourteen and a half thousand. While not entirely beyond the bounds of credibility, even at a time when the total population of eleventh-century Norway is estimated at around two million, the phrase ‘a hundred times a hundred' has a suspiciously formulaic character and so might be more cautiously read as an indication of ‘a very great number, almost beyond counting'. The saga also quotes lines from Sigvat, but the obscurity of their phrasing allows for no more informative evidence than a claim for Olaf's having been defeated entirely by weight of numbers, so in the last analysis neither source can offer evidence for anything more precise than confirmation of a modest army overwhelmingly outnumbered by the enemy host.

Such was clearly Olaf's own appraisal of the situation when he addressed his troops on the morning of the battle, proposing that victory was more likely to be won by shock tactics than a long and wearying confrontation of unequal forces. His stratagem was to extend his forces thinly across a long front to prevent their being outflanked by superior numbers and then to launch a ferocious onslaught at the enemy's front line, throwing it back against the ranks behind, thus extending the impact back through the host with such resulting chaos that ‘their destruction will be the greater the greater numbers there are together'.

This sort of oratory is customarily set out in the sagas at great length, and in the finest prose which is more realistically recognised as creative writing than historical record, but there is still no reason to doubt the essential accuracy of its content. The same is usually also true of negotiations between principal characters in the sagas, where the dialogue cannot be anything more than speculative reconstruction and yet the outcome corresponds well enough to the subsequent course of events, as it does in the discussion which decided the command and battle order of the bonders' army.

The first choice for its leader would have been the redoubtable Einar Eindridison, called
Tambarskelve
(‘paunch-shaker'),
⁸
who represented the most powerful figure in the Trondelag. A long-standing enemy of Olaf and married to a sister of the jarls Erik and Svein, Einar had been promised high office by Cnut. When he learned of the death of Hakon Eriksson, Einar sailed to England in full expectation of succeeding as Cnut's jarl over Norway, thus being out of the country when Olaf returned from Russia and apparently in no hurry to return and oppose him.