Kingdom of Norway

The vow of the frowsy-headed king

formationDrafted from Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)

The Icelander Snorri Sturluson's thirteenth-century Heimskringla, the principal source for Norwegian history down to its own time, traces the royal line back through a saga genealogy of Swedish kings said to descend from the god Frey himself - among them Aun the Old, who by legend sacrificed one son to Odin every ten years in exchange for a decade more of life, and stopped only at the eighth son when his own people intervened. Whatever thread of real memory runs through such stories, they are foundation legend rather than history, and Norway's own documented royal line begins several generations later, with Halfdan the Swarthy - a king Snorri credits with genuine gifts for justice and law, ruling Agder and neighbouring districts by inheritance, war and marriage until he was, by report, the mightiest king anywhere in Norway.

A bride who asked for a country

Halfdan's son Harald was only ten when his father died, and it took years of hard fighting under his uncle Guttorm's regency before the kingdoms his father had held stayed his. According to Snorri's own famous account, it was not naked ambition but a woman's rebuke that turned Harald from a merely successful king into a unifier: when he sent envoys to court a highborn girl named Gyda as his mistress, she sent back word that she would not throw away her honour on a king who ruled only a few counties, wondering aloud why no Norwegian king had done what Erik had done in Sweden and Gorm in Denmark - conquered the whole country outright. She would marry him, she said, only if he conquered all of Norway first. Rather than take offence, Harald declared the rebuke exactly what he needed to hear, and swore before God that he would neither cut nor comb his hair until he had made himself king of a united Norway - or die in the attempt.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Christian Krohg · Public domain

Hafrsfjord

What followed was roughly a decade of campaigning, province by province, in which Harald reinstalled the local kings who submitted to him as his own earls - governors who kept a third of the taxes they collected in exchange for maintaining armed men at the king's call - and killed or drove out those who resisted. By 872 the chieftains who still held out realized that none of them could stand against him alone, and combined their fleets to meet him in the Hafrsfjord, near modern Stavanger. The battle was long in the balance; Harald's own berserkers finally broke it, storming aboard the enemy ships in a killing frenzy that scattered the last resistance for good. It was remembered, in Snorri's own telling, as one of the greatest battles Norway had ever seen, and it left Harald with no serious rival left in the country. At a feast soon after, the Earl of Møre cut the king's long, unkempt hair before an admiring court - Harald had gone by the byname Lufa, "the Frowsy-headed," and came out of that feast as Harald the Fairhaired instead. He kept his vow and married Gyda, though not before the saga's own record undercuts its neat romance: Harald had already married another noblewoman years earlier and fathered three sons by her, a detail Snorri himself sets down without comment alongside the story he plainly preferred to tell.

National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo · Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Ole Peter Hansen Balling · Public domain

Haakon the Good

expansionDrafted from Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)

Harald Fairhair's own sons quarrelled bitterly over his legacy after his death, and Erik Bloodaxe, who murdered several of his brothers to secure the throne, ruled with a cruelty that made him widely hated. His half-brother Haakon had been fostered at the court of King Æthelstan in England and raised there as a Christian; when he returned to Norway to challenge Erik, he came not as a conqueror but as a rival offering something Erik never had - conciliation. Landing in Trøndelag, he won over the powerful Earl Sigurd of Hlade, his own mother's old protector, and through him called an assembly of peasants at which he promised, if they made him king, to restore the allodial land rights his own father had stripped from them a generation before. The offer was met with rejoicing, and homage followed him south through district after district until Erik, unable to raise an army against him, fled with his family first to the Orkneys and then to England.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Christian Krohg · Public domain

A gentler king, a durable law

Haakon proved unusually generous to his rivals once in power, confirming Erik's own nephews as subordinate kings in Viken rather than deposing them, and extending the same courtesy to other descendants of Harald Fairhair. With his own position secure, he turned to reforming the kingdom's institutions, dividing the country into judicial Thing-districts and codifying laws with the help of experienced advisors - the Gulating law, the most celebrated of these codes, would outlast him by centuries. He remained personally Christian and brought some of his own friends to the faith, but chose persuasion over compulsion, unwilling to alienate the same peasants whose support had made him king; between that caution and years of good harvests, he became, in the saga's own judgment, more loved by his people than any king who ever sat on Norway's throne - hence the name they gave him, Haakon the Good.

The golden helmet at Fitjar

In 961, in the twenty-sixth year of his reign, the sons of Gunhild - Erik Bloodaxe's own exiled family - returned with a fleet six times the size of the force Haakon had on hand at his estate in Hordaland. He chose to fight rather than flee, arming himself in a golden helmet that flashed in the sun and leading from the front through a battle his own poet, Eyvind Scald-Spoiler, later commemorated in verse; when the helmet made him too easy a target, Eyvind pulled a hood over it to hide him from the enemy. Haakon killed one of the attacking princes himself in single combat, breaking the enemy's nerve and turning the battle into a rout - but was struck in the arm by an arrow during the pursuit, a wound rumoured to have been cursed by Gunhild herself, that would not stop bleeding. Dying, he refused a friend's offer to have his body carried to England for Christian burial: "I have lived like a heathen," he said, "and therefore it is meet that I should be buried like a heathen." Having no son of his own and a daughter barred by law from the throne, his last act was to send a ship after the very sons of Gunhild he had just defeated, inviting them to come back and take the kingdom he was leaving behind.

A slave boy claims a kingdom

expansionDrafted from Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)

Olaf Tryggvason's own childhood, as the sagas tell it, reads less like royal history than adventure fiction - and Boyesen's own account warns that separating fact from the embellishments later tradition heaped on its favourite hero is no easy task. Fleeing Queen Gunhild's pursuit as an infant, Olaf and his mother were captured by pirates while sailing for Russia; his foster-father was killed for being too old to sell, and the boy himself was traded away twice more, once for a ram and once for a coat and cape, before landing with a master who treated him kindly. Found years later by his own uncle in an Estonian market square, he was bought free - and, not long after, spotted the viking who had killed his foster-father and split the man's skull with an axe on the spot, a killing that only his uncle's intervention with the local queen saved him from being executed for. Raised afterward at the Russian court as a prince, he spent his teenage years raiding as a viking commander, married a Wendish princess after service to her father, and, widowed in his early twenties, drifted into Christianity by way of a dream that sent him to Greece to be signed with the cross.

A hood lifted in a marketplace

Olaf's later adventures across Northumberland, Scotland, Ireland and France are corroborated in part by outside sources: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle names him as commander of a Viking fleet that raided the English coast in 994 and wintered at Southampton, extracting ten thousand pounds from King Æthelred before Olaf, confirmed in the Christian faith with Æthelred himself present, vowed never to trouble England again - a promise he kept, even as his companion Sweyn Forkbeard went on raiding regardless. It was in England, by the saga's account, that Olaf won an Irish princess named Gyda: summoned before her at an assembly where she was to choose a husband among a crowd of richly dressed suitors, he came dressed plainly with a fur hood pulled over his head, and Gyda, looking past every glittering noble present, lifted the hood of the plain stranger and chose him on the spot.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Unknown illustrator · Public domain

Proclaimed at the mouth of the Nid

Word of Olaf's growing fame reached Norway, where Earl Haakon, ruling in the name of no dynasty but his own, grew increasingly certain that a surviving grandson of Harald Fairhair would eventually come to claim his birthright - and sent an agent to lure Olaf home under pretence of friendship, hoping to have him killed once he arrived. The plot backfired completely: Olaf sailed for Norway in the spring of 995, planted a cross on the beach at Moster and had mass said there, and found on reaching Trøndelag that the peasantry was already in open revolt against Haakon's own unpopular rule. The earl died in disgrace shortly after, and the chieftains and peasants of Trøndelag, gathered at the Øre-thing by the mouth of the river Nid, proclaimed Olaf King of all Norway - a right the Trønders kept for themselves from that day on, and the reason Norwegian sovereigns have been crowned at Trondheim ever since. Olaf then travelled district by district to receive the homage of the rest of the country, welcomed, everywhere he went, with enthusiasm.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Peter Nicolai Arbo · Public domain

Norway from thy hands

expansionDrafted from Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)

Olaf Tryggvason spent his five years as king pursuing Christianization with the same uncompromising force that had marked his whole adventuring life - preaching first among his own family's following in Viken, where a generation of earlier missionary contact eased the way, and using the sword wherever persuasion failed elsewhere in the country. His downfall came not from that campaign but from a marriage: he wed Thyra, sister of the Danish king Sweyn Forkbeard, and when he sailed south to claim her dowry lands in Wendland, Sweyn - allied with Earl Erik, who had his own father Haakon's death to avenge, and the Swedish king Olaf - set an ambush. Earl Sigvalde of the Jomsvikings, entrusted with escorting Olaf home, was secretly in the conspirators' pay; Sigvalde's own wife tried to warn Olaf as openly as she dared, and he ignored her.

A trap sprung behind an island

The allied fleet, sixty or seventy ships strong, lay in wait behind the small island of Svolder as Olaf's own ships, sailing in loose order, came into view one by one. Sweyn and the Swedish king each mistook passing vessels for Olaf's famous flagship "The Long Serpent," only for Earl Erik to correct them each time; when the ship finally appeared, gleaming with its golden dragon-head, Sigvalde's squadron turned suddenly around the island on a prearranged signal, cutting Olaf off from most of his own fleet. Queen Thyra wept at the sight of the odds against her husband, and Olaf told her only that she would get, that day, the wedding-gift from her brother she had so often asked him for. The battle that followed went hard against the outnumbered Norwegians from the start, though they held their own against the Danes and Swedes in the centre until Earl Erik's galley "The Iron Ram" began systematically cutting Olaf's ships loose from the line, one by one, isolating "The Long Serpent" itself.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Otto Sinding · Public domain

The bow that broke

As Erik's ship closed for the ramming attack, the archer Einar Thambarskelver put two arrows near the earl himself before a counter-shot shattered his bow in his hands. "What was that which broke?" Olaf called out. "Norway, from thy hands, my king," Einar answered - and when Olaf tossed him his own royal bow to keep fighting, Einar bent it, found it too weak for his own draw, and flung it back. Olaf, already wounded and bleeding beneath his armour without mentioning it, fought on: hurling spears two at a time from the poop, distributing fresh swords from a weapons chest when his men's own blades turned dull, standing in plain view of the enemy's archers throughout rather than take shelter. When only nine men remained alive on his own ship, Olaf raised his shield over his head and leapt into the sea rather than be taken. A loyal follower who resembled him leapt after him and was fished out by Erik's men in his place; Olaf himself was never seen again, though a persistent legend held he had swum to a rescue boat and lived out his days as a hermit in the Holy Land. He was thirty-six. Queen Thyra, who blamed herself for the disaster her own dowry claim had set in motion, refused every offer of honourable return to Norway and died of grief nine days later. The victors divided Olaf's kingdom among themselves.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Christian Krohg · Public domain

I planted my foot in Norway's soil

contractionDrafted from Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)

Olaf Haraldsson, descended from Harald Fairhair through a different branch than either of his two royal predecessors, went to sea as a viking at twelve and spent his youth raiding Sweden to avenge his own father's death and fighting in England alongside Æthelred's sons against the Danes. When Earl Erik, then ruling Norway for Cnut, left the country in 1015, Olaf saw his opening and sailed for home - cautiously, leaving his warships in England and crossing with two plain merchant vessels so he could gauge the country's mood before committing himself. Landing unrecognized, he slipped on the beach as he came ashore; when he cried out at the apparent bad omen, one of his men answered that he had not fallen but planted his foot in Norway's own soil. Travelling in disguise, he was recognized by a peasant who correctly predicted he would soon defeat Earl Haakon and win a great victory - which he did, seizing power and forcing Christianity on the country with the same uncompromising resolve Olaf Tryggvason had shown two decades before, rejecting whole bands of men who would not renounce their old gods even as he accepted outlaws and robbers who agreed to be baptized.

Outwitting a king with a dam

Olaf's growing power drew Cnut's attention, and by the mid-1020s the Danish king was actively working to reclaim Norway. When Cnut's fleet pursued Olaf and his Swedish allies into the Helgeå river in 1026, Olaf dammed the river above the harbour where Cnut's ships lay overnight, then broke the dam in darkness, sending a wall of water crashing into the anchored Danish and English fleet and scattering it in confusion - a tactical triumph that nonetheless failed to finish Cnut off, since an ally's timely rescue let him regroup. Cnut answered not with another battle but with money, systematically bribing disaffected Norwegian chieftains until, in 1028, he sailed unopposed into Trondheim and was proclaimed king of Norway himself, leaving his young nephew Haakon as regent.

The scratch that became a killing blow

With nothing left to do but flee, Olaf made one last attempt to rally support, sailing north along the coast pursued by his old rival Erling Skjalgsson. Separated from his own main force by a ruse, Erling fought alone until overwhelmed and stood, an old man with grey hair falling over his shoulders, among a heap of his own dead followers. Olaf offered him peace after a moment's hesitation - then, half regretting the mercy, scratched the old man's cheek with an axe as a mark of shame. One of the king's own men, taking the gesture as license, immediately split Erling's skull instead, killing the most powerful chieftain Norway had ever produced. The act cost Olaf what little support remained to him: his followers deserted in numbers, enemies blocked every route he tried, and by 1029 he had fled through the mountains into Sweden, leaving his wife and daughter behind, and on to Russia, where his own brother-in-law King Jaroslav gave him refuge. Norway, meanwhile, had become a province of a foreign crown.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Peter Nicolai Arbo · Public domain

The sun turned blood-red

contractionDrafted from Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)

Exiled in Russia, Olaf gathered what forces he could and marched back toward Norway through Sweden in 1030, determined to reclaim a kingdom that had already once rejected him. Bishop Sigurd met him on the road and tried to talk him out of the attempt entirely; Olaf would not be dissuaded. When he crossed into sight of his homeland from the mountains, he reined his horse and sat in silence so long that the bishop finally asked what troubled him - Olaf described a vision in which he had seen not just Trondheim but all of Norway, and then the whole world, land and sea both known and unknown to him. The bishop, dismounting to embrace the king's foot, declared him a holy man on the spot. On the morning of the battle, Olaf had his own poet, Thormod Kolbrúnarskald, sing the old war-song Bjarkamál to wake the camp; his army numbered barely four thousand once five hundred pagans among them were sent away, against a peasant host ten thousand strong gathering on the heights of Stiklestad in Værdalen.

An eclipse over the battlefield

The armies closed with the war-cries "Forward, Christ's men, crusaders, the King's men!" against "Forward, forward, peasant-men!" Olaf's position gave him the advantage at first, but the peasants' sheer numbers told as the fighting dragged on, and his own ranks began to thin. He broke from the shield-wall around him and led a last charge into the enemy's front line; his standard-bearers fell one after another around him. Wounded and leaning against a boulder, he was struck first by a spear from Thore Hund - who had sworn six years earlier, over a rune-inscribed spear soaked in his own murdered kinsman's blood, to avenge him on Olaf - and then finished by a sword-cut across the throat from Kálf Árnesson. At the moment of his death, by the saga's own account, the sun turned blood-red and then black, an eclipse the terrified peasant army took for a sign of their victim's God's own wrath. Modern reckoning confirms a total solar eclipse did darken Værdalen that afternoon, 29 August 1030 - one of the rare saga details astronomy itself can date.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Peter Nicolai Arbo · Public domain

What survived him

The poet Thormod, badly wounded himself, made his way to a healer's hut afterward, pulled the arrowhead from his own side with a pair of tongs, looked at the flesh clinging to the barbs, remarked that the king had fed him well since he was "yet fat about the heart-roots," and died where he sat. A peasant named Thorgils, who had promised before the battle to bury Olaf if he fell, recovered the king's body, and within years tales of miracles worked by his blood and by the touch of his dead hand had spread across the country. St Olaf, red- bearded in legend, became not merely a martyr but Norway's national saint and national hero at once - his violent death doing more to root Christianity in the country than either his own forceful conversion campaign or Olaf Tryggvason's had managed while either man still lived. Cnut, unable to spare much attention from his wider empire, had his own son Sweyn proclaimed King of Norway in Olaf's place - a foreign boy-king and his mother's unpopular attempt to remake Norwegian law in the Danish image, which the chiefs who had once turned against Olaf himself would soon come to regret far more than the martyr they had helped kill.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · DXR · CC BY-SA 4.0

A name no one in the family had

contractionDrafted from Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)

Magnus, St Olaf's illegitimate son, was born so weak that no one expected him to survive the night of his birth, and in the emergency his father's own poet took it on himself to have the infant baptized at once - naming him Magnus, after Charlemagne, a name no one in the family had ever carried, and one Olaf was furious about when he learned of it later. The child who nearly died that night was not yet eleven when Norway's own resentment at Danish misrule brought him home from Russia to be proclaimed king at the Øre-thing in 1035, and he governed at first through the advice of the same chieftains who had once turned against his father, before growing into a ruler of independent judgment. Devoted to his father's memory in a way his own illegitimate birth made pointed, he began construction of a church in Nidaros to bear St Olaf's name and had a new, gold- and jewel- adorned sarcophagus made for him.

Norway and Denmark, briefly one

War with Harthacnut of Denmark nearly broke out within Magnus's first years, but chieftains on both sides talked the two young kings into an agreement at the Brenn Islands in 1038: each would inherit the other's kingdom if he died without an heir. It seemed a remote contingency until it was not - Harthacnut died in 1042, and Magnus was proclaimed king of Denmark at the Viborg-thing without opposition, uniting Norway and Denmark under one crown for the first time and winning his own Fairhair line recognition as equals from the Danish royal house, matching the standing it already held in Sweden.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Halfdan Egedius · Public domain

An uncle who demanded half a kingdom

Nine years into Magnus's reign, his uncle Harald Sigurdsson - badly wounded fighting at Stiklestad as a teenager, and since then a soldier of fortune who had risen to command the Byzantine emperor's own Varangian Guard through campaigns against the Saracens in Asia and Sicily - returned to Norway and demanded half the kingdom outright. When an old peasant at an assembly argued that the king properly proclaimed by the people held more claim than a newcomer demanding power by force, Harald turned his anger on Einar Thambarskelver, who had thanked the peasants for their loyalty: "happy will the day be when thy helmet shall be laid low... thou shalt then be a head shorter." Magnus's own prudence kept outright war from breaking out between uncle and nephew, and the two ruled jointly

• uneasily - until Magnus, thrown from his horse in Zealand and struck unconscious, fell into a foreboding melancholy that culminated in a dream of his father offering him a choice: die now, or live on to become the mightiest of kings while bearing a sin that could hardly be forgiven. "Choose thou for me, father," he answered in the dream. Magnus died in 1047, twenty-four years old, having ruled Norway for twelve and a half years and Denmark for five - mourned, the sources agree, by the whole of his people. Harald moved immediately to block the succession Magnus had promised in Denmark to his own rival, Sweyn Estridsson.

Seven feet of English ground

contractionDrafted from Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)

Harald Sigurdsson - Hardråde, "the Hard-ruler" - became sole king of Norway on his nephew's death in 1047, though the Danish throne Magnus had held passed instead to Sweyn Estridsson, whom Harald spent years of inconclusive warfare trying to dislodge without success. Even allowing for the exaggeration saga-tellers loyal to a Norwegian audience naturally brought to accounts of a Norwegian captain outshining the Byzantine empire's own generals, Boyesen's account treats Harald's Constantinople years - Varangian Guard commander, veteran of campaigns against the Saracens, accumulator of a fortune large enough to make him one of the richest men in the North by the time he came home - as substantially real beneath the romantic embellishment. At home he ruled with the severity his own byname promised, crushing a revolt among the Uplanders and defeating a Swedish force under Earl Haakon that had stopped paying him tribute its own province owed.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Wilhelm Wetlesen · Public domain

An earl's invitation

In 1066 Tostig, brother of England's King Harold Godwinson, came to Norway seeking help conquering England after finding no support in Denmark - Sweyn Estridsson wanted no part of his own uncle Cnut's old ambitions. Harald, never one to refuse adventure, sailed that September with the largest fleet Norway had ever sent abroad: by Boyesen's estimate as many as three hundred and fifty ships and thirty thousand men once the Orkney earls' own contingent and Tostig's forces joined it. He won a battle at Fulford outside York and took the city, then made camp at Stamford Bridge - leaving a third of his army under his own son to guard the ships, and letting the rest go without armour in the warm weather, with no expectation of any real threat nearby.

"Seven feet, or so much more as he is taller"

Harold Godwinson's army caught them entirely by surprise. Riding out to parley before the fighting began, a group of English horsemen asked for Tostig by name and offered him peace and a third of England to abandon the Norwegians - Tostig asked what England would offer King Harald himself, and was told: seven feet of ground, or as much more as his unusual height required. Tostig, recognizing his own brother as the rider who had made the offer only after the exchange was over, sent him back to open the battle. The fighting went well at first - Harald fought with the same berserker fury the sagas gave every hero of his line - until an arrow took him through the throat and he fell dead from his horse. Tostig, refusing his brother's offer of a truce, took command and fought on until he too was cut down; reinforcements under Harald's own brother-in-law arrived only to be overwhelmed in turn. What remained of the great army that had sailed from Norway that autumn straggled back to the ships under cover of dusk, leaving so many dead on the field that human bones still lay scattered there years afterward. Two weeks later William of Normandy landed at Hastings, and the victory Harold Godwinson had just won at Stamford Bridge came to nothing.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Peter Nicolai Arbo · Public domain

The devil's priest

contractionDrafted from Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)

Norway's throne in the mid-twelfth century belonged to Magnus Erlingsson, whose father Erling Skakke had spent years ruthlessly eliminating every rival descendant of Harald Fairhair he could reach, reportedly telling his own son that letting any survive would only give the people someone else to crown. One escaped his notice entirely: a youth in the Faroe Islands named Sverre Sigurdsson, whose own mother, Gunhild, had been a cook in the household of King Sigurd Mouth - ordered by the king to kill her child at birth, she fled to the Faroes instead and, to protect the boy, married a comb-maker named Unås who had been sent to find her, raising Sverre to believe he was Unås's own son. A local bishop, taken with the boy's evident intelligence, began educating him for the priesthood, and Sverre by his own account expected nothing grander than a bishopric someday.

A mother's secret

Everything changed the day Sverre was ordained a deacon. His mother burst into tears at what should have been an honour, and when he asked why, she told him the truth she had kept from him for twenty years: he was not Unås's son at all, but the son of King Sigurd. "If I am born to a crown," Sverre told her, "then I will strive to win it, whatever it may cost me." He sailed for Norway and spent months quietly gauging the political ground before revealing himself to anyone - visiting Erling Skakke's own men-at-arms in disguise as an amusing Faroese priest and coming away convinced that Magnus's rule was too popular to challenge directly. A cold reception from a Swedish earl he had hoped would back him left him with nothing, until the remnants of a defeated rebel faction called the Birkebeiner - the Birchlegs, named in mockery for the birch-bark they wrapped around their feet when they had no shoes - tracked him down and begged him to lead them.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Erik Werenskiold · Public domain

Two empty hands, seventy ragged men

Sverre refused them at first, pointing out that poverty was the only thing he actually had in common with a band of outlaws. It took the Swedish earl's own mocking suggestion - that the Birchlegs simply threaten to kill Sverre if he kept declining - to change his mind. He was about twenty-four when he finally accepted, taking command of seventy ragged, poorly armed men with nothing else to his name. It was, on its face, a hopeless venture against a king whose father had spent a generation clearing away exactly this kind of rival. What Sverre had that his predecessors in the role lacked was patience, calculation, and a genuine gift for war - qualities the Birchlegs would need in full over the decade of fighting still ahead of them.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · V. R. · Public domain

The corpses in the clear water

contractionDrafted from Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)

Sverre's Birchlegs, despite their ragged reputation, proved nearly impossible to keep beaten - defeated repeatedly, they rallied again and again with what Boyesen calls wonderful intrepidity and endurance, and by 1177 they were strong enough to seize Trondheim outright. King Magnus's forces, nicknamed the Heklungs, remained the stronger side at sea, where the Birchlegs never fought as well as on land, and at the Battle of Nordnes near Bergen in 1181 Magnus's fleet had gained the upper hand until Sverre, standing exposed amid a hail of missiles without even a shield, began singing a Latin hymn in a loud, clear voice and came through unharmed. Moments later Magnus himself was wounded in the wrist boarding an enemy ship, slipped on the blood-slick deck, and fell - and when word spread that the king was down, one of his own commanders, assuming him dead, cut the ropes joining the royal fleet's ships and fled, breaking the battle line and turning a fight Magnus was winning into a rout he could not reverse even after getting back on his feet to prove he was alive.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Peter Nicolai Arbo · Public domain

An offer to share the crown, refused

The war dragged on for three more years with fortunes shifting back and forth; Magnus, driven repeatedly into exile in Denmark, always found fresh forces to bring home again. Sverre, hoping to end a conflict that was bleeding the country dry, twice offered to share the kingdom with his rival - first outright, then as alternating three-year reigns - and Magnus refused both times. An archbishop who had excommunicated Sverre found the ban made no impression on him whatsoever, while losing his own see to the conflict impressed the archbishop a great deal; he eventually made his peace with Sverre in exchange for reinstatement. By 1183 Sverre had run Magnus out of Norway entirely, seizing his fleet, treasury and crown regalia in a surprise attack on Bergen.

Fourteen ships against twenty-six

Magnus made one last attempt the following summer, sailing north with twenty-six ships and over three thousand men while Sverre, with only fourteen ships, was off punishing a district that had killed one of his officers - and found himself surrounded before he had any warning an enemy fleet was near. The Heklungs, outnumbering the Birchlegs better than two to one, expected an easy victory. They found instead a battle that ran past midnight and cost two thousand lives, King Magnus among them, drowned when he leapt into the fjord rather than be taken. By morning the clear water of the Sognefjord showed the bodies of slain chieftains lying on the bottom with fish swimming around them; Magnus's own corpse was not recovered for two days. His death broke the last organized resistance to Sverre's throne, and with it began a reign - built on a claim of royal birth that could never be proven, only fought for - that would reshape how Norway's crown itself was won and held for a generation afterward.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Unknown photographer · Public domain

A candidate for emperor

contractionDrafted from Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)

Haakon Haakonsson, Sverre's own grandson, was proclaimed king at the Øre-thing in 1217 while still a child, guarded night and day by Birchleg loyalists against the intrigues of Earl Skule, who coveted the throne for himself and worked against Haakon for years through allies in the church. Norway's long civil war did not end immediately - rebel bands kept rising under one impostor after another claiming descent from King Magnus Erlingsson, each drawing enough restless, war-habituated men to sustain a few more years of plunder dressed up as rebellion - but Haakon's patient policy of conciliation, absorbing defeated rebel factions rather than exterminating them, gradually starved the civil wars of new recruits. What emerged from nearly a century of intermittent fighting, under a king remembered less for brilliance than for what Boyesen calls strong common sense, generosity and a clear-sighted instinct for choosing the right course, was the most stable and internationally respected Norwegian monarchy the country had yet produced.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Knud Bergslien · Public domain

A fleet that won without fighting

Haakon's reputation abroad rested chiefly on his navy. When war broke out with Denmark in 1256, the mere sight of the Norwegian fleet was enough to bring King Christopher to terms without a single battle being fought. Pope Alexander IV pressed Haakon to join a crusade, King Louis IX of France offered him command of a combined Norse-French fleet in recognition of his naval experience, and in 1256 the Pope is said to have put Haakon forward as his own candidate for Holy Roman Emperor. Closer to home, the reach of his authority grew more concretely still: Iceland, worn down by generations of internal feuding among its own great families, formally acknowledged his overlordship and agreed to pay him tribute in 1261, and the scattered settlements of Greenland recognized his sovereignty as well - bringing both North Atlantic territories under the Norwegian crown for the first time in the country's history, a reach no earlier Norwegian king, not even Magnus the Good ruling Denmark and Norway together, had achieved simultaneously with such lasting effect.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Unknown photographer · Public domain

The saga of Sverre

contractionDrafted from Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)

Norway's overseas holdings in Orkney and Shetland had cost the kingdom blood and treasure to defend for generations, and when a dispute over them brought Haakon into open war with Alexander III of Scotland, he sailed for Scotland in person in 1263 despite being past fifty. A storm wrecked a number of his ships on the crossing, but he pressed on around the western coast, raided Kintyre and Bute, and fought a battle at Largs near the mouth of the Firth of Clyde whose outcome depended entirely on which side told it: Scottish accounts called it a Norwegian defeat, the sagas a Norwegian victory. Whichever account was closer to the truth, the battle gave Haakon no real advantage either way, and he withdrew to the Orkneys to winter there, intending to renew the campaign again once spring came.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Raibeart MacAoidh · CC BY-SA 4.0

A death timed to his grandfather's own story

He never got the chance. Taken suddenly ill at Kirkwall, Haakon spent his final days having the sagas of his own ancestors read aloud to him, working forward from Halfdan the Swarthy through the generations to his grandfather Sverre's own story - and died quietly, on 15 December 1263, during the reading of Sverre's saga itself. He was fifty-nine, and had ruled Norway for forty-six years, longer than any king before him. Every account agrees that he was a wise and generous ruler rather than a brilliant one - not gifted, in Boyesen's own judgment, with anything like his grandfather Sverre's genius, but possessed of the kind of steady, well-balanced good judgment that made him, in the end, a greater king than a more dazzling man might have been. His own rival, Earl Skule, had been by most accounts the more striking personality of the two; Boyesen's verdict is that Norway was fortunate Skule never got the throne he wanted instead of the grandson of Sverre who actually held it.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · David Stanley · CC BY 2.0

The unwarlike king's bargain

contractionDrafted from Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)

With Haakon Haakonsson's death, Boyesen's own narrative loses the continuous thread the sagas had given it until then - what survives of his son Magnus's reign comes down in fragments, and a slow, initially barely visible decline sets in that would not fully reveal itself for generations. Magnus, already of age when he inherited the throne in 1263, chose peace over his father's unfinished war with Scotland: he ceded the Isle of Man and the Hebrides to Alexander III in exchange for four thousand silver marks and a token annual tribute meant mainly to preserve the appearance that Norway's old claim still stood. Whether it reflected sound judgment or simple reluctance to fight, later events largely vindicated the choice - those island dependencies had cost Norway more than they were worth to defend, and Scotland's own rise, followed eventually by England's absorption of it, would have forced Norway's hand sooner or later regardless. What the bargain cost was less territory than reputation: the international standing Haakon had built through decades of naval strength and diplomatic weight visibly diminished under a son notably less inclined to assert it. Magnus's own lasting achievement, the one that earned him his byname, was a unified national law code - the enduring legal legacy of a reign otherwise remembered as the hinge on which Norway's medieval strength began, almost imperceptibly, to turn.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Unknown scribe · Public domain

A crown shared with Sweden

The turn became explicit within a generation. When a Swedish rebellion deposed and executed King Birger's line in 1319, Norwegian and Swedish magnates alike settled on the three-year-old Magnus Eriksson - grandson of Haakon Haakonsson through his mother - as king of both kingdoms at once, uniting Norway and Sweden under one crown for the first time. The union was nominal rather than real: separate laws, separate administrations, nothing shared but a king who was meant to divide his time between both. During Magnus's own minority his mother governed Norway with a recklessness that emptied the treasury to enrich her own lover, and when Magnus came of age in 1332 he proved, as a Swede by birth with little feel for Norwegian affairs, content to leave the kingdom's government largely to itself. Norwegian magnates eventually forced him, at a meeting in Bergen in 1350, to make his younger son Haakon co-regent and heir to Norway alone - a decision that, through a marriage arranged nine years later between Haakon and the Danish princess Margaret, would draw Norway toward a very different union than the one with Sweden it was still nominally part of.

The fox in the farmhouse

contractionDrafted from Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)

Magnus Eriksson's later reign and his son Haakon's brought Norway one disaster after another. In 1344 a collapsing rock face suddenly diverted the Gula river, destroying forty-eight farms and drowning two hundred and fifty people along with their livestock; Iceland suffered its own earthquake and a violent eruption of Hekla. None of it compared to what arrived by ship at Bergen in 1349: the Black Death, already having ravaged Germany, England and southern Europe, reached Norway aboard an English merchant vessel and spread with terrible speed across the whole country. In Trondheim the archbishop and every canon of the cathedral chapter died but one, who was left to elect a successor alone. Whole districts lost their entire population; horses and cattle, with no one left to tend them, starved or wandered off to die in the forest. Centuries of accumulated labour unraveled within a single generation - fertile valleys reverted to forest, foxes denned in abandoned farmhouses, wolves prowled through empty churches, and in many places the dead simply lay where they fell until the ground itself absorbed them.

National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo · Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Theodor Kittelsen · Public domain

What the plague did not do alone

The survivors, in Boyesen's own account, fell into a sloth and lawlessness common to societies gutted by plague - fields went untilled for want of labourers and draft animals, famine followed directly on the pestilence's heels, and what remained of Norwegian trade fell into foreign hands as domestic commerce collapsed outright. But Boyesen is careful to note that later historians did the Black Death an injustice by making it solely responsible for Norway's eclipse: other causes, chiefly the political drift and absentee kingship of the preceding decades, compounded the plague's damage rather than being caused by it. Magnus Eriksson drowned in the Bommelfjord in 1374, having outlived his own liberty from Swedish rule by only three years; his son Haakon followed him to the grave just six years later, in 1380, dying young like so many Norwegian kings before him.

National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo · Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Theodor Kittelsen · Public domain

Four hundred and thirty-four years

Haakon and Margaret's only son, Olaf, was proclaimed King of Norway at his father's death in 1380 - already King of Denmark in his own right since his maternal grandfather Valdemar Atterdag's own death five years earlier. Still a child, he ruled in name only, his mother Margaret and a council of regents governing for him in both kingdoms. It was, without any single treaty or battle to mark it, the beginning of the union between Norway and Denmark that would run unbroken for four hundred and thirty-four years - a union Boyesen's own verdict calls, from Norway's own side of it, a disaster from which the smaller partner would not recover for centuries. Olaf himself did not live to see much of it: he died at seventeen, at Falsterbo in Scania, with his mother already the real power behind a throne two crowns now shared.

The seventeenth of May

contractionDrafted from Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)

News of the Treaty of Kiel reached a Norway that, in Boyesen's own telling, had finally woken from centuries of political torpor and meant to assert itself. The Norwegians were willing enough to give up their allegiance to Frederick VI, but denied he had any right to hand that allegiance to Sweden without their own consent - if Norway had become a Danish dependency four centuries earlier without being asked, they reasoned, then sovereignty renounced by the Danish crown reverted to the Norwegian people themselves, free to bestow it on whomever they chose. The Danish viceroy in Norway, Prince Christian Frederik, found this sentiment widespread enough to refuse simply accepting the treaty's terms, and summoned representative men to meet him at Eidsvoll in 1814. He had first meant to claim the Norwegian crown by hereditary right and rule as an absolute monarch; advisors talked him instead into accepting the crown from the people, bound by whatever constitution they themselves adopted.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A question to the peasants

Christian Frederik travelled through the depths of winter across the Dovre mountains to Trondheim to gauge the country's mood himself, stopping in Gudbrandsdal to read the inscription on a monument commemorating the destruction of a Scottish mercenary force two centuries before - "Woe to the Norseman whose blood does not course more warmly through his veins when he looks upon this stone" - and asking the peasants gathered to see him whether they, like their forefathers, were willing to sacrifice life and blood for their country. The response encouraged him enough to summon a full assembly at Eidsvoll: a hundred and twelve representatives, most of them officials, convened there and on 17 May 1814 adopted a constitution Boyesen calls extremely liberal for its time, declaring Norway a free and independent country and electing Christian Frederik king.

Storting, Oslo · Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Oscar Wergeland · Public domain

Independence or union, argued out loud

The assembly split openly over what came next. A larger faction led by Judge Falsen and Professor Sverdrup wanted full independence outright; a smaller but serious faction around Count Wedel-Jarlsberg argued that a country as small as Norway, unable to field an army adequate to its own defence, would end up prey to whichever foreign power chose to pick a fight with it - and that liberty was actually safer secured through union with a stronger neighbour than left to stand alone. The constitution adopted at Eidsvoll settled for declared independence without resolving that argument in advance, leaving the question of union or standalone kingship to whatever came next.

A constitution kept

endDrafted from Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)

The great powers had already promised Sweden's Crown Prince Bernadotte their support in forcing Norway to honour the Treaty of Kiel, and once Napoleon's abdication that spring freed Sweden from any distracting foreign complications, envoys arrived from the courts of Europe ordering Norway to submit unconditionally. Norway refused, and a Swedish army under Bernadotte crossed the frontier that summer. Christian Frederik, whom Boyesen describes as devoid of real warlike spirit, surrendered the fortress of Fredriksten to the Swedish fleet without firing a shot in its defence and showed more skill at retreating than at fighting - but Norwegian troops under Colonel Krebs, poorly supplied as they were, beat back a second Swedish column at Lier and forced another attacking force to retire across the frontier after fighting at Matrand. It became clear to both sides that outright conquest would cost more blood than either wanted, and with Sweden itself weary after its own German campaigns, an armistice was signed at Moss on 14 August 1814.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Unknown photographer · Public domain

What survived the surrender

The armistice called for an extraordinary Storthing to negotiate a lasting peace; when it met that October, it accepted Christian Frederik's renunciation of the Norwegian crown and elected Sweden's King Charles XIII in his place - on the explicit condition that he recognize Norway's independence and govern under the constitution adopted at Eidsvoll rather than impose one of his own. Bernadotte accepted these terms on the Swedish king's behalf that November and personally swore allegiance to the Norwegian constitution; Swedish troops withdrew, and Christian Frederik went home to Denmark, where he would later become king in his own right as Christian VIII. A formal convention the following year fixed the terms of the union proper, and Norway established its own national bank at Trondheim and its own supreme court at Christiania.

Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886) · Charles Turner · Public domain

A union, not quite independence

Given how desperate Norway's position had looked in 1814 - a small country resisting the combined will of Europe's great powers alone - the terms it secured were, in Boyesen's judgment, considerably better than anyone had reason to expect. What remained incompatible with real independence was the continued presence in the Norwegian capital of a Swedish viceroy representing the king's authority there. Bernadotte himself, who succeeded to the Swedish throne outright as Charles XIV John on Charles XIII's death in 1818, did not at first take Norway's independence terms especially seriously, content for a time to let Norwegians believe in an autonomy the union's own practice would test for decades to come.