Danish ambitions to rule Norway were nothing new. Back in 813 the Frankish annals recorded that kings Harald Klak and Reginfred were fighting in Vestfold, west of Oslo Fjord, trying to impose their rule on an unwilling population. The outcome of the struggle is not recorded but they probably failed to subjugate the area for long. Two decades later two high-status women, one elderly, the other middle aged, were buried with lavish grave goods in a richly decorated longship under a barrow at Oseberg, in the heart of Vestfold. As such a burial would only have been afforded to a powerful queen, it is clear that Vestfold was at the heart of an independent kingdom. It is not known which of the two women buried in the barrow was the queen and which the sacrificial companion to join her in the afterlife – both were well-dressed – but local traditions had a name for her: Åsa, known from saga traditions as the grandmother of Harald Fairhair, the first king to rule all of Norway.
Despite Harald’s importance in Norwegian history, it is not known for certain when he actually lived. The fullest account of Harald’s life is his saga in Heimskringla (‘The Circle of the World’), an epic saga history of the kings of Norway by the thirteenth-century Icelander Snorri Sturluson, but this certainly contains much legendary material. According to Snorri, Harald was a descendent of the proto-historical Swedish Yngling dynasty and through them of the fertility god Freyr. Harald’s father, Halfdan the Black, was the son of Åsa and her husband King Gudrød of Vestfold. Harald inherited the kingship of Vestfold at the age of ten after his father drowned accidentally by falling through a hole in a frozen lake. It is unlikely that this could have happened much before c. 870. Harald’s ambition was to rule all of Norway and he vowed not to cut or comb his hair until he had achieved his goal, hence his nickname ‘fairhair’ (hárfagri).
Unity was never going to come easily to Norway. The country’s rugged topography and long coastline made internal communications difficult, promoting localism: at the beginning of the Viking Age almost every valley had its chief or petty king. Two areas, however, were particularly favourable for the development of regional power centres. One of these was Viken, the sheltered Oslo Fjord region in the south-east of the country, which included Harald’s kingdom of Vestfold. Lying in the rain shadow of Norway’s central spine of mountains, Viken has a relatively dry and sunny climate favourable to arable farming. The other was the Trøndelag, the fertile region around Trondheim Fjord, over 300 miles away across the mountains to the north. This region was dominated by Håkon Grjotgardsson, the jarl of Lade, whose pedigree was no less illustrious than Harald’s. After some indecisive hostilities, Harald and Håkon became allies, the king recognising the jarl’s autonomy in the north in return for his support fighting the dozens of other local kings. Harald’s campaign ended with his victory around 885 (it is hard to be precise) over a coalition of seven local kings and jarls at the sea battle of Hafrsfjord, near modern Stavanger, after which opposition to his rule collapsed. Icelandic traditions claim that some of the survivors from Hafrsfjord fled to the Scottish isles from where they raided Norway. Harald led an expedition west to bring the area under Norwegian control, establishing the Earldom of Orkney under his ally Rognvald of Møre.
Icelandic historical traditions, epitomised by Snorri, present Harald Fairhair as a tyrannical ruler. After his victory at Hafrsfjord, Harald is said to have confiscated all the óðal land from the bonders (free peasant farmers), forcing them to become royal tenants, and to have imposed heavy taxation. It was to escape this oppression that medieval Icelanders like Snorri believed that their ancestors had emigrated to Iceland. However, there is no evidence that Harald attempted any such expropriation of óðal land: the reduction of most free peasants to tenant status seems actually to have been a phenomenon of Snorri’s own age. It is also certain that the settlement of Iceland began before the Battle of Hafrsfjord is likely to have taken place. Some historians also doubt that Harald ever made an expedition to the isles because the Earldom of Orkney was established before Harald became king (see ch. 4). It is, therefore, likely that the Icelanders invented the story in order to explain why so many of the first settlers came not from Norway but from the Scottish isles. In reality, Harald’s rule was much less than absolute. The jarls of Lade ruled in Trøndelag and Hålogaland in virtual independence and it is only in their title that they were anything less than kings. Harald certainly did reduce many local kingdoms to jarldoms but there were still dozens of ‘valley kings’ in Norway even a century later. Nor did such unity as Harald imposed survive his death some time between 930 and 940.
During his long life, he is supposed to have been eighty when he died, Harald fathered over twenty sons by at least eight different women. According to Snorri, Harald divided the kingdom between his sons three years before his death, appointing his favourite son Erik Bloodaxe as high king over them all. This did not go down well with Erik’s brothers, who all believed, as possessors of royal blood, that they were entitled to the dignity of full kingship. No sooner was Harald dead than his sons, predictably enough, sought power for themselves in the many local kingdoms their father had controlled. Thanks to his lurid nickname – earned because of his brutal rulership rather than his prowess in battle – Erik Bloodaxe is probably the most famous of all Viking leaders. Scarcely less notorious, in saga traditions at least, was Erik’s wife Gunnhild, who was reputed to be a völva or seeress. Even before Harald died, she had been accused of encompassing the death of Erik’s half-brother Halfdan by magic. No statesman, Erik tried to maintain the unity of the kingdom by violence. Egged on by Gunnhild, Erik seriously depleted the numbers of his brothers before the Norwegians tired of him and invited his younger half-brother Håkon the Good (d. 960) to come home from England, where he had been fostered by king Æthelstan, and take the throne. With the support of Sigurd Håkonarson, the jarl of Lade, Håkon was proclaimed king in the Trøndelag. When Håkon began to advance on Viken, Erik’s support evaporated and he fled to Orkney. From there Erik embarked on a career as a Viking raider, which won him the kingship of York in 948 and a violent death on Stainmore six years later (see ch. 2).
Håkon could have known little about his kingdom when he arrived home. He was still an infant when his father had sent him to England, and he had never been back to Norway. Håkon’s position in Norway was never strong because he lacked the local connections, friendships and prestige that would have accrued to him naturally if he had been brought up there. In most respects he was a weak ruler who exercised direct authority only in the west of the country. His nephews Gudrød Bjørnsson and Tryggvi Olafsson ruled as kings in Vestfold and Østfold, while jarl Sigurd ruled in complete autonomy in Trøndelag and Halogaland. Æthelstan had brought Håkon up as a Christian and he began his reign hoping to spread the faith in Norway. Although there had been no recorded missionary activity, many Norwegians must have been familiar with Christianity by this time thanks to their long-standing contacts with Britain and Ireland. There are likely to have been considerable numbers of Christian slaves living in Norway and many Norwegians will have had Christian relations living in the Viking colonies in Britain and Ireland. Many a homecoming warrior may have been a nominal Christian after accepting baptism for pragmatic reasons while serving Christian rulers as a mercenary or to smooth negotiations of tribute payments. However, apart from a few inscribed crosses, there is no archaeological evidence of any Christian communities in Norway before Håkon’s reign.