“I swear I will not flee from this fight. I will triumph, or I will die!” In the 1066 game of thrones for the crown of England, the most extraordinary of the three contenders is arguably Harald Hardrada: viking warrior, daring explorer, emperor’s bodyguard, serpent slayer, alleged lover to an empress, King of Norway, and legend of Norse mythology. How did this titan of a man come to cross the North Sea with his army, and take on Harold Godwinson, in the titanic showdown of Stamford Bridge? His story before this point is so colourful that it may be one the most exciting lives in all history. Fighting from the age of twelve, Harald was born to a petty regional king of Norway, in a Scandinavia of competing religions and kingships. As a teenager, he would then join his fearsome brother Olaf, the man who united Norway but later fell foul of King Cnut, and subsequently sailed the seas and mysterious waterways of Russia, in a mighty battle to take back Norway. Their defeat was terrible and absolute, leaving the young Harald wounded and on the run. A journey of horrors and hardship would then lead him at last to the awe inspiring city of Kyiv, where he would serve as mercenary for the Grand Prince. But still hungry for wealth and glory he then travelled on to the most remarkable city in the world: Constantinople, where his life would take an even more dramatic turn… Join Dominic and Tom as they describe the electrifying early life of Harald Hardrada. From Scandinavian prince, warrior, and would-be usurper, to Baltic mercenary, and member of the elite Varangian Guard, in the glittering Constantinople or Miklagard - Asgard on earth. The stage is set for the greatest adventure of his life so far. But will Harald ever seize his ultimate destiny and become a king? EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restishistory Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! Head to investengine.com/history or use promo code HISTORY for a welcome bonus of up to £100 _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the Battle of Stiklestad and its significance?
And it's the Battle of Stiklestad in Norway, one of the most celebrated events in the history of Norway and particularly of Norwegian Christianity. But we will come on to that in due course. So, Dominic, Harald Hardrada, Two episodes on the Thunderbolt of the North, as Adam of Brayman called him, the last Viking, the greatest warrior of his day. Take him away.
Yeah, so Tom, we've done a lot of great characters and the rest is history, but I think Howard Hardrada has a claim to be the most exciting. Certainly his life is the most dramatic and unexpected. So you and I, when we studied 1066 at school, yeah, Howard Hardrada is really an exciting supporting character, isn't he?
Chapter 2: Who was Harald Hardrada and why is he significant?
He's one of the three contenders in the great Game of Thrones, arrives suddenly in the middle of 1066. He crosses the North Sea, he leads an army into York, and then he faces Harold Goldwinson in this sort of thrilling showdown at Stamford Bridge.
But his story before that is so colourful that I think, I would be interested to know what you think, I think it's surely a contender for the most exciting life in medieval history.
Well, as written several, I mean, a couple of centuries later. So definitely ornamented. But the basic outline of it, I agree, is astonishing. And we did an episode before on the Vikings going eastwards. And we talked about the strangeness of it's kind of like two different periods of history rubbing up against one another.
the Viking Age and the Roman Age, because you have Harold walking around Constantinople. And we've been doing this series focused very much on England and the North Sea and northern France. But there are all kinds of links to the Mediterranean, to the Byzantine Empire, to the Holy Land that we will be exploring over the course of these episodes looking at Harold Hardrada's life.
Exactly. So to give people just a little preview... He fights that first battle when he's a teenager. He flees Norway into exile. He ends up as a mercenary for the Grand Prince of Kievan Rus'. He crosses the Black Sea to Constantinople. He joins the Varangian Guard. He fights everywhere from Sicily to Armenia. He becomes engulfed, quite literally, in the snake pit of Constantinople politics.
One might say the dragon pit. Exactly. And then he returns to claim the throne of Norway. So it's a very kind of Aragorn trajectory. The guy who disappears into exile as a sort of mercenary or a ranger from the north and then returns to reclaim his throne.
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Chapter 3: How did Harald's early life shape his future?
Although he's a bit more kind of brutal, isn't he?
Yes. Aragorn. A bit more wading through the blood of other people, I think it's fair to say. But I think there are two important dimensions of it, sort of more seriously. So one is, as you've said, it is a brilliant reminder of the interconnectedness of this world. So 11th century Europe. So these trading networks, cultural networks, political and so on, that link the fjords of Norway together.
to the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and so on. These are not completely different spheres of action. People move between them.
Right, and the great silver hordes that you get in Viking Scandinavia, they're not just coming from England, they're also coming from Byzantium and from the Caliphate. These much richer parts of the world, quite frankly.
And then the other thing is, you described him, as people do, as the last Viking. And we'll discuss that in more detail later on. And his life undoubtedly is a window into... the last sort of embers of the Viking Age, so a changing Scandinavia. We've hinted at this in the last series we did about the roads, 1066.
So the way in which villages are becoming towns, warlords are becoming kings, pagans are becoming Christians, and the Viking Age is passing into history, and his life seems to be the perfect punctuation point, I would say. Now, the other point, we shouldn't perhaps labour too much. You've alluded to it.
The best sources for his life are these sagas, like Heimskringla, great sagas sometimes written by Snorri Sturluson, the great kind of saga writer, written in Iceland centuries later. What are we talking, sort of 12th, 13th century sagas? So they're written long after the event. And as we will see, there are a lot of fictional and fantastical elements, which some scrupulous historians would cut.
You know, they would do their best to eliminate from the podcast. We've done the opposite. Well, I've certainly done the opposite. I think it's best to play those up because, Tom, as we always say, it's important to see the world as they saw it, isn't it?
I suppose what I would say, we would see the world as Snorri Sturluson. Right, yes. And medieval Iceland would see it. Whether that maps on exactly to how Harold sees it, we will explore that.
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Chapter 4: What role did Olaf play in Harald's life?
Exactly.
So if you're hoping for giant serpents... You'll get them. Berserkers covered in birds screaming, you know, at the top of their voices, this is the podcast for you. But let's start in history with what we know of the historical Harold Sigurdsson. So he's born in the uplands of Norway, probably in 1015. His father is a kind of local king, what they call a petty king, a kind of regional big man.
And his father had the brilliant name Sigurd Sir, Sigurd the Sow. And he had this nickname, the Sow, because he preferred farming to fighting. And sometimes people think, well, obviously this is derogatory. They imagine him as a kind of, you know, a lazy man who doesn't, you know... doesn't go out and smite his neighbours or whatever.
But actually in the sagas, the portrait of Sigurd is quite generous. And I quote, he was a careful householder who kept his people closely to their work and often went about himself to inspect his crops and meadows, the cattle and the smithies.
I mean, I imagine him as a kind of a slow moving, but you wouldn't want to annoy ox.
Yeah, I think that's fair. Much loved by his vassals or whatever, I would imagine. Respected.
They would put kind of daisy chains around his horns, but do not provoke his wrath. That kind of thing.
And he is married to this woman called Auster. She's the widow of another kind of provincial bigwig in the Westfold of Norway. And she's had a son with this guy called Olaf the Stout. Now, when Harold is born, so Olaf, his half-brother, is about 20. He's going to play a massive part in Harold's life because Harold is going to hugely look up to him.
So Olaf, we know more about Olaf at this point than we do Harold. Olaf has been involved in war from a very young age. Supposedly, according to the sagas, he first went into battle when he was 12. And he fought in Finland and Estonia. He was part of that Scandinavian horde who descended on England in the years of Æthelred the Unready.
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Chapter 5: How did Viking culture influence Harald Hardrada?
So anyway, thanks to this head-smashing, Olaf has actually stamped his authority on the different kind of strongmen of Norway. And around the time of Harald's birth, so 1015, he's recognised as the king of Norway. So another brilliant example of the way in which the Viking Age is passing into history and being replaced by a kind of more ordered, more structured kind of world.
We talked in the previous series about Olaf Tryggvason, this kind of sinister reader of history. Bird bones. I mean, he establishes a Christian monarchy. He does it by committing spectacular atrocities in the name of Christ. And I think Harold Sigurdsson is... Cut from similar cloth. Very much in that kind of line of descent.
So Harold, at this point, he's still only a little boy. Our first anecdote about him as a boy is in 1018 or so. His father has died, so Sigurd has died, and Olaf comes to visit his mother. So this early 20s guy who's become king, his half-brother, he comes to visit their hall in a place called Ringarike.
And the story is that Harald is there with his older brothers, Gothorm and Halfdan, and they're very shy of their relative, the king, and they can't meet his eye. They have the hearts of girls. They do. But Harold, who is three years old, sits on Olaf's lap and tugs his moustache. The mark of a king. Yeah. Olaf says, brother, you will be a fighter one day. And then the next day...
Olaf is walking with his mother. They're having a chat in the sort of the fields and they come across the boys playing by the stream and the other boys are playing as farmers. But Harold Hardrada, the future Harold Hardrada, is sort of playing with long, ten long ships. And Olaf says to him, the day may come, brother, when you command real ships.
And then he says to them, and I'm sure this definitely happened, Tom. He says, what would you like? What would you like most in life? And Gutthorne says, I would like a lot of fields. And Halfdan says, I would like cows. And Harald, age three, says, house cows. So many they would eat all Halfdan's cows at a single feast.
And Olaf says to Auster, his mother, he says, well, well, mother, you are bringing up a king. So this is all very impressive, and I'm sure that this all happened. But actually, all the sources agree, and there's no reason to doubt them, that Harold is an exceptionally formidable character.
So Snorri Sturluson in King Harold's Saga says, Harold was a handsome man of noble appearance, his hair and beard yellow. He had a short beard and long moustaches. Peculiarly, the one eyebrow was somewhat higher than the other. So he's kind of Roger Moore-like in that respect. You know, he can raise an eyebrow, At a merry quip. Yeah, he's brutal, but suave. Suave, exactly. His height was five L's.
He was stern and severe to his enemies and cruelly punished all opposition or misdeed. So five L's, as historians point out, that would make him seven and a half feet tall. And the sources do say he's very, very tall. But he's probably not seven and a half feet.
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Chapter 6: What led to Harald's involvement in the battle of 1030?
He's definitely a huge man. I don't think there's any doubt about that. And he's good looking because one of the other names that he gets as well as Hardrada is Fairhair.
Yes. So he's blonde haired. He's incredibly impressive. And the portrait we get of him generally, I think in the sagas, captures that last of the Vikings feel. There's definitely a sort of, he's huge, he's ruthless, he loves gold, he likes fighting. And the sagas always have him. There's a brilliant book called Laughing Till I Die.
by Tom Shippey, the great kind of expert on kind of Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature. He's written a lot about Tolkien. And Tom Shippey says one of the defining things about Harald Hardrard and the Salkers is he's always making quips and composing poems in the face of danger and stuff. The Vikings took that. That's very much a Viking sensibility.
That, you know, there's a fatalism coupled with a sort of, I laugh in the face of death. which I don't doubt because you can tell that from the way he behaves. I don't doubt that that's true to his character to some degree.
Well, I mean, I guess the sagas preserve poetic traditions that definitely go back to the Viking age. And if this is part of the context in which Vikings are growing up, then they're going to model themselves on what they're reading in the epics. Exactly. It's a kind of a virtuous circle.
As he sits around the hearth, Tom, listening to the... to the bards or the skulls kind of telling their stories about Ragnar Lothbrok or whatever.
He wants to live up to it. He wants to model himself on that.
Exactly.
The fact that they have become Christian, that they have become kings, that they can now command the vast resources, almost of a kind of an emergent state, doesn't make them less of Vikings. Because if you think of Canute or Svein Fortbeard, Canute's dad, they're Vikings on a terrifying scale. And there's that intersection point, isn't there, where Viking brutality...
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Chapter 7: Who were the key figures in the Battle of Stiklestad?
And some Scandinavian historians think that what had basically happened is that Olaf had probably promised to be Cnut's vassal and had reneged on the deal, which is a big theme of Danish and Norwegian history. Well, because they'd fought each other on opposite sides in England. Exactly.
So in 1028, so two years before 1030, Cnut had sailed from England with 50 warships and had actually been welcomed by the Norwegians with open arms. So it's pretty clear that in the north, in particular of Norway, the local magnates actually didn't like Olaf and wanted him out. And Canute, we're told, when the sagas had bribed them with enormous quantities of gold and silver.
Every man who came to him and wished to be his friend had his hands filled with coins. So Olaf, Harold's brother, has fled. He flees over the mountains to Sweden with a handful of his closest friends and his son Magnus, who will come up again on Thursday. And from Sweden, he took a ship across the Baltic and he vanished into the forests of what is now Russia.
Now, we'll come back later in this episode to this side of things. But basically, for 200 years, this has been the kind of wild east of the Viking world. They've got all this network of forts and towns and so on. They're going all the way down the rivers into Ukraine towards the Black Sea and Constantinople, which is obviously the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire.
And Olaf has taken shelter, probably in Kiev, with the Grand Prince Yaroslav of Kiev, who's basically of Scandinavian descent.
And who will be a key figure in the story we're going to tell.
So Olaf has been gone for two years. And then in the spring of 1030, a dramatic twist, one of many in the story, word reaches Norway that Olaf is on his way back. He's got about 200 warriors who are kind of Slav mercenaries and Norwegian exiles.
I mean, the phrase Slav mercenaries is never something you want to hear if you're a peaceful villager, is it?
It's a phrase that you definitely want to be using on a podcast. When you're talking about Slav mercenaries, you're living the dream. So he goes back and he arrives in Sweden. And the Swedish king, who's called Onund Jakob, he gives him some more men. And then he recruits some more troops in Sweden, some more Norwegian exiles and so on. And so Olaf has this force of about 2,500 men. And then...
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