Harald Hardrada Read Free

the question almost entirely beyond doubt. Although there is no known original manuscript, there is one single leaf surviving from a copy set down before 1275 and believed to be the closest to Snorri’s original on the evidence of its full text, which is preserved in at least three good transcripts. The title Heimskringla (‘the world’s orb’), which is derived from the work’s opening line (‘The orb of the world on which mankind dwells . . .’) and has been applied since the seventeenth century, has a cosmic resonance well befitting the scope of its cycle of sixteen sagas extending from the mythic origins and legendary ancestry of the Norwegian royal house through to the last quarter of the twelfth century.
    Snorri Sturluson himself was one of the most prominent figures in the Iceland of his time, a man of wealth and power as well as literature and learning. Although born into one of the most powerful Icelandic kindreds around the year 1179, he was to acquire much of his wealth and land through marriage, while also seeking to extend his influence by marrying his daughters into other important Icelandic families. He made two extended visits to the Scandinavian mainland where he is said to have been honoured with the title of jarl, as well as twice holding the presidential post of lawspeaker in the Althing , the Icelanders’ parliament. In his later years, however, Snorri fell victim to a poisonous blend of family feud and political intrigue when offence caused to his resentful in-laws and to the Norwegian king Hakon Hakonsson resulted in an attack on his home by an armed band led by one of his sons-in-law. They found Iceland’s most eminent man of letters, sixty-two years of age and utterly defenceless, taking refuge in his cellar and there they murdered him on a September night in the year 1241. Other than that lightly sketched outline, Snorri Sturluson’s remarkable life story lies beyond the scope of these pages and yet there are some aspects with such significant bearing upon his authority as Harald Hardrada’s saga-maker as to demand due notice here.
    When his father, Sturla Thordason of Hvamm, died Snorri was only five years old and was passed into the foster-care of Jon Loptsson, the most cultivated of Icelandic chieftains, whose home at Oddi was the foremost cultural centre in Iceland at a time when Icelanders could genuinely boast the pre-eminent literary culture of the Scandinavian world. There can be little doubt that the civilised ambience of Oddi, and especially its fine library, offered an exceptional stimulus to the literary inclinations of a youngster who might well be thought to have inherited a gift for poetry by way of his mother’s descent from the warrior-poet Egil Skalla-Grimsson, who is now best known as the hero of the famous Egil’s saga , another work often attributed to Snorri’s authorship. In fact, there can be no question of Snorri’s accomplishment and learning in the art of the skáld (the Old Norse term for a ‘court-poet’), not only because one work of which he is firmly identified as author is the outstanding medieval treatise on skaldic verse known as the S norra Edda (although more usually in the English-speaking world as the Prose Edda ), but because his own youthful praise-poetry sent to the Norwegian court made so great an impression that he was invited to visit Norway. He was to take up that invitation in 1218 and spent the next two years on the Scandinavian mainland, much of that time in the service of Jarl Skuli, who held the office of regent to the young king Hakon Hakonsson.
    The decade following his return from Norway in 1220 represented a period of peace in Icelandic society, a lull before the storm of internecine violence that erupted in the later 1230s. Snorri was already a man of great wealth, perhaps even the richest in Iceland, and settled on the farm at Reykjaholt to which he had moved from his