Harald Hardrada Read Free Page A

wife’s estate in 1206. There he would undoubtedly have built up his own library and there too he apparently had the assistance of an amanuensis, so it was at Reykjaholt that he is thought to have written most, if not all, of his surviving works – not only Heimskringla , but also his Edda and, quite possibly, Egil’s saga too – between the years 1220 and 1230. The key item of evidence supporting this unusually precise dating is a passage found in Íslendinga saga (‘Saga of the Icelanders’, a history of his own Sturlung kindred written within living memory of Snorri’s lifetime by his nephew, Sturla Thordason) which tells how another nephew, Sturla Sigvatsson, spent the winter of 1230–1 at Reykjaholt where he ‘had saga-books copied from the works which Snorri had composed’.
    While the writing of Heimskringla can be convincingly placed at Reykjaholt in the 1220s, the gathering together of all the history and tradition upon which it draws must have represented the work of a lifetime for a man who had by then entered into his fifth decade. It was a pursuit upon which Snorri had probably first embarked in his foster-home at Oddi and continued throughout the following years, especially when his travels around Norway and Sweden during the first sojourn on the Scandinavian mainland would have allowed visits to historic sites associated with Norwegian kings and introduced him also to oral traditions which were to inform his sagas.
    As to his documentary sources, Snorri’s own prologue to Heimskringla acknowledges a debt to an earlier historian, the esteemed Icelander Ari Thorgilsson, and to his ‘lives of the kings’, presumably a saga-history but a work now long since lost. He does, however, make passing reference to other written sources which have survived into modern times and of these an early version of Orkneyinga saga – known to Snorri as Jarls’ saga – will be of special importance here by reason of its bearing on Harald Hardrada. Meticulous scholarly research into the text of Heimskringla has identified further documentary sources, notably Ágrip and Morkinskinna , upon which he appears to have drawn but does not mention by name. There is, however, another body of historical record, quite independent of the narrative histories, and this is the wealth of skaldic verse which represented a key primary source for the saga-maker, having been used first by the author of Ágrip , to a greater extent by those who composed Morkinskinna and Fagrskinna , but most extensively of all by Snorri in Heimskringla .
    These court-poets known as skálds , almost all of them firmly identified as Icelanders, had been in richly rewarded attendance on Norwegian kings since the time of Harald Fair-hair in the later ninth century. Usually informed at first hand and sometimes even themselves eye-witness to the events they described, their poetry can be taken to represent an immediately contemporary source of history. Before the battle of Stiklestad, Olaf insisted on his skalds sheltering within a shield-wall in order that they should see the conflict and survive to commemorate its deeds in verse for posterity. So too, Thjodolf Arnorsson, who was Harald Hardrada’s favourite among his own court-poets, fought beside his king at Stamford Bridge and is thought to have been slain in the battle or to have died soon afterwards of wounds suffered there. Heimskringla contains very many more examples of the first-hand authority of skaldic verse, as Snorri himself confirms in his prologue when he acknowledges having ‘gathered the best of our information from what we are told in these poems which were recited before the chieftains themselves or their sons’.
    The contemporaneity of such information thus lies almost entirely beyond dispute, and yet reasonable doubt might still be cast on its objectivity when, as Snorri admitted, ‘it is the way of the court-poet to