552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
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Olaf and Harald crashed into the enemy line like a storm ripping into a forest. Men were falling on every side, shards and splinters and splatters of blood flying into their faces.

But soon the Norwegians were pressing back, using their numbers to hem Olaf's men in, squeezing them, crushing them together. More missiles rained down, spears, arrows and throwing axes. The ground was slippery with blood. For a moment Harald lost his footing, but then a hand was dragging him back up. And Ulf the Icelander flashed him a grim smile.

Olaf raised his voice again, rallying his men for another charge, the sea serpent waving proudly overhead. Yet in the corner of his eye, Harald could see the terrifying figure of Thorir the Hound. His teeth bared with savage laughter, his black spear dripping with blood, cutting through the crowd towards his brother.

And it was now, as the battle hung in the balance, that the heavens proclaimed their verdict.

So that unbelievably manly and buccaneering prose is from Adventures in Time, Fury of the Vikings, Dominic's excellent book on the Vikings. And it describes one of the many thrilling scenes from the life of Harold Hardrada, who will go on to become one of the stars of the great drama of 1066. But Dominic, this is not a description of...

a battle fought in 1066, but in 1030. 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, Harold Hardrada, two episodes on the Thunderbolt of the North, as Adam of Bremen 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 Harold 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, Harold Hardrada is really an exciting supporting character, isn't he? He's one of the three contenders in the great Game of Thrones, arrives suddenly in the middle of 1066, and then he's

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

the Viking Age and the Roman Age, because you have Harold walking around Constantinople. And we've been doing this series on focus 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

The guy who disappears into exile as a sort of mercenary or a ranger from the north and then returns to reclaim his throne. 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 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. Yeah.

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 life.

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. And medieval Iceland would see it, whether that map.

on exactly to how Harold sees it. We will explore that. But the good news for everybody is this is a podcast and not a PhD. So if you're hoping for giant serpents, you'll get them. Berserkers covered in bud, 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 Sier, 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 people.

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 Harald is born, so Olaf, his half-brother, is about 20. He's going to play a massive part in Harald's life because Harald is going to hugely look up to him. So Olaf, we know more about Olaf at this point than we do Harald.

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 and

He was part of that Scandinavian horde who descended on England in the years of Æthelred the Unready. So he served with this bloke, Thorkell the Tall, who we talked about last time. And he actually ended up, was one of the people who has ended up as a mercenary fighting for Æthelred the Unready. Yeah, he's the guy who supposedly pulls down London Bridge. Exactly. Thereby inspiring the nursery rhyme. Now, he's also spent time in Normandy, a place we talked a lot about last time. A crucial sort of node in the network of...

across the sort of North Sea in the Channel. He'd been baptized a Christian in Rouen and he later becomes a great champion or he's seen as a great champion of Christianity in Norway. But whether he's very pious, I think is dubious. I think for him, Christianity is about power and about status and about generally smiting his enemies and making himself king. So Snorri says that his eyes are hard as serpents. Right. Jesus.

Jesus wouldn't like that, Tom, would he? It's more adventures in time, it has to be said. It is. His scalds, his poets, said that he was the ember breaker of battle. He gave gold to his loyal men and carrion to the ravens. That's what I like. I like that in a king. And actually, in all the poems that were composed about him when he was alive, there's no mention of being kind or turning the other cheek. There's an awful lot of mention of smashing people's heads in with hammers and stuff. 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 recognized 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

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. Absolutely.

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 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 10 longships. 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 that

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 and

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. I mean, the one thing that people know is that Stamford Bridge, at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, he says of Harold Gobinson, what a small man. But also, Harold then turns it, doesn't he, and makes a famous joke about his height, which we will come to in due course. He's definitely a huge man. I don't think there's any doubt about that. And he is good looking because one of the other names that he gets as well as Hardrada is Fair Hair. 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 Harold Hardrider in the sagas is he's always making quips about

and composing poems in the face of danger and stuff. The Vikings took that. That's very much a Viking sensibility, that 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 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. It 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 and the resources available to a Christian king intersect. And it's very bad news for their neighbours. Yeah, so they're not really going on those piddling little raids anymore.

What they're doing in launching proper invasions and seizing kingdoms and piling up gold on the skins of oxes. That's what they're doing. So he next appears in the sagas in the spring of 1030 when he's 15 years old. And a lot has changed since the days when he was, you know, tugging people's beards.

So his brother Olaf, Olaf the Stout, this guy who'd united Norway, has had a massive falling out with Cnut, the king of Denmark and England, who we talked about in the last series. Now, we know that Cnut and Olaf did know each other. Their paths had undoubtedly crossed in England back in the days of Svein Fortbeard and so on. And some Scandinavian historians think that what had basically happened is that Olaf had probably promised to be kind of Cnut's vassal.

and had reneged on the deal, which is a big theme of kind 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 Cnut, we're told, when the Sargers 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. Oh, for sure. 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...

Harold, his younger brother, turns up. So Harold at this point is about 15 or 16 years old. Please, brother, may I fight with you? I think his voice broke when he was about eight. Oh, maybe when he was three and playing with his Viking ships. I imagine he's pretty formidable. Massively hairy? Uh,

I think it's more he's got a mane of blonde hair, so he tosses in the wind. I hope one day, brother, to have a moustache like yours. And he will. Well, he will. Well, hold on. Hold on, actually. I can't believe I didn't read this out. Snorri Sturluson says at this point he was very stout and manly, as though full grown. As though full grown, Dominic. Yeah, but very stout and manly. What, so he's fat? No, because stout in these days. So Olaf the Stout is not that he's fat. It's actually that he's sort of sturdy.

Like me. So, right. Harald has raised a couple of hundred men from the uplands of central Norway. He's crossed the mountain spine of Scandinavia and he's gone down to Sweden to meet his brother. So they all assemble.

And then they decide they'll set off back to Norway and they're hoping to get more recruits as they go. And they cross the spine again through the passes into the Norwegian uplands. Now there are some accounts, because this is the age of Christianization, that say that Olaf forced recruits to be baptized and he made them paint white crosses on their shields. We must depend on God. Only with his power and mercy shall we gain victory. And I cannot have pagan men in my army.

But actually, most of the historians' accounts that I've read of this say this is probably nonsense. That actually this is a back projection by later Christian chroniclers. And that actually, almost certainly, it's a mixture of all kinds of random people in this army at this point. I would be less sceptical about it because he has seen London. He's seen Kiev. He's seen Christian kings and the power that they command. And I think that...

Everything about would-be Viking kings in this period suggests that they want a part of it. Oh, they do. I'm not saying that he doesn't shout about Christ and have a cross. What I'm saying is his very ragtag army, I don't think it has the quality of a crusade. No, it doesn't have a quality of the crusade, but the possibility that he makes them put white crosses on their shields or whatever, I mean, it's certainly possible. Yeah. Anyway...

They come down into the height of summer, 1030, and they come down into the most fertile bit of Norway, which is called the Trondelag, and surround the city that we now know as Trondheim, which at the time was called Nidaros. And they're going through this valley, and at the end of the valley is the village of Stiklestad, Stikler's Farm. And this is the setting for this great battle, probably the most famous battle in Norwegian history. I don't know how many Norwegian listeners we have, but they'll be very excited by this.

And as they advance down this valley, they see at the end a huge army waiting for them. So this army, their enemies, these are A, Canute loyalists, and B, basically local farmers and local peasants who hate Olaf. And they are horrified that all these Slav mercenaries have turned up and they're about to pillage their lands and sort of...

you know, attack their families and stuff. Do we know if Harold's brothers, who are the farmers? Oh, my word. You know, do you think they've turned out? I think they've disappeared from the story completely. Gothorm and Halfdan. I don't think they've turned out. No, no, no. Because they wouldn't welcome Slavic mercenaries descending on there. They wouldn't, but that's actually too busy tending their crops, Tom. They've got no time for this kind of nonsense. Now, in the sagas, there are some absolutely splendid people involved in the enemy army.

So the head of it, the head of this kind of loyalist army, is a local strongman called Kalf Arneson, who's a sort of Canute loyalist. Then there's a bloke called Thorstein the Shipwright, and he has a grudge against Olaf because Olaf confiscated a ship from him as punishment for murdering somebody.

Snorri Sturluson says that Thorstein the shipwright was, quote, very ardent and a skilled killer of men. That's nice. Which is nice. But by far the most terrifying person who you mentioned in that wonderful reading at the beginning of the show is this guy who's called Thorir the Hound. And Thorir the Hound, I'm sure he existed. He's a warlord from the northern coast of Norway. So he's been in touch with the Sami people.

And he's wreathed in mystery and magic. He's a sorcerer as well as a hound. Well, this is the kind of figure that Neil Price talks about. Yeah. It's a great book, The Viking Way. And he came and talked about Viking sorcery. And his great thesis is that so much of Viking culture is influenced by shamanistic traditions from the far north. That's a very fashionable view, though, isn't it, Tom? I like it.

Yeah, I really, really like it. This bloke bears it out. He's wearing a Sami cloak of 12 reindeer skins with, and I quote, so much magic that no weapon could pierce them. And if people doubt that, we will have evidence for it later on in this story. He's got good medicine. He's also got a magic spear. He's got a magic spear and he said, I would use this magic spear to kill Olaf. Now they outnumber Olaf's men four to one and they are absolutely pumped. They are gagging for battle.

Kalf Arneson, he raises his banner and he addresses his men and he says, he who does not fight bravely today shall be held a worthless coward. Spare none, for they will not spare you. Now Olaf, who's massively outnumbered, he raises his banner. You mentioned it in the reading, the sea serpent. He unsheathes his sword, which is called Hnaitir, striker.

And he gives his own speech. Of course he does. And he says, they may have more men, but it is fate that decides victory, not numbers. I swear that I will not flee from this fight. I will triumph or I will die. And all his men assemble. It's got his great lieutenant standing at his side, who obviously is called Bjorn the Bear. He's there. Doesn't Bjorn mean bear? Yeah. Yeah, it's just a tautology. But I mean, you know, it's there to... Don't forget the Slav mercenaries there. They might not know that, Tom. So it needs to be explained.

It's also got a kind of Lancelot character who's called Rogenvald Brussesen, who's the son of the Earl of Orkney. You're a big fan of Orkney, aren't you? Yeah, well, because the Earls of Orkney carry on being Vikings, you know, deep into the Middle Ages. So he's there, Rogenvald, and everyone should remember him because he'll be important in this story. But Harold, what about Harold?

Olaf says, I do not think my brother Harold should be in the battle for he is still a child. Certainly I should be in the battle for I am not too weak to handle a sword and if necessary you can tie my hand to the hilt. That's what he says. He's stout and manly. He did not speak like that. So anyway, this is the first time

Then he comes out with one of his poems in the face of death. He says, my arm is wing where I shall stand. I will hold good with heart and hand. My mother's eye shall joy to see a battered bloodstained shield from me. That's great. There's no doubt, I think, in any listener's mind that this absolutely happened. So at about one o'clock, according to the sagas, these two lines advance on each other.

Thorir the Hound is shouting, Olaf is shouting. The tension mounts, it's very Bernard Cornwell. And then the two lines crash together and sort of trying to work out from the sagas, which are, as we said, written much later with masses of kind of fictionalization and back projection. Olaf's men are almost certainly more skilled, more experienced than all these farmers and peasants. So when the sagas say they made initial headway, that's very plausible.

But over time, the sheer weight of numbers four to one tells against them. So in King Harold's saga, which is part of a big cycle called Heimskringla, says the peasant army pushed on from all quarters. Those in front hewed down with their swords, those behind thrust with their spears, and those in the rear shot arrows, cast spears, and threw stones, hand axes, or sharp stakes. Soon many men began to fall. So in other words, Olaf is very embattled. And Harold.

And then, remember you said, Tom, the heavens proclaimed their verdict. As is oddly so often the way in decisive battles in history, guess what happens? There is a total eclipse. So we're told the saga say the sky and sun became red and then as black as night.

And to read from a thrilling version of this story for younger readers, blood-curdling roars rose from the peasant army. The gods had spoken. The king must die. Now they surged forward, emboldened, triumphant, closing in on their former master, their faces twisted with demonic rage. That also definitely happened. So a very prosaic version of what happens next is basically the peasant armies, whether the initial surge,

Olaf is outnumbered. His men are cut down. The standard bearer is cut down, drops the sea serpent banner. The morale breaks. People start running. And at some point, Olaf himself is slaughtered among the piles of bodies. But the sagas tell a very exciting story. So basically, all boils down to this duel between Olaf and Thorir the Hound. He lands this fantastic blow on Thorir. He slashes at him. But...

Thorir is wearing that Sami reindeer skin coat. It was as dust flew from this coat and Olaf's sword just glances off it.

And then Thorstein, the shipwright, hacks at Olaf's leg with his axe. Olaf falls over a boulder, which apparently you can still see on the field, called Olaf's Stone. And you were driving very near the site. You opted not to go and look at it. I just don't like stones. I find them very dull. I find them disappointing. And also, I had a brilliant image in my mind of this battle. Yeah, you didn't want to be disappointed. I didn't want to be disappointed by some prosaic stone. Anyway, Thorri the Hound, remember, he's got a magic spear.

He plunges it up through Olaf's male shirt into his chest. And then Kalf Arneson hits him in the neck and it's all over. For Olaf, that's all right. Because do you know who had appeared to Olaf while he was in Novgorod in a dream?

It's Olaf Tryggvason. Oh, no way. Another Olaf. So it was Olaf Tryggvason who'd been Olaf the Stout's godfather. Right. He appeared to him and he said, look, don't worry. It's a glorious thing to die in battle. And then he vanished. Yeah. A Viking would know that, though. They wouldn't need to be told. Yeah, but it would be a reassurance, wouldn't it? If your godfather tells you. It would be a reassurance. You're right. That's true. That's true. Oh, that's nice. Anyway, he probably dies with a smile on his lips, I like to think. A grim smile. Now, almost everybody else we're told in the sagas is killed, too. But not Harold.

Harold has somehow been wounded and put out of action. So he's kind of lying among the piles of bodies. And this guy, the Earl of Orkney's son, Roggenwald Brussesen, he helps him up and he drags him off the battlefield into the woods. Now, Thorir the Hound is leading a kind of mopping up party to kill all the survivors. But they managed to evade him and they reach a woodsman's hut. And there, the woodsman, a kindly forester,

He takes them in and he says, listen, I will look after young Harold until he's well enough to travel.

So I think it's probably fair to say at this point, this probably didn't happen. This feels a bit fairytale to me, Tom. I mean, just to say also, there must have been enough survivors of the battle the next day to go and find Olaf's body and spirit away. And they bury it in a sandy bank upriver from Trondheim. And this is very important for the Christianization of Norway because his death in that battle will come to be seen as a martyrdom and

And his relics will become a great object of pilgrimage. Well, spoiler alert, he becomes a saint. Yeah, he's a patron saint of Norway. We've had a few implausible saints on the podcast. He's definitely one of them. He's got a church in London. Yeah. So, Roggenvald goes off and he leaves Harold with this woodsman.

And days or weeks we don't know go by. Harold's wounds heal. And eventually the woodsman's son says, I will guide you through the forests and over the mountains to Sweden. We're told that they stayed off the roads. They made their way through the woods. And Harold wore a hooded cloak to hide his face. So he's very much kind of the Ranger of the North.

I like to think he travels under the name Stroider or some such. Trotter. Yeah, Trotter. That's Tolkien's original name. And he devises one of his lovely poems during the journey. Now from wood to wood I slink, rated little. Who knows? But I may win better fame later. I mean, it's not really a...

As poems go, it's probably not the best. But anyway. Yeah, he's really tired. Yeah. He's just lost his brother. He's also a teenager. He's a teenager. Come on, don't be hard. Yeah, I'm being too hard on him. I feel ashamed of myself now. Anyway, they go through all this wild country. He goes down into Sweden. The Baltic Sea lies beyond. He meets up with Roggenveld. And that winter, they hunker down, brooding on their defeat. And then, says the saga, the spring came. And Harald and Roggenveld hired a ship

And that summer they sailed east to the lands of the Rus. Goodness, what a cliffhanger. So go east, young man. And that is what we will be doing after the break. Music

Hello, I'm William Durrumpal. And I'm Anita Arnand. And we are the hosts of Empire, also from Goldhanger. And we're here to tell you about our recent miniseries that we've just done on The Troubles. In it, we try to get to the very heart of the violent conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted from the 1960s all the way up to 1998.

It's something that we both lived through and remember from our childhoods, but younger listeners may not know anything about it. And it's a time when there was division along religious and political lines. Neighbors turned against each other. Residential city streets became battlegrounds.

Thousands were killed and the IRA bombed London. It seemed as if an end was out of reach. But in 1998, a peace process finally brought those 30 years of violence to an end. But the memory of the troubles is still present, not only within Northern Irish communities who experienced it, but

but in international relations and political approaches to peace. And new audiences are starting to understand this national trauma through films like Belfast and kneecap and TV shows like Derry Girls. In fact, our guest on the miniseries is Patrick Radden Keefe. Now, he's the author of the nonfiction book that inspired the hit TV drama Say Nothing.

It's one of my favourite books. It's, I think, the kind of in-cold blood for our generation, extraordinary work of nonfiction. To hear the full series, just search Empire wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is brought to you by the Swedish clothing brand Asket. Now, Dominic, in our episode on tailoring and the history of the suit, one of the most salient things that you get a real sense of while stood in a tailor's on Savile Row is that historically clothes were made with love and

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Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We're in the midst, literally, of a saga. The 16-year-old Harold Hardrada is on the run. His brother Olaf the Stout has been killed. He's being hunted. He and his friend Rognarold have taken ship from the Swedish coast into the freezing waters of the Baltic. They have their ranger's hoods over their heads. Dominic, where are they going? So...

For the last 200-odd years, the Vikings have been going east as much as they've been going west. They've been sailing across the Baltic and the Gulf of Finland to what's now Russia, Estonia, and Latvia. We did a couple of episodes about this in the early days. The rest is history. But just to remind people, the Vikings would head up the rivers. They'd carry furs and slaves. They'd go deep into Eastern Europe. And then they would make their way through the river network to the Black Sea and then south to Constantinople.

And over these 200 years, they have built a chain of trading stations and forts and settlements stretching for 1,300 miles. And this becomes known as the Kingdom of Cities, Guadalupe. But

but it's better known today as the land of the Rus. That word probably, there's lots of academic arguments about it, which we talked about before, but it probably comes from an old Norse term that means rowers because they often rode down these or up these rivers. And obviously it's from that that we get Ruthenia, Russia, Belarus, and so on and so forth. Now we can pretty much guess which way Harold went because there's a set route, there's kind of a highway.

So he and Roggenwald would have crossed the Gulf of Finland to roughly near modern St. Petersburg, and then they'd have taken the River Neva upstream to Lake Ladoga, Europe's largest freshwater lake. And here on the southern side is basically the gateway to the wild east, which is a place called Storaia Ladoga.

which is this sort of, it is like a wild west town. And you mentioned Neil Price, Tom, the great historian of the Vikings. He calls it a muddy riverine deadwood with greater ethnic variety plus swords and a multitude of gods. It's such a great description. And I mean, the context, the rivers and the network of forts, there is a sense beyond it of a kind of fantasy world, isn't there? Completely. Where you

you know there are dragons and I think men who have mouths between their nipples and all that kind of stuff it is a kind of Dungeons and Dragons terrifying dimension everything about this reminds me of it feels so Tolkien-esque and the journey that Harold is going on is so Fellowship of the Ring

And actually, it's not a silly parallel because obviously Tolkien is basing his stories on this. And that does capture, as you say, how they viewed the world. Because at the end of it are these shining cities of the Eastern Roman Empire and the Caliphate and whatnot with so much wealth and so much to them, so much mystery and splendor beyond anything they would see in Norway. But also on the way, kind of strange cities. Harold goes to Novgrod, which we've already mentioned, literally Newcastle.

And this is a town made so completely out of wood that even the documents that have survived consist of birch bark. That's right. And again, that must have seemed an extraordinary place to anyone visiting it. Yeah. They've moved 150 miles down through the rivers to Novgorod. Again, it's a tough place. It's kind of Wild West type place. But as you say, welcome back to the rest of the streets. We are in the marshes and whatnot.

Then they cross again with their canoes, probably Lake Ilmen. They would have had to drag the canoes or the barges through the woods for hundreds of miles when they're crossing from river to river or crossing around rapids and whatnot. It's risky. If you think about the Fellowship of the Ring, when they're going through the woods and stuff, being chased by orcs, it's got that feel to it because there are bandits in the woods. There are Slav tribes. I wouldn't have enjoyed it. It's a good thing.

It wouldn't have been a Restless History Tour vibe, would it? No. And then at last, they must have gone round a bend in the river and they see the walls of Kiev, which is built on bluffs above the river Dnieper. And Kiev, or Kiev, depending on what you call it, according to legend, it had been founded centuries earlier by three Slavic brothers and then taken over by Vikings called Asgald and Dyr in the 860s.

And it ends up effectively becoming the capital of this very loose state called Kievan Rus'. This is the state from which, as Vladimir Putin would be the first to tell you, both Ukraine and Russia trace their kind of national lineage. The Grand Princes of Kiev had been Christian since 988. And that was when a guy called Volodymyr or Vladimir the Great converted to Christianity.

And the fact that he's doing that tells you something about their strategic position. Because for them, the great superpower is what would have called itself at the time the Roman Empire, the empire based in Constantinople. And Philodemir had married the emperor's daughter, Anna, a massive figure in the history of the Christianization of the Rus'.

And it's probably their son. We can't be entirely certain about his parentage, but it's their son, Yaroslav, who is now the Grand Prince and rules in Kiev as a Christian. So in that sense, you could say they're not so different from the warlords in Scandinavia who are also becoming Christian. Well, you know who they remind me much more of is actually the Norman Dukes. Right. Yeah. Because similarly, there's that...

of a Viking polity that is becoming so influenced by the Christian power on its doorstep. Historians at this point are debating, are they still Scandinavian?

Yeah. They're adopting the language. So Yaroslav, he is of Viking descent, right? But his name is Slavic. Has a Slavic name. Yeah. So it's very similar to debates that we've been having about the Norman Dukes. Are they Scandinavian? Yeah. Are they French? What are they? I think it's a really nice comparison. I think the difference is that Normandy is more, obviously much smaller and more focused and more coherent and more militarily progressive, as it were, than Kievan Rus'. It's such an interesting and strange place, I think.

So when Harold arrived, Kiev at that point must have been by far the biggest and most awe-inspiring place he'd ever seen. Maybe 50,000 people lived there? So a lot bigger than, say, London at the same time. And also very closely modelled on Constantinople, right? So it's a kind of prefiguring of the great city, the golden city of Caesar, that he will be reaching in due course. Exactly. So we know, to give people a sense of what Kiev was like...

all kinds of barges, people trading everything from silk to slaves to grain to amber and honey and furs, all the products of the North.

There was a lower town at the bottom of the hill called Podil, and they would go up through the kind of past the cottages. And then you've got this huge ramparts. You have this topped with kind of white painted oak palisades, three massive gates, one called the Polish Gate, Jewish Gate, and the Golden Gate. I mean, as you said, Tom, modeled on the gates in Constantinople, the Golden Gate, and

has its own chapel on the top of it and a kind of gilded dome. And this is the great entrance point to Kiev. And this great kind of fortress, again, I guess a point of comparison with the Normans, is the use of a fortified stronghold to intimidate the locals, to prey on them. And it's a very predatory state, isn't it? Yeah. And the citadel...

It does have something in common with the kind of Norman castle. So the citadel was called the Detonets. It's a little bit like a Kremlin. Huge walls, impregnable to attack. Inside you've got churches, you've got the kind of palace quarter, all of that kind of stuff. And it's there that you would, you know, if you wanted an audience with the Grand Prince Yaroslav, it's there that he would receive you. So according to the sagas, Harold and Rogenvald go in to see Yaroslav. He's now in his 50s.

He's probably, as I said, the son of Grand Prince Vladimir and his wife Anna. He is a man absolutely drenched in blood. He has fought this massive war against all his brothers. He's got about 500 brothers, hasn't he? 40 brothers. He's killed most of them. Well, there's one who...

Gets chased into Poland, is it? And he dies a lunatic there, stabbing with a sword at empty air. Yeah. And a kind of terrifying sense that Yaroslav, even when he's not there, is haunting this poor brother's imaginings. Well, Yaroslav is a very impressive man. So later chroniclers called him Yaroslav the Wise. At the time, people called him Yaroslav the Lame because he'd got a limp from battle.

And Tom, in 2008, a TV poll of two and a half million Ukrainians crowned him the greatest Ukrainian in history. Yeah, well, he is. I think he's amazing. So there's also the amazing story that his enemies, his brothers and everything, are on the far side of, I guess, the Dnieper or one of the great rivers. And they're screaming abuse at him. And they're the first to call him the lame Ukrainian.

And Yaroslav is furious about this. And then the river ices over. Yaroslav crosses even with his limp. Slaughters the lot of them. Of course he does. He's the man that I would take shelter with in Harold's predicament. And it obviously works out very well for him. So Yaroslav, he's this blend, as you said, of Viking, Roman and Slav. Slavic name. His wife is the daughter of the Swedish king, Ingergird. And I think it's very unclear, but I think

She's a distant relative in some way of Harold's brother, his late brother Olaf. So he can kind of claim kin. Exactly. And as we said, he's also within what they would have called the Roman orbit. So his mother probably Roman. And he's just started work on St. Sophia. So Hagia Sophia. Exactly. It's first cathedral modelled on the original in Constantinople.

And we are told by King Harold's saga, he gave Harold and Rognvald a very friendly reception. He loves a Scandinavian mercenary. Who doesn't? And so for the next two years, Harold will serve in the Grand Prince's army. So this is really his military apprenticeship. So what is he? This is between the ages of, let's say, 17, 18? Yeah, 17, 18, 19. This is what he's doing. And we get some...

sense very vague of what kind of things he's doing so we know that around this time Kievan Rus is fighting against the Poles so the Poles are a Slav kingdom that have expanded from around Poznan and they've been pushing east into what's now Belarus and western Ukraine and now Yaroslav is pushing back through the woods

So we get these little hints, very fragmentary, from what Snorri Sturluson says. Harold scalds his kind of poets, his praise singers. So there's a guy called Theodolf Arneson who's quoted by Snorri Sturluson. He says, the leaders fought side by side, their troops in a fighting wedge. They drove the Slavs to defeat and showed the Poles little mercy. So we can only kind of glimpse these very murkily, but subtly.

But staining the snows red. Exactly. And then the other one is they were definitely fought a people called the Pechenegs. Oh, they're terrifying. They're like step nomads, aren't they, from Central Asia. They are always turning skulls into cups, aren't they? They are. So Yaroslav's grandfather, they'd beheaded him, they'd lined his skull with gold and used it as a wine goblet. And what the Rus will do is they will transport their troops along the rivers and

And then go and fight these guys and try to avoid fighting them in an open step ground because they're the petrified eggs are unbeatable with their cavalry. So they try to draw them into the woods and fight them there. There's all kinds of stuff in the saga saying Harold loves this and he's absolutely brilliant at it. Another one of his sculls, his guy called Bolverk wrote these lines about Harold kind of looking back and

Later on, he said, our brave king is to the Rus lands gone. Braver than he on earth, there's none. His sharp sword will carve many a feast for wolf and raven in the east. Do you know, I think the rhyme scheme makes it slightly less impressive. Do you think so? Yeah, I do. So by the time he's about 18 or 19, Harold is promoted to captain of the guard. The guard were called the Drujina. And we know from the Arab traveler, Ibn Fadlan,

that if you became one of the king's companions, you would sort of feast with him in his hall and you would be given your own slave girl to wait on you, quote, to wash his head and to prepare food and drink and another slave girl to serve as your concubine. So Harold doesn't want for female company at this point, though unfortunately these are slave girls. But he's after more.

So he clearly sees himself as somebody who will return one day to claim the throne of Norway and succeed his brother and avenge his brother Olaf. And it is such a theme, isn't it, of this period? People being exiled and coming back over and over again. But to do that, he would obviously need Yaroslav's support. He would need to persuade the Grand Prince of Kiev to allow him to recruit troops, to give him troops. And he would really want to strengthen his connection with Yaroslav, I think, as much as possible.

And as luck would have it, Yaroslav has an eligible daughter. There's no way of dressing this up. When Harold arrived in Kiev, she was probably about six years old. So by the time he's made captain of the guard, she's probably about nine. And that's a point at which you would become betrothed. You wouldn't marry until you're mid-teens, but you might have been betrothed for several years. Her name is Elisif, or in the Slavic, Elizaveta.

We have absolutely no knowledge of her inner life at all. There is an image of her. There's an 11th century fresco of her family in the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Kiev. But it's quite, I mean, some of the accounts I've read, people say, oh, she's obviously a very serious person, pale-skinned and all this kind of thing. I'm like, this is obviously a generic Orthodox image. You can't really interpret anything from this. But we know from the sagas, Harald goes to Yaroslav and he says...

Listen, you'll recall my distinguished lineage and you know firsthand of my prowess. Can I ask for your daughter's hand in marriage? Yaroslav, I think he responds quite nicely. He says, it's fair. It's a good match. But you have no means to support a royal wife since you have no lands of your own. So although I do not say yes, I do not say no either. One day I believe you will be a great man. And when that day comes, you may ask me again.

So the sagas say Harold walks away from Yaroslav's hall and his mind, he already knows what he's going to do. He needs a reputation to marry this girl and he needs money.

And there is one place you go to get both of those things. And this is the city that is really the dream, I think, of every Viking who goes east, which is this great city of Miklagard. Actually, literally, the great city. The great city, yeah. So Miklagard, some historians think the inspiration for Asgard.

You know, for the city of the gods. The descriptions are Asgard is golden. It's roofed with precious metals, isn't it? It gleams with splendid palaces. It's encircled by a great wall. I mean, that is a description of, well, of Caesar's golden city. Exactly. So this city, Miklagard, the great city, is Constantinople, the new Rome. By far the biggest city in Europe.

So in the summer of 1034, Harold and some companions, we're told the suspiciously round number of 500 companions, go south down the Dnieper, very well-traveled path, past the rapids of Zaporizhzhia to the Black Sea, down the Bosphorus, and then up the Golden Horn into the city of Constantine.

Not an unfamiliar place for Norsemen to go. They've launched attacks, haven't they, in 860, 941, 944? They kind of initially introduced themselves by capturing monks and shooting arrows into their heads. Exactly. The Romans had seen them off with a combination of Greek fire and icon fire.

intervention yes they paraded with icons with with magic powers not magic powers i should say divine powers indeed supernatural yeah and and seen them off so the historian kat jarman has a book called river kings read that book tom about following beads the amber yeah and she has loads of stuff in there about um what we know about customs they're all kind of customs arrangements and special regulations for norse travelers arriving in constantinople

So he's not, you know, an incredibly unfamiliar figure. Well, there are two kinds, aren't there? There are people who are going to fight, but there are also merchants there. Yes. Skins, I think they're called. Exactly. He is not going to be doing that. No, he's going to fight.

So for Harold, what is he, 19 years old? This must have been an absolutely jaw-dropping experience. The Golden Horn, the huge walls, the markets, the bathhouses, the forum, the hippodrome, the massive palace complex of the Caesars. I mean, we know there's the famous story about when emissaries from the Rus went into Hagia Sophia

which was then 500 years old. And they said, we didn't know if we were in earth or in heaven, for surely there is no such magnificence or opulence anywhere in the world. Yeah, we cannot forget that beauty. Exactly. And actually that reflects a deeper picture or a wider picture, which is that actually the Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, for once it's actually doing pretty well.

It's at a kind of medieval peak under the Macedonian dynasty who are ruling it. They've crushed the Bulgars. They've recaptured a bit of territory in Syria. They've recaptured a bit of territory in Sicily and in Georgia. They're going through a kind of literary and artistic renaissance. So actually things are looking quite good for them and they're quite self-confident and quite buoyant.

Now, Harold will get very, very involved in kind of Constantinople politics, and we'll get onto that in the next episode. But just to give listeners a sense of the picture, there has just been a change of emperor at the top. So the emperor in the early 1030s had been a guy called Romanus III, who was basically a bureaucrat. He was in his mid-60s.

And he was married to the Empress Zoe, born in the purple. So from the imperial family. She's younger. She's in her mid-50s. And Zoe, I think it's fair to say, she's a character, isn't she, Tom? Yeah, she is. She's a memorable character. We'll discuss her in more detail on Thursday. She's blonde. She's very voluptuous. She's very clever.

She's incredibly vain. She's always sort of taking strange potions and sort of smearing creams on herself. Unguents. Unguents. She loves an unguent. Now, she's been having an affair with a younger palace official called Michael, who's in his 20s, very good looking. And in April 1034, so just before Harold arrives in Constantinople,

The emperor's officials, Romanus' officials, came into his bathroom and found him dead in his bath, strangled probably. And almost all the sources say it was Michael who did it. He had murdered this bloke. And he has now become emperor because he's married Zoe and become emperor himself, Michael IV.

And actually, the empire is being run by his brother. Who's a tremendous figure. Inevitably, a eunuch. Well, you say inevitably. Yeah. I mean, it's quite odd that the brother of the emperor would be a eunuch. But actually, it's the eunuch who had originally got Michael in. The eunuch comes first. Exactly. We will come to him because he's a great character. John the Orphanetrophus, I think is his name. Anyway.

He's running the show. Michael, this kind of handsome toy boy, is now the emperor, and Zoe is still on the scene as empress. And it's fair to say, I think, a nest of vipers, Tom. And I choose the serpentine analogy for good reason. Yeah, because the serpents go all the way down into the bowels of the palace. They do indeed. But for the time being, you know, Harold, there's no reason he should really worry about all this. He's just an obscure Scandinavian mercenary. His name will mean something to Scandinavians, but it won't really mean anything to the Romans. Yeah.

And he is heading not for the palace, well, not for the center of the palace, but for a building that may well adjoin it, which is the barracks of the most glamorous warriors in Christendom. And these are the Varangian Guard. So the Varangian Guard, I mean, they're the sort of sexiest of all medieval warriors.

elite warriors, aren't they? They are a bodyguard established in 988 at the point when Vladimir the Great of Kiev had decided to embrace Christianity and to do this marriage deal with the emperors. And Vladimir had sent

We're told 6,000 Norse and Slavic mercenaries who became known as Varangians after the Norse word var, which means oath. So they are literally called the Oath Keepers. And I think that when bands of Norse went southwards to begin with,

It would be a kind of consortium. Exactly. So it's a band of Varangians who found Novgorod, for instance. Exactly. So the idea that you would swear an oath and you would become a kind of team. A blood brother. Exactly. These over time, we've now moved on sort of 40, 50 years from this, but they're still going and they've become a kind of special forces unit.

So they will be sent across the empire to Syria, to Sicily, wherever, you know, to take part in sieges and stuff like that. Parachuting in. Exactly. Most of them are Scandinavian, not all. So there are Anglo-Saxons and certainly later on. Well, there will be quite a few more in due course. And Slavs. They become famous. There are sort of hints of them in Roman sources. Yeah.

They are famous for drinking, for having double-headed axes, and general sort of berserker ferocity, I think it's fair to say. And for scrawling graffiti in churches. The most famous relics of them are in Hagia Sophia, and there's a bit of graffiti that says Halfdan. In other words, a guardsman guarding the imperial family would have written basically Halfdan was here.

And there are scrawled longboats, aren't there, in the upper galleries? I mean, an amazing thing to see. We have a sense of them from picture stones on the island of Gotland and also things that have been found in graves in Scandinavia that they might have worn sort of baggy silk trousers and had kind of armour in rectangular little plates, rather like step nomad kind of armour. And do you think when they go back to Scandinavia... They're baggy silk trousers. Yes.

They're like teenagers from a gap year in India. Like you, Tom, after you went to India and you returned an Indian garb. Yeah. I guess maybe. Yeah. I think there's an element of that plus the French foreign legion. Yeah. They've seen things. All of that. And I mean, you don't come back from a gap year with your pockets loaded with gold.

No, but these blokes absolutely do. So to be a Varangian guard, you were paid 40 gold solidi for a regular guardsman. And if you get to guard the imperial family, you get 44 solidi. That's as much money, if not more, than you would get from a really, really good Dane Geld payout in the West. And of course, it's much more reliable. You basically signed a contract. As long as you don't get killed. And gold is better than silver. Yeah, of course.

Remember we had Eleanor Barraclough on talking about the sagas. So in one of her books, I think it's Beyond the Northlands, she describes these people as strong, silent types dripping with gold, swayed in expensive fabrics and weighed down by top of the range weaponry. And she compares them with the Rangers of the North in The Lord of the Rings.

So, you know, the Rangers, when they turn up in the Fellowship of the Ring, Aragorn and whatnot, they're kind of these strong, silent, battle-hardened, mysterious figures behind their hoods with suspiciously fine swords. But not prone to berserk. No, I guess not. But we just don't see that. Feats of violence. I like to think it's happening offstage in Tolkien's world, don't you? Yeah, I suppose. The massacres of orcs or something. Yeah, I guess. All those little orc babies. Right, exactly.

So Harold, it makes complete sense that he will do this. If he is able to not get killed and to save his money, he'll be able to go back to Kiev, a rich man. He'll be able to marry Elisif.

He'll have the blessing of the Grand Prince of Kiev, and then he can think about going back to Norway to reclaim his throne. So he goes to their barracks, and we're told brilliantly that he signs on under an assumed name, very Strider-like, and his name is Nordbricht, North Bright. That's what he chooses. And so, Tom, he's joined the Varangian Guard, and the stage is set for adventure. Hooray. Ahead...

Like Sicily, Armenia, Jerusalem, the murder of an emperor, eye gouging and a terrifying encounter with a giant snake. But will Harold ever make it back to avenge his brother and reclaim his throne? Tom, will he put aside the ranger and become who he was born to be?

We'll find out next time. So exciting. So next time on The Rest is History, we continue the saga of Harold Hardrada with the return of the king and members of The Rest is History Club, those who belong to our own Varangian guard, can hear that story right now. And if you are not a Varangian, if you're just a skin, a merchant, then you can change that. You can sign up at therestishistory.com. Alternatively, you can wait to hear it later in the week.

But either way, we will be back with Barangian fun and games. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.