552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club.
That is therestishistory.com. This season, a new hot deal has arrived at Metro.
$25 a line for four lines with all the data you need and four free Samsung Galaxy A15 5G phones.

Getting Metro's best deals is easy.

No ID required, no activation fees.

Get a new number or keep your own.

It's up to you.

That's four lines for $25 a line plus four free phones.

Visit a store or go online today.

Only at Metro by T-Mobile.

When you join Metro Plus Tax.

For a limited time, it's subject to change.

Max one offer per account. Olaf and Harold 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 Harold 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 waving proudly overhead. "'Yet in the corner of his eye,

"'Harold could see the terrifying figure

"'of Thoria 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 Sticklerstad 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 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.
He crosses the North Sea, he leads an army into York, and then he faces Harold Gobinson 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 on, 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. 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.
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 labor too much. You've alluded to it.
The best sources for his life are these sagas, like Heimskringler, great sagas, sometimes written by Snorri Sturlus and 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 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 Stirlesson. Right.
And medieval Iceland would see it. Whether that maps 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.
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 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 you know his neighbors 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 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 orster 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. 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 Ethered the Unready soready.
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 ended up as a mercenary fighting for Aethelred 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

across the sort of North Sea and the Channel. He'd been baptised 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 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 um being kind or turning the other cheek but it's an awful lot of mention of like 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 strong men of norway and around the time of harold 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 Tryggforsen, this kind of sinister reader of 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 his end.
So Harold, at this point, he's still a new 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 sort of 20 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 harold is there with his older brothers guthrum and half dan and 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.

Ah, 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 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 Guthorm says, I would like a lot of fields. And Halfdan says, I would like cows.
And Harold, age three, says, house cows. So many, they would eat all Halfdan's cows at a single feast.
And Olaf says to Orster, his mother, he says, well, well, mother, you are bringing up a king. 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 um 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 Godwinson, 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

have 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.

This is a great deal. 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 Hardrada and the Sarkis 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 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 this piddling little raids anymore what they're doing is 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 Canute the king of Denmark and England who we talked about in the last series now we know that Canute 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 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 going all the way down the rivers into Ukraine towards the Black Sea in 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 this 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 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? 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. Harold 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 across 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 nideros and they're going through this valley and at the end of the valley is the village of sticklestad sticklers 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. 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 knut 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 sturleson 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 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 in his 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 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 mention it in the reading, the sea serpent. He unsheathes his sword, which is called night ear striker.
And he gives his own speech. Of course he does.
And he says, they may have more 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 it's just a tautology but I mean it's there's 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 bruserson 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 yeah deep into the middle ages so he's there rogdonvald 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 that he comes out with one of his poems in the face of death he says um 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 thorny the hound is shouting olaf is shouting they're kind of 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 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 heimskringler 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 through 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 weather the initial surge olaf is outnumbered his men are cut down the standard bearers 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 thoria the hound he lands this fantastic blow on thoria he slashes at him but thoria is wearing that sami reindeer reindeer skin coat it was as dust flew from this coat and olaf saw 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 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 back. Yeah, you didn't want to be disappointed.
I didn't want to be disappointed by some prosaic stone. Anyway, Thoreau 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 Trigfersen oh no way another Olaf so it's Olaf Trigfersen 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 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 say that.
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 Brusseson, he helps him up and he drags him off the battlefield into the woods. Now, Thorre the Hound is leading a kind of mopping up party to kill all the survivors.

But they manage 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 little bit fairy.

This feels a bit fairy tale to me, Tom. I don't know.
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 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 church in london yeah so roganval 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, 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 also 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 Harold and Roggenwald 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. Hello, I'm William Durimple.
And I'm Anita Arnond. And we are the hosts of Empire, also from Goalhanger.
And we're here to tell you about our recent mini-series 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.
Neighbours 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 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 ink-hole 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 you get a real sense of while stood in a tailor's on Savile Row is that historically clothes were made with love and care so that they would last for a very long time indeed. And I think it's a shame in today's age of fast fashion that it is hard to come by clothes that stand the test of time.
But Tom, honestly, you don't have to go to the lengths of getting a bespoke suit tailor-made to own clothes that are made with that same sense of love and pride. There are very few companies left that have that real focus on quality and longevity, but one of them is Asket.
They work almost exclusively with organic and natural materials milled in Italy and Portugal and made in factories built on generations of craftsmanship. Every product is worn for months by the two founders, stress testing every stitch and seam before it's approved for production.
And as a result, they have just

one single permanent collection. It's around 50 garments offered in three lengths for every regular size that are meant to be around forever.
And there are no discounts ever. If you don't need anything, don't buy.
Have a look at the collection yourself. Visit asket.com.
hello welcome back 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 Rognavold have taken ship from the Swedish coast into the freezing waters of the Baltic they have their rangers 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 a couple of episodes about this in the early days of 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, Gardarike, 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 rogenwald would have crossed the Gulf of Finland to roughly near modern St.
Petersburg, and then they'd have taken the River Naeva 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 Storaja 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 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, you know, 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. Harald goes to Novgorod, 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 ways on the marshes and whatnot then they cross again with their canoes probably lake ilman 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 wouldn't have been a Restless History tour vibe, would it? No. And then at last, you know, 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 to legend it had been founded centuries earlier by three Slavic brothers and then taken over by Vikings called Askold and Deer 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 Volodymyr 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 issue of a Viking polity that is becoming so influenced by the Christian power on its doorstep.
Yeah. Historians at this point are debating, are they still Scandinavian? Yeah.
They're adopting the language. So Yaroslav, he is of Viking right his name is 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 um 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 you'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,

Thank you. 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 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 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 Roggenvald go in to see Yaroslav. He's now in his 50s.
He's probably, as I said, the son of Grand Prince Volodymyr 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.
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 polled 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 dnaipa or one of the great rivers and they're screaming abuse at. And they're the first to call him the lame.
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 viking roman and slav slavic name his wife is the daughter of the swedish king ingigerd 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, 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 modeled on the original in Constantinople. And we are told by King Harold's saga, he gave Harold and Roggenwald 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 kiev and 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 scowls his kind of poets, his praise singers. So there's a guy called Theodulf 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 mercily. But staining the snow's red.
Exactly. And then the other one is they were definitely thought of people called the Petronegs.
Oh, they're terrifying. They're like steppe nomads, aren't they, from Central Asia? They're 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 the uh what the rus will do is they will transport their troops along the rivers and then go and fight these guys and try to avoid fighting them in an open step ground because they're the petcheneggs are unbeatable with their cavalry so they'll try to draw them into the woods and fight them there there's all kinds of stuff in the the saga saying Harold loves this and he's absolutely brilliant at it. Another one of his skulls, a guy called Bolverk, wrote these lines about Harold.
Kind of looking back later on, he said, Our brave king is to the Rusland's 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 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 idun fadlan that if you became one of the king's companions you would sort of feast with him 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's 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 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, Elisaveta.
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 saint sophia in kiev but it's quite i mean some of the accounts i've read people say oh she's obviously very serious person pale skinned and all this kind of thing i'm like this is obviously generic orthodox image you can't really interpret anything from this but we know from the sagas harold 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 the yaroslavs yeah 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 miklag 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 Caesar's golden city. Exactly.
So, this city, Myclegard, 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 Zaporozhsia 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 the combination of Greek fire and icon intervention.
They paraded with icons with magic powers. Not magic powers, I should say.
Divine powers. Indeed.
Supernatural. And seen them off.
So the historian Kat Jarman has a book called River Kings. You read that book, Tom? read that book tom about following 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 so yes skins i think they're called exactly that 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 bath houses 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 Haccia 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 she's very clever she's incredibly vain she's always sort of taking strange potions and yeah 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 apr April 1034 so just before Harold arrives in Constantinople the emperor's officials Romanus's 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 Orphanotrophus

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.
And he is heading not for the palace, well, not for the center of the 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 elite warriors aren't they yeah they are a bodyguard established in88, at the point when Volodymyr the Great of Kiev had decided to embrace Christianity and to do this marriage deal with the emperors. And Volodymyr 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.
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 Haccia Sophia. And there's a bit of graffiti that says Half Dan.
In other words, a guardsman guarding the imperial family would have written basically Half Dan 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 armor in rectangular little plates rather like step nomad kind of armor and do you think when they go back to scandinavia they're baggy silk trousers 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 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.
course remember we had Eleanor Baraclough yeah 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 than 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 violence i like to think it 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 will be able to go back to Kiev, a rich man.
He'll be able to marry 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 Northbright that's what he chooses and so tom he's joined the varangian guard and the stage is set for adventure hooray ahead fly sicily armenia jerusalem the murder of an emperor eye gouging and a terrifying encounter with a giant snake but will 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 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 the restless history.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.