The Last Viking

THE LAST VIKING

The Viking era in European history may be said to run very roughly from about 775 A. D., when the Norse longships suddenly burst on a startled world that had only the vaguest idea that Scandinavia even existed, until 1066 and the Battle of Stamford Bridge. The last true Viking chieftain and one of the most colorful characters in Viking history was King Harald Hardraada of Norway.

In their pagan days the Norse practiced polygamy, which was one reason for the overcrowding which produced so many land-hungry and adventurous young men ready to go sailing off in the dragon ships. In the ninth century Harald Fairhair was a minor Norse ruler who had the usual collection of wives, but there was a singularly lissome young maiden he wished to add to his collection named Ingeborg. But Ingeborg turned him down on the grounds that his kingdom was too small; no doubt she was a kind of Norse Valley Girl type who liked to shop til she dropped and Harald's piece of turf was too small for her expensive tastes. Well, Harald showed her. He spent a number of years conquering all of Norway, and in due course claimed his reward, nailed his hottie and produced a whole dynasty of swashbuckling kings and adventurers who spent the next two hundred years raising all kinds of hell.

Harald Hardraada's tale begins with a great grandson of Harald Fairhair, one Olaf Tryggvason, being baptized as a Christian as part of a settlement arranged with the English, whom Olaf's Vikings had been subjecting to a particularly pulverizing series of raids. [See The Battle of Maldon, Weird Histories passim.] Olaf however not only was acknowledged as leader of the Vikings in northern England, but he also managed to quell enough dissent in Norway to become that country's monarch around 995 A.D.

As a result of this, the throne of king of Norway was then linked to the leadership of at least half of England. When Harald Hardraada (the "hard ruler") finally ascended to the throne, this sparked off one of the final battles between the Vikings and the English.

Harald was the half brother of King Olaf the Stout, a king of Norway who was chased out of his country while trying to violently convert his countrymen to Christianity. Olaf fled to the Viking settlements in Russia, which stretched as far south as Kiev in what is now the Ukraine. These areas had become Christianized, and Olaf raised an army to stage a comeback in Norway. Olaf returned to Norway in 1030, with his 15 year old half brother, Harald, at his side. Together they fought their pagan countrymen but were defeated. Olaf was killed (he was later made a saint by the Christian Church and is to this day patron saint of Norway) and Harald was severely wounded.

The young Harald fled back to Russia, stopping in Kiev to enlist in the army of King Yaroslav, winning great prestige as a soldier. From there he went to Constantinople where he enlisted in the Byzantine emperor's Varangian guard, an elite army unit made up exclusively of Vikings and Rus recruited from the Norse settlements in Christian Russia. He eventually rose to be the commander of this elite military unit. For a decade Harald fought for the Eastern Roman Empire, winning not only great fame but also great wealth and experience as a general. Harald saw an immense amount of the known world as he engaged in campaigns across Asia Minor and the Mediterranean, and it is said that he became fluent in Greek, Latin, Bulgarian, and Arabic, as well as being able to read and write all of those languages. This was quite an accomplishment for any man of that period, never mind a barbarian Northman.

In 1044, he went back to Kiev and married the daughter of King Yaroslav. By 1047, he had