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  At that time, regents of Cnut Sweynsson ruled in Denmark, while he himself occupied the throne of England. Foremost among Cnut’s regents was his brother-in-law and bosom friend, Jarl Ulf Sprakaleggsson. Those were bountiful years in Denmark, both on land and at sea, and the commoners’ welfare improved, as always happens when lords of the land remain distant, taking their wars with them. As might be imagined, the noblemen in Uppsala took a dim view of the wealth accumulating in Denmark through peace, and the Swedish peasants began grumbling discontentedly at the harsh treatment they felt they were getting from their tax collectors in peacetime – besides being mobilized to make war on unfamiliar peoples in the eastern part of the world, while the Danes, on the contrary, enjoyed wealth and plenitude. A dangerously unwholesome friendship sprang up between the Swedish and Danish peasants whose lands bordered each other, and some of the Swedes’ leaders declared their willingness to accept the laws of Denmark rather than remain the subjects of the Swedish king.

  Just as Denmark’s wealth grew in the absence of kings, however, so did the populace of Norway suffer ever-increasing hardship under the rule of King Olaf Haraldsson the Stout. Every penny in the land went toward keeping his army primed and ready against the Norwegian peasants, as well as toward the furtherance of Christianity and the construction of warships.

  After some time, Norway found itself devoid of grain, and many men in that land whose livelihood had previously depended on two goats, now had only one. Others – far more numerous – who had previously gotten by with one goat, now found themselves with none, and were forced to remove to the woods with their broods and gnaw on bark or dig for roots. At this point, Olaf the Stout sent word to his father-in-law, the king in Uppsala, petitioning him for grain and meat, or bright silver to trade with foreign merchants for food. His peasants, he complained, had nothing left with which to feed his army – many had been reduced to beggary and were dependent mainly on Christ’s goodwill for their sustenance. They were now paupers of the Church, which had taken control of much of the best land and property in Norway.

  The Swedes, for their part, rarely had enough grain or meat for themselves, but they did have good mines that supplied plentiful ore. They were better at forging iron than most peoples in the North and always had arms to spare, even when they had nothing to eat. The king in Uppsala sent word back to his son-in-law the Stout that he had neither grain nor meat to hand over to the Norwegians. “But,” he said, “the land lying here next to us has more than enough grain and livestock. It is called Denmark. You pirates must have taken a giant step backwards if you now sit and watch hungrily while other men stuff their own bellies on your doorstep. No one has ever heard of the Norwegians having to beg their bread from Swedes, and we are certainly not about to change that – but I will supply you what you need in weapons and ships in order to drive the wolf from your door.”

  Historians reckon that the beginning of the end of King Olaf the Stout’s reign in Norway was his going to war against the Danes, into which he was duped by his father-in-law, the king of the Swedes.

  Olaf assembles all the ships that he can get his hands on, mans them with peasants who have lost their livelihoods in Norway, gives them whale meat to eat, and sails on a fair wind south to Denmark. Awaiting him there are several ships under the command of Swedish noblemen, sent by the king in Uppsala to reinforce him. No sooner does Olaf the Stout reach Denmark than he falls back into his old Viking habit of pillaging the countryside, slaughtering the sheep and cattle and salting them down. He duly proclaims that his is an army of defenders, come to deliver Denmark from tyranny. The Danes, having been caught entirely off-guard, suffer immense losses of people and livestock before their lords manage to call men to arms throughout the country and engage Olaf’s forces. They send word to King Cnut in England, informing him that an army has come from Norway to free Denmark, and entreating their overlord to respond quickly. Cnut does not tarry, and musters a huge army in no time – all English soldiers. He has aremarkable number of ships, too, huge ones, and so well equipped that a fairer fleet has never set sail against the North. All the ships are painted above the waterline, and many have gilded heads at their prows, and sails striped with blue, red, and green. When their arrival in Øresund is reported, the Swedish king’s ships prepare immediately to sail for home, while Olaf the Stout’s fleet flees in terror toward the Baltic, where many a vessel, being poorly rigged, is lost in storms. Of the ships that seek harbor in Sweden, the Swedes seize those of any worth as payment for old debts, and pillage others. Those that remain unscathed in the harbors, and which no thief or villain has a mind to plunder or dismantle, are trapped there and prevented from returning to Norway by the fact that Cnut’s entire fleet is lying in wait in Øresund. Winter draws on, and Olaf the Stout’s troops remain cooped up in their ships with few provisions of their own, and none provided by the Swedes. In the end, the Norwegian peasants decide that their best hope is to abandon their ships and attempt to journey home on foot, traversing the breadth of Sweden in winter, and the king is persuaded to consent to the expedition. At first, King Olaf has horses to ride, but his troops eat them, compelling the king to march like everyone else, though he has men carry him over gullies and rocky terrain, due to his ungainliness and clumsiness on dry land. The Norwegian troops are often forced to resort to looting, for the Swedes still refuse to assist them, beating them instead like dogs every chance they get, and even enslaving some. It is a long time before this forced march fades from the memories of the peasants who manage to make it home barefoot to Norway.

  Olaf is left with very few men. He is unable to gather new forces to defend his kingdom against the peasants, and has lost his fleet. The peasants harass him so relentlessly that by summer he has no other choice, due to the riots and uprisings throughout the land, than to take to his heels once more and flee with his household by the shortest route out of Norway, eastward over the mountains.

  Now that Olaf Haraldsson the Stout has been ousted from his throne, things go as they so often do for deposed kings: most people lose their love for them – particularly those who once put their faith in them – and so it was with Queen Astrid. Her life seems to her to have taken a cruel turn – clambering over mountains out of Norway, over scree and sharp-edged rocks, her husband banished and disgraced and their young son crying, with no companions apart from a few ribalds whose service Olaf has purchased with silver. Gone too is every other close, trusted friend of King Olaf – the farthest from him now being those who had formerly sung his praises with flowery words and courtly affectations, such as his marshal, Skald Sigvatur of Apavatn. Gone too is the Englishman, Bishop Grímkell of Canterbury, whose life the king had saved on the banks of the Thames, and whom he had made his court bishop, father-confessor, and most intimate friend, in defiance of the episcopal see of Bremen and the Lord Pope himself. All are gone.

  Writers of old have hinted that King Olaf was so loathed by the populace that he was reduced to plundering and robbing to feed himself, his queen, and their son as he made his way out of Norway.

  When Olaf Haraldsson and his ragtag household come down out of the forest lying between Norway and Varmland, envoys of his father-in-law, the king of the Swedes, are there waiting for them, to take his wife Astrid and their son and return with them to Uppsala.

  The king asks: “What will you do with me, the son-in-law of the king of Uppsala?”

  The envoys reply: “You can look after yourself, fool!”

  There at the edge of the forest, King Olaf parts from his queen. Yet he will not give up their son, for he fears that the kinsmen of the boy’s mother will do him harm, so before the queen leaves the mountain, he persuades her to allow him to take the boy with him. Queen Astrid then rides to her kinfolk in Uppsala.

  After begging from door to door in Varmland with his son for a time, King Olaf makes his way to the coast and takes passage for himself and the boy on a merchantman sailing eastward that fall, back to Russia.

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  AT AROUND THE same time, a ship returned from Greenland to Nidaros after a two-year journey. Such a homecoming was always considered great news in Norway, for not all ships returned from voyages to Greenland. Though tusks from whales and walruses might be had there, and these being people’s only source of ivory in the north, merchants were reluctant to visit those parts for fear of sea ice and prolonged storms, which churned up breakers more powerful than anyone had encountered on other seas. When the ship anchored, and its crew members spoke to the first person they met on one of Norway’s rocky reefs, they were told of the changes that had taken place there: King Olaf Haraldsson had been toppled and driven to the East by his enemies, and most of his friends had turned against him.

  This news grieved and distressed the crewmen – to think that they had set sail with the king’s wares two years ago and returned to the same land, yet it was now the land of the king’s enemies. To them, Norway seemed to hang like a necklace that has lost its gemstone – what good was it, though Norway’s meadows blossomed and its forests abounded in leaves, if its people no longer united round its trunk? As so often happens, however, the crew had lost sight of the comforting fact that one man is always replaced by another, and a king by a king – but more importantly, a penny by a penny.

  Word now spread that King Cnut Sweynsson of England had anchored his fleet in Viken, intending to take over custodianship of the Norwegian king’s realm – following the old custom that the kings ruling Denmark should also possess Norway, regardless of whomever else might temporarily raise his banner there. Envoys were dispatched by Cnut to every part of Norway to persuade the nobles to swear oaths of loyalty to him – in return, he offered his vassals more power and loftier titles than ever before, and privileges and honor far beyond what Sigurd Syr had sold them when he traveled round the country with his train of packhorses. The noblemen were promised greater fiefs for their livelihoods and more lenient taxation than before, as well as the full backing of the English army. Convinced that the English fleet was far more capable than King Olaf’s starving servants of thwarting the insolent peasant rabble, the leading men in Norway soon abandoned any reservations they had about submitting to Cnut.

  That evening, curious townsfolk gathered at an inn in Nidaros to hear the sailors’ tales of Greenland and to discover what valuables they had brought back with them. Among the ship’s crew was a man of rather dubious appearance. His cheeks were sunken and haggard, and he was scarred and marred, tattered and tousled, wearing threadbare shoes and clutching a raggedy skin about him. The townsfolk asked who this ragamuffin might be – whether he was a Lapp or a Finn, and why such men did not stay put in Greenland. The crewmen replied that he was an Icelander, and that he had seen places farther to the north than any others – places where it was horrendously cold, and nearly as infinitely dark as the long night of the grave. Trolls had left him on a skerry not far from the Western Settlement in Greenland, and there he had sat beneath a distress flag for six days and nights before the ship’s crew found him. His extremities were nearly frozen, but the crewmen saved his life. Unknown trolls had encountered the man on the coast at Northern Seat and brought him south to that skerry.

  Norwegians have always found it highly laughable how Icelanders trace their ancestry to kings, and now the townspeople of Nidaros ask this newcomer: “What kings did you have for forefathers, Suet-lander?”1

  The ragamuffin replies: “King Olaf Haraldsson’s warriors were my closest kin, and he who had the noblest heart was closest of all.”

  They, in turn, reply: “King Olaf the Stout’s army was made up of none but cowards and moochers, and here in Trøndelag you are better off never speaking the names of firebugs and thieves. It is clear from your arrogance that you are a true Icelander, though worse for wear.”

  The ragamuffin retorts: “We Icelanders are the only men in the North who can neither be forced into submission nor bought.”

  They laugh, saying that it is astonishing to witness a dust devil in calm weather. “How does chopping up suet on the remotest skerry in the world inflate folk so?”

  The ragamuffin says: “It cannot be denied that when Harald Tanglehair set Norway aflame, we betook ourselves west and made ourselves Icelanders. This we did because we had no desire to associate with men who allow themselves to do battle and murder for money. We took no possessions from Norway apart from the lore of skalds, warrior ideals, and tales of ancient kings. To Iceland, we brought Mímir’s head, and Boðn, the vessel of the mead of poetry, yet here you remain, dull-witted, bereft of skalds, and speaking a corrupt language, with no glory of your own making. Norway will never have any glory, apart from what Icelanders bestow on it.”

  The others retort that it is high time to have done with the glory bestowed on Norway by Icelanders. Icelanders had never portrayed Norwegians in poetry or sagas as anything but bullies and crooks, mustered by their rulers to ride roughshod over the populace and trample it underfoot. Icelanders consider none to be men apart from those who kill people en masse. The townsfolk say that that lout with the title of king, Harald Tanglehair, from whom the Icelanders had fled, was not a whit worse than any others the Icelandic skalds had praised to the sky, such as Olaf the Stout.

  A distinguished man steps forth from the host’s table in an inner nook of the inn. He is finely attired, elegantly groomed, black-eyed, and wearing a sword and arm ring. As he draws nearer, the patrons who have been making fun of the Icelander over their mead fall silent.

  The courtly man speaks up: “Good sirs,” he says, “it is my understanding that this man you are teasing is a countryman of mine, and I ask you to regard his sore and battered feet and consider what a difficult road he has traveled. Look, too, at how weathered and furrowed his face is. This man has certainly traveled far longer and harder roads than you. I would hazard that he has experienced a thing or two more than some of you who lie about here among the skerries of Norway, men of little spirit and narrow outlooks. What man are you, Icelander?”

  The ragged old man whom the townsfolk have been mocking rises from the table, clad in a hairshirt beneath hide tatters, his feet swathed in rags and his toes stricken with sores that reveal white bone, and limping on both legs. Several of his fingers have been lost to frostbite, while the others, still whole, are twisted into his palms. His ears are missing as well, and the tip of his nose is blunted. Most of his teeth have come out, his pate is white and bare, and his beard hoary. He has neither weapons nor shield, nor a single possession of any monetary value. Now he rises from his seat before the stately lord, his countryman, who has defended him out of kindness, and states his name and lineage.

  “My name,” says he, “is Þormóður, and I am the son of Bessi, from the Vestfirðir. Some called me Kolbrúnarskáld at Djúp and in the Jökulfirðir, when I was younger.”

  At this disclosure, the nobleman goes to this countryman of his and embraces and kisses him and bids him hearty welcome. “My name is Sigvatur,” he says, “and I am the son of Þórður. My father and I have often extolled the glory of kings, though such a thing passes now, as before, for a fleeting honor. What fate did the Norns spin for you, Þormóður, whose verses every child in Iceland knows? You look to me rather ill-treated by the sisters.”

  “I was the richest farmer in the west,” says the skald, and he smiles. “And I was wed to the noblest woman in Djúp, a Valkyrie in beauty and grace, and by her had two little daughters with the nimblest toes and sweetest laughter in the Vestfirðir. They used to wake me in the morning, one by kissing my feet and the other by pressing her forefinger on the tip of my nose.”

  The royal skald bids the serving-maid bring him and his fellow skald ale, and a salted pork joint, as well. “Tell us freely, Skald Þormóður, of what has been on the lips of many: your journeys beyond Iceland’s shore.”

  The courtier has the sores on the newcomer’s feet cleansed and bandaged. Þormóður starts in on his story, looking down at his feet:

  “It was known to a
ll in Iceland that I swore an oath of brotherhood with the warrior whose like had never before been born in the North. I loved him above all others and he me, though we were not granted the good fortune to remain together long. It was in our pact that nothing but the death of both of us should sever our brotherhood.”

  “I have heard tell of the warrior Þorgeir Hávarsson, but the more I have heard, the less I have understood what sort of man he was,” says Skald Sigvatur.

  Þormóður says: “The sort of man in whose chest laughed a heart that was no bigger than a rowan berry, yet as hard as an acorn.”

  Sigvatur replies: “Such a warrior must truly have had much to commend him. What further proof do you have of his merit apart from his small heart, Þormóður?”

  “That the king,” says Þormóður, “to whom that heart was pledged is the greatest in the North and all the world. This is in fact why he has become my king as well.”

  Sigvatur then says: “I think I have some knowledge of the king to whom you refer. I was his marshal and faithful friend for no less than ten years, and we conversed on many a topic. Yet I do not recall ever having heard the king mention the small heart you describe. Nor does it appear that that heart alone was sufficient to bring victory, either to its owner or to the other to whom its support was pledged: King Olaf. Both have been laid rather low, and some think the sun has not shone brightly on Norway’s mountainsides for some time now.”