The Early Kings of Norway

Summary

The Early Kings of Norway is Thomas Carlyle's compressed retelling of roughly four centuries of Norwegian royal history, from Harald Haarfagr's unification of the country around 860 to Hakon the Old's expedition against Scotland in 1263. Carlyle says in a brief preface that the Icelanders, writing through their long winters, preserved almost everything known of the Norse kings in their sagas, and that Snorri Sturluson (whom he calls Snorro) built his History of the Norse Kings, the Heimskringla, out of those sagas. Carlyle works from Samuel Laing's English translation of Snorri, checked against the Danish history of the German professor F. C. Dahlmann and the Norwegian historian P. A. Munch, and he calls his chapters rough notes hastily thrown together. Sixteen short chapters move king by king. Harald Fairhair vows not to cut or comb his hair until he has subdued the jarls and won the proud Gyda; his conquest turns a patchwork of chieftaincies and local assemblies into a kingdom, and drives restless Norsemen to Iceland, the Scottish isles and Normandy. His son Hakon the Good, fostered at the court of Athelstan in England, tries to bring Christianity into Norway and is forced by heathen chiefs into half-measures at the Yule sacrifice. Hakon Jarl, the last great heathen ruler, dies in a cellar under a pig-house, beheaded by his own slave. The two Olafs are the book's heroes: Olaf Tryggveson, who converts Norway in about two years by preaching backed with force and dies leaping from his ship the Long Serpent at the sea-battle of Svolder; and Olaf the Thick-set, later Saint Olaf, a stern lawgiver driven out by rebellious chiefs and the Danish king Knut, who returns and is killed at Stiklestad, after which Norway reverses its judgment and venerates him. Carlyle keeps turning to England: Ethelred the Unready, the Danegeld, Svein and Knut ruling England, and Harald Hardrada falling at Stamford Bridge in September 1066, days before the Norman landing. Later chapters show the dynasty consuming itself in blindings and murders until it dies out, then follow Sverrir and Hakon the Old to the Battle of Largs. In the Epilogue Carlyle reads the whole story as the birth of human order out of chaos and sets it against modern democracy, quoting Ruskin's demand that a people discern who is best man. The book is short and partisan, and it is lively.

Plot or Argument

• Preface: Icelandic penmanship and Snorri's sagas

  An untitled opening paragraph credits the Icelanders' winter habit of writing for the survival of Norse royal history, praises Snorri Sturluson's saga-history as worthy to rank among the great history-books if well edited, names Dahlmann as Carlyle's chief modern guide, and complains that English histories show next to nothing of the threads linking English and Norse affairs.

• Ch. I-II: Harald Haarfagr unites the jarls; Eric Blood-axe

  Before about 860 Norway had only jarls and local Things. Harald, spurred by Gyda's refusal to marry a mere kinglet, spends about twelve years conquering and some sixty governing, while defeated chiefs settle Iceland, the isles and, under Rolf the Ganger, Normandy. His violent son Eric Blood-axe kills off his brothers and becomes hated.

• Ch. III-V: Hakon the Good, Greyfell, Hakon Jarl

  Hakon, raised as a Christian by Athelstan, is welcomed by the Trondhjem Thing, gives the Gula and Frosta law-codes, and struggles against heathen demands at the Yule feasts; Sigurd Jarl passes off his sign of the cross as Thor's hammer. Mortally wounded by an arrow after a victory over Eric's sons, he is buried in heathen fashion and mourned by friend and enemy. Harald Greyfell and his brothers misrule under their mother Gunhild, and the heathen Hakon Jarl governs long and sinks into tyranny.

• Ch. VI-VIII: Olaf Tryggveson and the Long Serpent

  Olaf, born in flight and sold as a child slave in Estonia, rises through viking service and raids on England, is baptized, returns to overthrow Hakon Jarl, and harrows Norway into outward Christianity, sending the violent priest Thangbrand to Iceland. Betrayed on a voyage to Wendland, he fights the combined fleets of Denmark, Sweden and Jarl Eric at Svolder and leaps overboard. Jarls Eric and Svein then govern, while Carlyle narrates Ethelred's collapse and Svein's and Knut's conquest of England.

• Ch. IX-X: Olaf the Saint

  Olaf Haraldson's viking youth, his recovery of Norway, his breaking of the idol at Gudbrand's Thing in the dales, his severe enforcement of law and Christianity, his exile in Russia under pressure from Knut, and his death at Stiklestad, after which a blind man's sight is said to be restored and Norway turns from rebellion to veneration. Carlyle notes the London churches of St Olave and the derivation of Tooley Street.

• Ch. XI-XII: Magnus the Good, Hardrada, Olaf Kyrre, Sigurd the Crusader

  Olaf's son Magnus is recalled and rules justly; his uncle Harald Hardrada, enriched in Byzantine service, shares and then inherits the throne, invades England with Tostig, and is killed by an arrow at Stamford Bridge. Olaf the Tranquil softens the court; Magnus Barefoot campaigns in the western isles and Ireland; Sigurd goes on crusade to Jerusalem and Constantinople.

• Ch. XIII-XV: Dynastic self-destruction, Sverrir, and Largs

  Harald Gylle blinds and mutilates Magnus, Slembi-diakn murders Gylle, and the rival lines of the Haarfagr kin exterminate one another like a crop of dragon's teeth. Sverrir and his descendants restore order down to Hakon the Old, whose 1263 expedition to the Hebrides ends with storm damage and the fight at Largs, which Norse records barely mention and Scottish ones celebrate.

• Ch. XVI: Epilogue on order and democracy

  After noting that Norway passed under the Calmar Union in 1397, Carlyle meditates on despotism and democracy, praises the Haarfagr kings as Homeric figures seen through Snorri, quotes a long passage from Ruskin's Fors Clavigera against modern liberalism, and wishes for a scholar who would edit Snorri properly with maps and topography.

Characters

• Harald Haarfagr (Fairhair), founding king

  Unifier of Norway who vows not to cut his hair until the jarls are subdued; reigns about seventy years and leaves too many ambitious sons.

• Hakon the Good, Christian king

  Harald's youngest son, fostered by Athelstan in England; a lawgiver whose zeal to Christianize meets heathen resistance and who dies of an arrow wound, mourned by both sides.

• Gunhild, queen mother

  Eric Blood-axe's queen, a schemer whose sons, led by Harald Greyfell, misrule Norway after Hakon's death.

• Hakon Jarl, last heathen ruler

  Able governor who grows tyrannical, revives human sacrifice, and is beheaded by his own slave while hiding under a pig-house.

• Olaf Tryggveson, hero-king and converter

  Former child slave and viking who forces Christianity on Norway and dies at Svolder; to Carlyle the most beautiful man, in body and soul, of the North.

• Olaf Haraldson (Saint Olaf), lawgiver and martyr-king

  The Thick-set king whose severity provokes rebellion and whose death at Stiklestad begins his cult as Norway's patron saint.

• Knut (Canute) the Great, Danish king of England

  Svein's son, ruler of England and Denmark, who uses bribery and the discontented chiefs to drive Olaf from Norway.

• Harald Hardrada, adventurer-king

  Olaf's half-brother, enriched in the Varangian service of Constantinople, killed invading England at Stamford Bridge in 1066.

• Hakon the Old, last king treated

  Thirteenth-century king whose expedition to the western isles ends at Largs in 1263.

• Snorri Sturluson (Snorro), source

  Icelandic author of the Heimskringla, whom Carlyle follows closely and compares to the stitchers of Homer.

Lessons

• A kingdom made out of quarrelling jarls

  Carlyle opens with Norway as a land of jarls and local assemblies, often at feud, and treats Harald's conquest as rough but salutary because it reduced anarchy. The claim deserves careful testing. Students should state his reasoning exactly (order is the first good of a people, and someone must impose it) and then weigh what the narrative itself shows: Harald's sons kill one another, the land empties of proud chiefs fleeing to Iceland, and the dynasty ends in mutual extermination. Order is a real good, and Scripture treats rulers as servants of it; the question is whether Carlyle notices the costs his own sources record.

  • What did the Fylke Things do before Harald, and does Carlyle give them a fair hearing?
  • Which later chapter best tests Carlyle's claim that strong rule is beneficent even under savage forms?
  • How does the flight of chiefs to Iceland help explain why the sagas exist at all?

• Conversion by the harrow and conversion by the cross

  Three kings try to Christianize Norway in three ways. Hakon the Good relies on English priests and his own example and nearly loses his crown at the Yule feasts; Olaf Tryggveson goes over the land with a rough harrow of conversion; Olaf the Saint breaks the idol before Gudbrand's Thing. Carlyle admits that conformity was in form more than substance, but notes that English bishops and preachers followed the soldiers. Students can distinguish the historian's narration from his approval, and set these methods beside the Gospel's own pattern of persuasion and witness.

  • Why does Hakon the Good, the gentlest of the converting kings, accomplish the least?
  • What does Thangbrand's mission to Iceland show about the limits of force?
  • Does the change of heart toward Olaf after Stiklestad suggest that a martyr's death converted Norway more deeply than a king's sword?

• The saga as history: what Snorri can and cannot tell us

  Carlyle is candid about his sources. He corrects Snorri's account of Stamford Bridge against the English chroniclers, reasons from a solar eclipse about the date of Stiklestad, dismisses Adam of Bremen's twelve men's burden of gold as impossible, and notes that Largs is absent from Norse books. He also passes on miracles and enchanted deer-skin coats without much comment. The book is therefore a good place to practice asking how a historian handles a vivid but late source.

  • Find one place where Carlyle corrects a saga and one where he simply repeats it. What standard is he using?
  • Why does Carlyle compare Snorri to Homer in the Epilogue, and is the comparison praise or warning?
  • How should a reader treat the story of the blind beggar healed beside Olaf's body?

• England seen from the North

  Carlyle insists that English histories neglect the Norse threads: Athelstan fostering Hakon, Olaf Tryggveson's treaty with Ethelred at Andover, the Danegeld, Svein and Knut on the English throne, Hardrada at Stamford Bridge, and Hakon the Old at Largs. Reading English history from the deck of a longship shows that the Norman Conquest itself was the work of Rolf the Ganger's descendants and that 1066 began with a Norwegian invasion.

  • List the English kings who appear in the book and what each owed to, or suffered from, the Norsemen.
  • Why does Carlyle call Stamford Bridge a dim business fallen dull to most English minds?
  • How does the story of Tooley Street and the London churches of St Olave show history surviving in place-names?

Context

The book belongs to the Victorian revival of interest in the Norse past, which followed Samuel Laing's translation of the Heimskringla (1844) and fed English and Scottish ideas of a vigorous northern inheritance. Carlyle had already lectured on Odin as the hero as divinity in On Heroes (1840). By the 1870s he was an old man hostile to the extension of the franchise (he had attacked the 1867 Reform Act in Shooting Niagara), and the Epilogue turns medieval Norway into an argument against modern democracy. The events narrated run from about 860 to 1263; Carlyle wrote some six to eight centuries later from printed translations and German and Norwegian scholarship.

Composition

Carlyle's preface describes the book as rough notes drawn from Snorri, aided by Dahlmann's Geschichte von Dännemark (1840-1843), with Munch, Laing, Buchanan and the Saxon Chronicle cited in the footnotes. The text first appeared in 1875 and was issued in book form with Carlyle's essay on the portraits of John Knox; the library text (Project Gutenberg #1932, from volume 19 of the Sterling Edition of the collected works) contains the Norway history only, with footnotes gathered at the end. The Epilogue quotes Ruskin's Fors Clavigera, Letter XIV.

Reception

The book has always been among Carlyle's least read works, overshadowed by The French Revolution and Frederick the Great. It is usually discussed as evidence of his lifelong admiration for the Norse and of the political temper of his last years rather than as original scholarship, since it adds little to Snorri beyond Carlyle's commentary and English cross-references.

Comparisons

• On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

  The first lecture of Heroes (1840) treats Odin and Norse religion as the hero as divinity; thirty-five years later Carlyle tells the history of the Christian kings who displaced that religion, so the two books together show his admiration for the North on both sides of the conversion.

• History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great

  Frederick occupied Carlyle for thirteen years and six volumes of archival labor; the Norway book, written just after, is its opposite in scale and method, a quick paraphrase of one medieval source, yet both test the same thesis that a strong able ruler brings order out of chaos.

• Ecclesiastical History of the English People

  Bede narrates the conversion of the English kingdoms through missionaries, royal councils and miracles three centuries before Olaf Tryggveson; set Edwin's council and Coifi's profaning of the temple at Goodmanham beside Gudbrand's Thing to compare persuasion and compulsion in northern conversions.

• The Story of the Volsungs (Volsunga Saga)

  The Volsunga Saga preserves the heroic legend of the pagan North that the skalds sang in these kings' halls; reading it beside Carlyle shows what the converted kings inherited and what Carlyle meant by Norse heroism.

• Beowulf

  Beowulf presents a Christian poet's view of pagan Scandinavian kings and their feuds; Carlyle presents a Victorian's view of Christian Norwegian kings and theirs, and both writers admire the courage while counting the cost of the blood-feud.

• Macbeth

  Shakespeare's Scotland, with its Norwegian invaders and Sweno's ransom at Saint Colme's Inch, comes from the same world of Norse-Scottish wars that Carlyle closes with at Largs.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The opening paragraph on Icelandic penmanship. Carlyle tells you where every story in the book comes from, and you should keep asking whether a scene sounds like eyewitness memory or like a skald's improvement.
• Hakon the Good at the Yule feasts in Ch. III: the cup signed with the cross, the horse-broth taken through a towel. Notice how Carlyle judges a good king's compromises.
• Olaf Tryggveson's two careers in Ch. VI-VII, first as a child sold into slavery and a viking, then as a converting king, and how both end at Svolder.
• The idol of Gudbrand's dalesmen in Ch. X, which Kolbein smashes while the crowd looks at the sunrise. Ask what Olaf's trick proves and what it does not.
• The Epilogue's turn from the Haarfagr kings to Universal Suffrage and the long Ruskin quotation. Separate what Carlyle has shown from what he asserts.

Key terms and names

Jarl

A Norse earl or regional chieftain. Carlyle calls the pre-Harald jarls kinglets; later jarls such as Sigurd of Lade and Hakon Jarl govern under or against kings.

Thing

An assembly of free farmers that made law and acclaimed kings. Hakon the Good is accepted by the Trondhjem Thing; Olaf the Saint argues with Gudbrand before a Thing in the dales.

Bonder

Carlyle's word for the free landholding farmers who sat in the Things, fought in the levies, and turned against Olaf the Saint at Stiklestad.

Skald

A court poet whose verses preserved battles and kings' deeds; Snorri builds his sagas partly on skaldic verse, and Thangbrand kills two skalds for their lampoons.

Heimskringla

Snorri Sturluson's thirteenth-century history of the Norwegian kings, which Carlyle calls Snorro's History of the Norse Kings and follows chapter by chapter.

Danegeld

The tax raised in England under Ethelred to pay Danish raiders to go away; Carlyle calls it the worst of remedies, good for the day only.

Varangians (Vaeringer)

Norsemen in the Byzantine emperor's guard at Constantinople; Harald Hardrada made his fortune among them before claiming Norway.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What did Gyda demand of Harald, and how did his answer shape the history of Norway and of the lands its chiefs fled to?
2. Comprehension How did Hakon the Good try to introduce Christianity, and what concessions did Sigurd Jarl persuade him to make?
3. Comprehension Who fought against Olaf Tryggveson at Svolder, and how did the battle end?
4. Interpretation Carlyle calls Olaf Tryggveson and Olaf the Saint heroes of almost the highest type, yet records their violence. On what grounds does he admire them, and does the narrative give you reason to share or qualify his admiration?
5. Interpretation Why does Norway turn against Olaf the Saint while he lives and venerate him once he is dead? What does Carlyle's Latin tag about the dead being loved suggest about him as a historian?
6. Interpretation How does Carlyle use the English material (Athelstan, Ethelred, Knut, Stamford Bridge, Largs) to change the way an English reader sees his own history?
7. Big Question Can a faith rightly be spread by a king's command, and what did the Norwegian conversions gain and lose by that method?

Faith Connections

• Romans 13:1-4 (Scripture)

  Paul calls the ruler God's servant for good, bearing the sword against wrongdoers. Carlyle's praise of Harald for diminishing anarchy echoes that charge; the feuding sons and blinding cousins of the later chapters show rulers who used the sword chiefly against one another.

• 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 (Scripture)

  Paul says the weapons of Christian warfare are not carnal but cast down strongholds of the mind. Read it beside Olaf Tryggveson's harrow and Kolbein's club on Gudbrand's idol, and ask which kind of victory each king won.

• Augustine, City of God V.24 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine describes the happy Christian emperor as one who rules justly, is slow to punish and ready to pardon, and fears God more than he loves power. Hakon the Good and Olaf the Saint can be measured against that portrait more fairly than against Carlyle's ideal of the strong man.

• Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.13 (Great Conversation)

  At King Edwin's council a counsellor compares human life to a sparrow flying through a lit hall in winter. Bede's Northumbrian conversion, argued in council, offers a contrast to Gudbrand's Thing, where the argument is ended by a club.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Before Harald, Norway was a land of quarrelling jarls; strong kings, rough as they were, imposed law, unity and in time Christianity; when the royal kin stopped governing and turned on one another, they destroyed themselves; therefore, Carlyle concludes, the story shows human order born out of chaos by the work of able rulers, and modern societies that refuse to ask who is the best man will be governed by the worst.

Rhetorical device: ironic understatement. In Ch. VII Carlyle reports that Thangbrand, after killing three men in Iceland, came home calling the Icelanders a perverse, satirical, and inconvertible people; the missionary's own record is left to judge him.

Debate: Resolved: Olaf the Saint did more for the Christianization of Norway by his death at Stiklestad than Olaf Tryggveson did by his two years of forced conversion.

Memory Work

Till about the Year of Grace 860 there were no kings in Norway, nothing but numerous jarls,--essentially kinglets, each presiding

Writing Prompts

Essay: Choose two of the three converting kings (Hakon the Good, Olaf Tryggveson, Olaf the Saint). Using specific scenes from Ch. III, VII and X, argue which king's method better served the faith he professed, and explain how far Carlyle's own judgment agrees with yours.

Comparison with On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History: In Lecture I of On Heroes Carlyle describes Odin and the Norse religion with sympathy. Compare that lecture with his account of the kings who destroyed the old temples, and argue whether Carlyle's admiration for the North is consistent across the two books.

Medical Lens

The book is not about medicine, but it records how early medieval Scandinavians died of wounds and how mutilation was used as a political weapon. Wounds are fatal from bleeding rather than infection in most accounts (Hakon the Good's arrow under the armpit, Olaf Tryggveson's unexplained bleeding wrist), and the saga tradition preserves anatomically specific details, such as Hardrada's arrow through the windpipe and Olaf's broken thigh. Blinding, as in the cases of Raerik and Magnus, disqualified a rival without the guilt of killing a kinsman; Carlyle treats it as both mercy and horror. The healing of a blind man beside Olaf's body is a saga miracle report, not a clinical record, and belongs to the history of saints' cults.

• Ch. III (Hakon the Good)

  Hakon, hit under the left armpit by a stray arrow, sails toward Alrekstad but stops at Hella, his birthplace, faint from loss of blood, and dies after arranging the succession.

  WAR Wounds Death Dying
• Ch. VI (Olaf Tryggveson)

  Hakon Jarl and his slave hide two sleepless days in a cellar under a pig-house; the slave beheads him while he dozes.

  Death Dying
• Ch. VII (Svolder)

  Olaf hands out fresh swords because the old ones are blunted, and blood is seen running from his wrist from a wound no one can locate, shortly before he leaps overboard.

  WAR Wounds
• Ch. X (Reign of King Olaf the Saint)

  The rival king Raerik, blinded and kept in Olaf's household, makes three attempts to stab him; at Stiklestad Olaf's thigh is broken by an axe before the killing blows, and a blind beggar is said to recover his sight where the body lies.

  Disability Deformity WAR Wounds
• Ch. XI (Magnus the Good and others)

  Harald Hardrada, fighting in berserk fury at Stamford Bridge, is killed by an arrow through the windpipe.

  WAR Wounds Death Dying
• Ch. XIII (Magnus the Blind, Harald Gylle)

  Harald Gylle blinds and mutilates Magnus and confines him in a convent; Magnus is later brought out to serve as a figurehead king.

  Disability Deformity
• Ch. III (end)

  Snorri's report that Hakon the Good was lamented by friends and enemies alike, a saga picture of public mourning for a king.

  Grief

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Draw a genealogical chart of the Haarfagr kin from Harald to Magnus the Blind, marking which kings died in battle, which by treachery, and which in bed, then write a paragraph on what the pattern shows.

• Dialogue

  Write the exchange at the Yule feast between Hakon the Good, Sigurd Jarl and the heathen chiefs, showing Hakon's conscience and Sigurd's peacemaking craft.

• Essay

  Carlyle says Olaf Tryggveson converted Norway in form more than substance, but that bishops and preachers followed. Argue whether the narrative supports calling the conversion a success.

• Fiction

  Retell the battle of Svolder from Einar Tamberskelver's point of view, ending with the broken bow and his answer to the king.

• Classroom

  Make a map of Carlyle's Norse world, from Trondhjem to Iceland, Normandy, York, Andover, Constantinople and Largs, and label one event from the book at each place.

Further Reading

• Heimskringla, Snorri Sturluson

  Carlyle's main source, which he read in Samuel Laing's 1844 translation.

• On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Thomas Carlyle

  Lecture I on Odin is the earlier statement of Carlyle's view of the Norse.

• Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede

  For comparison with the conversion of a northern kingdom.

• Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, James Anthony Froude

  Covers Carlyle's last years, when this book was written.