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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Ch. XI (Magnus the Good and others)

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

• 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.

• 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.