Eric Blood-axe, whose practical reign is counted to have begun about
A.D. 930, had by this time, or within a year or so of this time, pretty
much extinguished all his brother kings, and crushed down recalcitrant
spirits, in his violent way; but had naturally become entirely unpopular
in Norway, and filled it with silent discontent and even rage against
him. Hakon Fairhair's last son, the little foster-child of Athelstan in
England, who had been baptized and carefully educated, was come to
his fourteenth or fifteenth year at his father's death; a very
shining youth, as Athelstan saw with just pleasure. So soon as the few
preliminary preparations had been settled, Hakon, furnished with a ship
or two by Athelstan, suddenly appeared in Norway got acknowledged by
the Peasant Thing in Trondhjem "the news of which flew over Norway, like
fire through dried grass," says an old chronicler. So that Eric, with
his Queen Gunhild, and seven small children, had to run; no other shift
for Eric. They went to the Orkneys first of all, then to England, and
he "got Northumberland as earldom," I vaguely hear, from Athelstan.
But Eric soon died, and his queen, with her children, went back to
the Orkneys in search of refuge or help; to little purpose there or
elsewhere. From Orkney she went to Denmark, where Harald Blue-tooth took
her poor eldest boy as foster-child; but I fear did not very faithfully
keep that promise. The Danes had been robbing extensively during the
late tumults in Norway; this the Christian Hakon, now established there,
paid in kind, and the two countries were at war; so that Gunhild's
little boy was a welcome card in the hand of Blue-tooth.
Hakon proved a brilliant and successful king; regulated many things,
public law among others (_Gule-Thing_ Law, _Frost-Thing_ Law: these
are little codes of his accepted by their respective Things, and had a
salutary effect in their time); with prompt dexterity he drove back the
Blue-tooth foster-son invasions every time they came; and on the whole
gained for himself the name of Hakon the Good. These Danish invasions
were a frequent source of trouble to him, but his greatest and continual
trouble was that of extirpating heathen idolatry from Norway, and
introducing the Christian Evangel in its stead. His transcendent anxiety
to achieve this salutary enterprise was all along his grand difficulty
and stumbling-block; the heathen opposition to it being also rooted
and great. Bishops and priests from England Hakon had, preaching and
baptizing what they could, but making only slow progress; much too slow
for Hakon's zeal. On the other hand, every Yule-tide, when the chief
heathen were assembled in his own palace on their grand sacrificial
festival, there was great pressure put upon Hakon, as to sprinkling
with horse-blood, drinking Yule-beer, eating horse-flesh, and the other
distressing rites; the whole of which Hakon abhorred, and with all
his steadfastness strove to reject utterly. Sigurd, Jarl of Lade
(Trondhjem), a liberal heathen, not openly a Christian, was ever a wise
counsellor and conciliator in such affairs; and proved of great help
to Hakon. Once, for example, there having risen at a Yule-feast, loud,
almost stormful demand that Hakon, like a true man and brother, should
drink Yule-beer with them in their sacred hightide, Sigurd persuaded him
to comply, for peace's sake, at least, in form. Hakon took the cup in
his left hand (excellent hot _beer_), and with his right cut the sign
of the cross above it, then drank a draught. "Yes; but what is this with
the king's right hand?" cried the company. "Don't you see?" answered
shifty Sigurd; "he makes the sign of Thor's hammer before drinking!"
which quenched the matter for the time.
Horse-flesh, horse-broth, and the horse ingredient generally, Hakon all
but inexorably declined. By Sigurd's pressing exhortation and entreaty,
he did once take a kettle of horsebroth by the handle, with a good deal
of linen-quilt or towel interposed, and did open his lips for what of
steam could insinuate itself. At another time he consented to a particle
of horse-liver, intending privately, I guess, to keep it outside the
gullet, and smuggle it away without swallowing; but farther than this
not even Sigurd could persuade him to go. At the Things held in regard
to this matter Hakon's success was always incomplete; now and then it
was plain failure, and Hakon had to draw back till a better time. Here
is one specimen of the response he got on such an occasion; curious
specimen, withal, of antique parliamentary eloquence from an
Anti-Christian Thing.
At a Thing of all the Fylkes of Trondhjem, Thing held at Froste in that
region, King Hakon, with all the eloquence he had, signified that it was
imperatively necessary that all Bonders and sub-Bonders should become
Christians, and believe in one God, Christ the Son of Mary; renouncing
entirely blood sacrifices and heathen idols; should keep every seventh
day holy, abstain from labor that day, and even from food, devoting the
day to fasting and sacred meditation. Whereupon, by way of universal
answer, arose a confused universal murmur of entire dissent. "Take away
from us our old belief, and also our time for labor!" murmured they in
angry astonishment; "how can even the land be got tilled in that way?"
"We cannot work if we don't get food," said the hand laborers and
slaves. "It lies in King Hakon's blood," remarked others; "his father
and all his kindred were apt to be stingy about food, though liberal
enough with money." At length, one Osbjorn (or Bear of the Asen or Gods,
what we now call Osborne), one Osbjorn of Medalhusin Gulathal,
stept forward, and said, in a distinct manner, "We Bonders (peasant
proprietors) thought, King Hakon, when thou heldest thy first Thing-day
here in Trondhjem, and we took thee for our king, and received our
hereditary lands from thee again that we had got heaven itself. But
now we know not how it is, whether we have won freedom, or whether thou
intendest anew to make us slaves, with this wonderful proposal that we
should renounce our faith, which our fathers before us have held, and
all our ancestors as well, first in the age of burial by burning, and
now in that of earth burial; and yet these departed ones were much our
superiors, and their faith, too, has brought prosperity to us. Thee, at
the same time, we have loved so much that we raised thee to manage all
the laws of the land, and speak as their voice to us all. And even now
it is our will and the vote of all Bonders to keep that paction which
thou gavest us here on the Thing at Froste, and to maintain thee as king
so long as any of us Bonders who are here upon the Thing has life left,
provided thou, king, wilt go fairly to work, and demand of us only such
things as are not impossible. But if thou wilt fix upon this thing with
so great obstinacy, and employ force and power, in that case, we Bonders
have taken the resolution, all of us, to fall away from thee, and to
take for ourselves another head, who will so behave that we may enjoy
in freedom the belief which is agreeable to us. Now shalt thou, king,
choose one of these two courses before the Thing disperse." "Whereupon,"
adds the Chronicle, "all the Bonders raised a mighty shout, 'Yes,
we will have it so, as has been said.'" So that Jarl Sigurd had to
intervene, and King Hakon to choose for the moment the milder branch of
the alternative. [4] At other Things Hakon was more or less successful.
All his days, by such methods as there were, he kept pressing forward
with this great enterprise; and on the whole did thoroughly shake
asunder the old edifice of heathendom, and fairly introduce some
foundation for the new and better rule of faith and life among his
people. Sigurd, Jarl of Lade, his wise counsellor in all these matters,
is also a man worthy of notice.
Hakon's arrangements against the continual invasions of Eric's sons,
with Danish Blue-tooth backing them, were manifold, and for a long time
successful. He appointed, after consultation and consent in the various
Things, so many war-ships, fully manned and ready, to be furnished
instantly on the King's demand by each province or fjord; watch-fires,
on fit places, from hill to hill all along the coast, were to be
carefully set up, carefully maintained in readiness, and kindled on any
alarm of war. By such methods Blue-tooth and Co.'s invasions were for a
long while triumphantly, and even rapidly, one and all of them, beaten
back, till at length they seemed as if intending to cease altogether,
and leave Hakon alone of them. But such was not their issue after all.
The sons of Eric had only abated under constant discouragement, had not
finally left off from what seemed their one great feasibility in
life. Gunhild, their mother, was still with them: a most contriving,
fierce-minded, irreconcilable woman, diligent and urgent on them, in
season and out of season; and as for King Blue-tooth, he was at all
times ready to help, with his good-will at least.
That of the alarm-fires on Hakon's part was found troublesome by his
people; sometimes it was even hurtful and provoking (lighting your
alarm-fires and rousing the whole coast and population, when it was
nothing but some paltry viking with a couple of ships); in short, the
alarm-signal system fell into disuse, and good King Hakon himself,
in the first place, paid the penalty. It is counted, by the latest
commentators, to have been about A.D. 961, sixteenth or seventeenth year
of Hakon's pious, valiant, and worthy reign. Being at a feast one day,
with many guests, on the Island of Stord, sudden announcement came
to him that ships from the south were approaching in quantity, and
evidently ships of war. This was the biggest of all the Blue-tooth
foster-son invasions; and it was fatal to Hakon the Good that night.
Eyvind the Skaldaspillir (annihilator of all other Skalds), in his famed
_Hakon's Song_, gives account, and, still more pertinently, the always
practical Snorro. Danes in great multitude, six to one, as people
afterwards computed, springing swiftly to land, and ranking themselves;
Hakon, nevertheless, at once deciding not to take to his ships and
run, but to fight there, one to six; fighting, accordingly, in his
most splendid manner, and at last gloriously prevailing; routing and
scattering back to their ships and flight homeward these six-to-one
Danes. "During the struggle of the fight," says Snorro, "he was very
conspicuous among other men; and while the sun shone, his bright gilded
helmet glanced, and thereby many weapons were directed at him. One of
his henchmen, Eyvind Finnson (_i.e._ Skaldaspillir, the poet), took a
hat, and put it over the king's helmet. Now, among the hostile first
leaders were two uncles of the Ericsons, brothers of Gunhild, great
champions both; Skreya, the elder of them, on the disappearance of the
glittering helmet, shouted boastfully, 'Does the king of the Norsemen
hide himself, then, or has he fled? Where now is the golden helmet?' And
so saying, Skreya, and his brother Alf with him, pushed on like fools or
madmen. The king said, 'Come on in that way, and you shall find the king
of the Norsemen.'" And in a short space of time braggart Skreya did
come up, swinging his sword, and made a cut at the king; but Thoralf the
Strong, an Icelander, who fought at the king's side, dashed his shield
so hard against Skreya, that he tottered with the shock. On the same
instant the king takes his sword "quernbiter" (able to cut _querns_
or millstones) with both hands, and hews Skreya through helm and head,
cleaving him down to the shoulders. Thoralf also slew Alf. That was what
they got by such over-hasty search for the king of the Norsemen. [5]
Snorro considers the fall of these two champion uncles as the crisis of
the fight; the Danish force being much disheartened by such a sight, and
King Hakon now pressing on so hard that all men gave way before him,
the battle on the Ericson part became a whirl of recoil; and in a few
minutes more a torrent of mere flight and haste to get on board their
ships, and put to sea again; in which operation many of them were
drowned, says Snorro; survivors making instant sail for Denmark in that
sad condition.
This seems to have been King Hakon's finest battle, and the most
conspicuous of his victories, due not a little to his own grand
qualities shown on the occasion. But, alas! it was his last also. He was
still zealously directing the chase of that mad Danish flight, or whirl
of recoil towards their ships, when an arrow, shot Most likely at a
venture, hit him under the left armpit; and this proved his death.
He was helped into his ship, and made sail for Alrekstad, where his
chief residence in those parts was; but had to stop at a smaller place
of his (which had been his mother's, and where he himself was born)--a
place called Hella (the Flat Rock), still known as "Hakon's Hella,"
faint from loss of blood, and crushed down as he had never before felt.
Having no son and only one daughter, he appointed these invasive sons
of Eric to be sent for, and if he died to become king; but to "spare his
friends and kindred." "If a longer life be granted me," he said, "I will
go out of this land to Christian men, and do penance for what I have
committed against God. But if I die in the country of the heathen, let
me have such burial as you yourselves think fittest." These are his
last recorded words. And in heathen fashion he was buried, and besung by
Eyvind and the Skalds, though himself a zealously Christian king. Hakon
the _Good_; so one still finds him worthy of being called. The sorrow on
Hakon's death, Snorro tells us, was so great and universal, "that he
was lamented both by friends and enemies; and they said that never again
would Norway see such a king."