The end of it was, or rather the first abatement, and _beginnings_ of
the end, That, when all this had gone on ever worsening for some forty
years or so, one Sverrir (A.D. 1177), at the head of an armed mob of
poor people called _Birkebeins_, came upon the scene. A strange enough
figure in History, this Sverrir and his Birkebeins! At first a mere
mockery and dismal laughing-stock to the enlightened Norway public.
Nevertheless by unheard-of fighting, hungering, exertion, and endurance,
Sverrir, after ten years of such a death-wrestle against men and things,
got himself accepted as King; and by wonderful expenditure of ingenuity,
common cunning, unctuous Parliamentary Eloquence or almost Popular
Preaching, and (it must be owned) general human faculty and valor
(or value) in the over-clouded and distorted state, did victoriously
continue such. And founded a new Dynasty in Norway, which ended only
with Norway's separate existence, after near three hundred years.
This Sverrir called himself a Son of Harald Wry-Mouth; but was in
reality the son of a poor Comb-maker in some little town of Norway;
nothing heard of Sonship to Wry-Mouth till after good success otherwise.
His Birkebeins (that is to say, _Birchlegs;_ the poor rebellious
wretches having taken to the woods; and been obliged, besides their
intolerable scarcity of food, to thatch their bodies from the cold with
whatever covering could be got, and their legs especially with birch
bark; sad species of fleecy hosiery; whence their nickname),--his
Birkebeins I guess always to have been a kind of Norse _Jacquerie_:
desperate rising of thralls and indigent people, driven mad by their
unendurable sufferings and famishings,--theirs the _deepest_ stratum
of misery, and the densest and heaviest, in this the general misery of
Norway, which had lasted towards the third generation and looked as if
it would last forever:--whereupon they had risen proclaiming, in this
furious dumb manner, unintelligible except to Heaven, that the same
could not, nor would not, be endured any longer! And, by their Sverrir,
strange to say, they did attain a kind of permanent success; and, from
being a dismal laughing-stock in Norway, came to be important, and for
a time all-important there. Their opposition nicknames, "_Baglers_ (from
Bagall, _baculus_, bishop's staff; Bishop Nicholas being chief Leader),"
"_Gold-legs_," and the like obscure terms (for there was still a
considerable course of counter-fighting ahead, and especially of
counter-nicknaming), I take to have meant in Norse prefigurement seven
centuries ago, "bloated Aristocracy," "tyrannous-_Bourgeoisie_,"--till,
in the next century, these rents were closed again!
King Sverrir, not himself bred to comb-making, had, in his fifth year,
gone to an uncle, Bishop in the Faroe Islands; and got some considerable
education from him, with a view to Priesthood on the part of Sverrir.
But, not liking that career, Sverrir had fled and smuggled himself
over to the Birkebeins; who, noticing the learned tongue, and other
miraculous qualities of the man, proposed to make him Captain of them;
and even threatened to kill him if he would not accept,--which thus at
the sword's point, as Sverrir says, he was obliged to do. It was after
this that he thought of becoming son of Wry-Mouth and other higher
things.
His Birkebeins and he had certainly a talent of campaigning which has
hardly ever been equalled. They fought like devils against any odds
of number; and before battle they have been known to march six days
together without food, except, perhaps, the inner barks of trees, and in
such clothing and shoeing as mere birch bark:--at one time, somewhere in
the Dovrefjeld, there was serious counsel held among them whether
they should not all, as one man, leap down into the frozen gulfs and
precipices, or at once massacre one another wholly, and so finish. Of
their conduct in battle, fiercer than that of _Baresarks_, where was
there ever seen the parallel? In truth they are a dim strange object to
one, in that black time; wondrously bringing light into it withal; and
proved to be, under such unexpected circumstances, the beginning of
better days!
Of Sverrir's public speeches there still exist authentic specimens;
wonderful indeed, and much characteristic of such a Sverrir. A
comb-maker King, evidently meaning several good and solid things;
and effecting them too, athwart such an element of Norwegian
chaos-come-again. His descendants and successors were a comparatively
respectable kin. The last and greatest of them I shall mention is Hakon
VII., or Hakon the Old; whose fame is still lively among us, from the
Battle of Largs at least.