14: Sverrir and Descendants, to Hakon the Old
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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.
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