3: Hakon the Good
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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."
__________
(4) Dahlmann, ii. 93.
(5) Laing's Snorro, i. 344.
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