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Fall asleep inside history. A calm sleep podcast that takes a single quiet night from the past, a medieval village, ancient Rome, a knight's whole life, and lets you sleep inside it. A real disclosed voice, sources in every episode, and no mid roll ads. New episodes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Part of the Gildenmyth family. More at kingdomsatdusk.com.
Hi, I'm David. Welcome to a Tale. Once a week on this channel we tell a true story from history, the kind I stay up too late reading about, told slow enough to fall asleep to. Tonight it is the story of Harald Hardrada, the last of the great Viking kings, a man who lived about three ordinary lifetimes inside one. He fought his way across the whole known world, and I will tell you right at the start that at the very end he does not come home. But I promise you the story is a warm one anyway, and everything you will hear is drawn from the old sources, which are listed below. There are no ads waiting to wake you. So settle in, get warm, and let an old story keep you company. Goodnight.
Close your eyes now, if you like. This is a story, and stories ask nothing of you except that you lie still and let them happen.
And before we begin it, let me give you the ending, so that you can hold it the whole way through, the way you hold a rail on a dark stair. This is one of the great restless lives of all history. A boy who walked out of a lost battle and kept walking, all the way to the greatest city on earth. A stranger who rose to command the emperor's own bodyguard, and carried home more gold than the north had ever seen, and bought himself a crown with it. And it does not end quietly in a bed. So let me tell you where all of that goes now, and then nothing along the way will be able to frighten you.
The boy in this story is about fifteen years old when we meet him, standing at the edge of a battle in the cold north where his own half brother, a king, is going to die. He lives. He wears the crown of Norway for twenty years, hard and bright, the last true Viking to sit a throne. And at the very end, an old man of about fifty, still hungry, he sails for one more crown, the crown of England, and in a green English valley on a warm September day he does not get it. He falls there, in a battle by a little bridge, and the histories have said ever since that the long age of the Vikings, three hundred years of sails on the horizon, ends more or less in the moment he falls. He is the last of them. He is also, by a wide margin, the man who lived the largest life of any king of his whole century.
So hold that. He does not come home from the last voyage. But he was never really a man the story could make you fear for, because fear was the one thing he never seems to have carried, and by the time he sails for England he has already outrun death so many times, in so many countries, that his falling at the end feels less like a defeat and more like a very long day reaching its evening. You know the harbor now, even though the ship, this once, is lost within sight of it. Let it take its time. There is a whole world to cross first, and it is warm, and it is wonderful.
He was born in Norway around the year ten fifteen, a chieftain's son in a country that was only just learning to be one country at all.
You have to understand what Norway was, in that age. Not the calm and settled kingdom on a modern map. It was a long ragged coast of fjords and islands and steep green valleys, each with its own proud families and chieftains and quarrels, and over all of it the newest and most fragile idea in the north, that one man might be king of the whole of it. Harald's family stood close to that idea. His half brother Olaf, older by many years and born of the same mother, was king of Norway when Harald was a boy, and was trying, with a hard hand and a new religion, to pull all those proud valleys under one crown and one faith. Not everyone wanted to be pulled.
So there came a day, in the summer of the year ten thirty, when the quarrel came to a battle. King Olaf had been driven out of Norway by his enemies, the chieftains and the farmers who would not be ruled, and he had gone east and gathered what men he could, and now came back over the mountains to win his kingdom again. And near a farm called Stiklestad, in the green country north of the great fjord, the king's small army met the much larger army of the men who did not want him, and there was a battle.
Harald was about fifteen years old. The saga says he was too young, by the reckoning of the day, to stand in the line at all, and that his brother the king told him to stay back. And the boy answered with a small line of verse, the way heroes do in these old stories, promising that if his arm was too weak to lift a sword he would simply tie it to his hand. Now, hold that scene lightly. Snorri Sturluson, the Icelander who wrote this saga down two hundred years after the battle, loved his heroes, and a boy who answers a king in perfect poetry on the morning of a battle is exactly the sort of thing a great storyteller polishes until it shines. Whether the boy truly spoke those words, we cannot know. But the shape underneath is almost certainly true. The boy was there. He was too young. He fought anyway.
And the battle went the way the ending of this story warned you it might, when the camera comes in close to the people we love. King Olaf, the half brother, fell at Stiklestad. It was the great tragedy of the north, and it did a strange thing afterward. Within a year, the very people who had killed him began to think they had killed a holy man, and Olaf became Saint Olaf, the eternal king of Norway, the most beloved saint of all the north, and his shrine at Nidaros became a place pilgrims walked to for five hundred years. But all of that is later. On the day itself there was only a lost battle, and a dead king, and among the wounded hidden from the field a fifteen year old boy, bleeding, alive, and now, suddenly, with nothing left in Norway but enemies.
Friends carried him away in secret. The saga tells of a lonely farmhouse deep in a forest, a farmer who asked no questions, a long slow healing while the boy's wounds closed and the winter passed. And when he could travel, they took him up over the spine of the mountains, out of Norway altogether, and pointed him east, toward the one direction in the whole world where a boy with a famous dead brother and a sword and nothing else might make a life.
Keep that boy in view, please, the whole long way from here. Because everything that is about to happen, the golden city, the fortune, the crown, is really just the story of that one wounded fifteen year old, walking out of a lost battle, deciding not to be finished. He was not finished for another thirty six years. The rest of tonight is what he did with them.
There was, in that century, a road. Not a road of stone. A road of rivers, and it ran from the cold north all the way down to the warm center of the world, and the Norsemen knew it the way sailors know a current.
You could take a ship, or a boat small enough to carry, and go east across the Baltic Sea, and then up the rivers of the land the Norse called Gardariki, which we call Russia and Ukraine, and where the rivers ran out you dragged your boat overland to the next river, and so, river by river, portage by portage, month by month, you could travel down and down through a vast green world of forests and trading towns until at last you reached the warm inland seas of the south. The Norse had been trading and settling along that road for generations. Where it began in the north there were Viking towns. Where it ended there was the greatest city on earth.
So the young Harald went east, and the first place the road took him was the court of a great prince, Jaroslav, who ruled a wide realm from the city of Kiev on the river Dnieper. And here the saga and the history agree, because this prince was a real and powerful man, married into half the royal houses of Europe, and a natural refuge for a young Norse nobleman on the run. Harald served him, a soldier in the prince's household, learning the trade of war in a warmer and richer country than the one he had left. He was becoming, quietly, what he would be for the next fifteen years, not a king, not a prince, but the most valuable thing a landless young fighting man could become. A professional. A commander of other men. A sword for hire whose name was starting to be worth something.
And there is a thread that begins here, at the court of Kiev, one of the warm ones, and it runs all the way to the end. The prince Jaroslav had a young daughter, a girl named Elisabeth, whom the Norse called Ellisif. Harald, the saga tells us, wished to marry her. And the prince, sensibly, looked at this young man who had a great name and a great sword and no land and no money at all, and said, in effect, not yet. Come back when you are rich. It was not a cruelty. It was simply the arithmetic of the age. But it planted a purpose in the young man, and pointed him further down the river road, toward the one place on earth where a Norseman with a sword could truly make a fortune.
He went south, he and his band of hardened Norse fighting men, down the river road to its very end, to where the last river spilled into the sea, and there, across the water, they saw it.
The Norse had a name for it. They called it Miklagard, which means, simply and perfectly, the Great City. We call it Constantinople, and today it is Istanbul, and in the year Harald first saw it, around ten thirty four, it was, without any argument at all, the largest, richest, and most dazzling city in the entire Christian world.
Let me let you look at it a moment, because Harald did, and it must have stopped his breath, hard young man though he was. Rome had fallen in the west five hundred years before, but here in the east the Roman Empire had simply never ended. It spoke Greek now, and was Christian, and historians call it Byzantium, but its own people never stopped calling themselves Romans, and their emperor was the direct unbroken successor of Augustus and Constantine. And their city was the wonder of the age. Great walls that no enemy had broken in seven hundred years. A harbor full of the ships of the world. Markets of silk and spice and gold. And at the heart of it, the vast domed church of Holy Wisdom, so enormous and so full of light that visitors wrote they could not tell whether they stood on earth or in heaven, and gave up trying to describe it. To a young man out of the fjords, a country of turf houses and wooden halls, this was not a city. It was the center of the world, and he had walked to it from the far edge of everything.
And the Great City had, waiting for exactly such a young man, exactly the thing he needed. The emperors of Constantinople kept a bodyguard, not of their own citizens, whom they did not entirely trust, for citizens had politics and loyalties and cousins with ambitions, but of foreigners, of northern men, huge, fair, ferocious, and, being strangers in the city, loyal to the emperor alone and to no faction in it. They were called the Varangians. The Varangian Guard. And they were, in that century, the most famous and most feared soldiers in the world.
Harald Sigurdsson, of Norway, joined the Varangian Guard. And he was so obviously exactly the sort of man the Guard was made of that he rose in it fast.
Now here I owe you an honest word, because the accuracy promise covers the golden parts too, not only the sad ones. Snorri, writing in Iceland two centuries later, tells Harald's years in the Great City as a string of dazzling adventures, some of them almost certainly folk tales that had drifted onto his hero the way iron filings drift onto a magnet, clever tricks and daring escapes and beautiful empresses. But underneath the shine there is bedrock, and it does not come only from the sagas. There is a Byzantine book, written by a Greek advisor to the emperors, that mentions a leader of the northern guardsmen, a man of royal blood from the far north, and the details fit Harald so well that historians are confident. So this much is not a legend. A real Norwegian prince really did command real Varangians for the real emperors of Constantinople, and really did campaign for them across the warm seas of the south. The rest, the specific daring stories, we will enjoy the way you enjoy a tale told by a grandfather who was, more or less, there. True in the shape, perhaps embroidered in the stitching.
So picture the years now, roughly ten thirty five to ten forty two, the golden middle of this life.
Harald served three emperors in his time in the Great City, for the throne of Byzantium changed hands more than once in those years, and he was there for it. And in their service he sailed and fought across the whole warm heart of the world. He hunted the pirates who preyed on the empire's shipping among the eastern islands. He campaigned in Sicily and in the south of Italy, and the saga tells of him taking one walled town after another, by wit as much as by force. And, the saga says, he went to the Holy Land, to Jerusalem itself, and bathed in the river Jordan as pilgrims did, and this too may well be true, for the empire made a peace in those years that opened the pilgrim roads to the Norse guardsmen.
Let me slow down on one of these, because it shows exactly what sort of man the age believed him to be, and whether or not it happened precisely so, it is true to him. The saga tells of a walled town in Sicily that Harald's men could not take. The walls were too strong, the siege too long. And Harald, watching the little birds that nested in the thatched roofs inside the town fly out each morning to feed and home again each evening, had an idea that was pure cold cleverness. His men caught the birds. To each one they fixed a shaving of pine wood, coated in wax and sulphur, and they lit them, and let the birds go, and the birds did the one thing birds always do. They flew home. Home to their nests, under the dry thatch, all across the town, and the roofs caught, and the town, to save itself, had to open its gates. Now, that exact trick is told about several conquerors long before Harald, a fair sign it is a traveling tale that landed on him. But hear why it landed on him and not some other man. Because everyone who knew Harald agreed this was the kind of thing he would do. Not the strongest arm. The most patient, watchful mind. A man who beat walls by watching birds.
And through all of it, town by town and voyage by voyage, the thing that was really growing was not his fame. It was his fortune.
Because this is how the Varangians were paid, and it is the engine of the whole rest of the story. A guardsman took wages, good wages. But he also took a share of the spoils of every town and every ship, and the commander took the largest share, and beyond even that there was a custom, a marvelous custom, that historians believe was real. When an emperor died, and in those years emperors died often, the Varangian Guard had the right to walk through the imperial palace and help themselves, within reason, to the treasures of it, a grand and licensed sharing out of the old emperor's gold. And Harald was there, commanding, for the deaths of more than one emperor, standing in the treasure rooms of the greatest palace in the world at exactly the moment the doors were, by custom, thrown open. The Norse would say for generations that no man had ever brought so much gold to the northern lands as Harald brought home from the Great City, and for once the legend and the likelihood agree. He was, by the end of his years in the Guard, one of the richest men alive.
And here the arithmetic of the young man at Kiev came due, because now he was rich, and a young woman named Ellisif was waiting at the top of the river road, and a prince named Jaroslav had said, come back when you are rich. Harald was about to make that whole long journey in reverse, up the rivers, back to the north, to collect on a promise and, beyond it, on a crown.
But he did not leave the Great City easily. The saga tells the end of his time there as a dramatic escape, an empress who wished to keep him, a night flight across the harbor with a chain stretched across the water, and Harald ordering his men to drag the ships over the chain itself. It is a wonderful scene, and almost certainly one of Snorri's brightest embroideries. What is sober and sure is only this. After years of extraordinary service, Harald left Constantinople, wealthy beyond the dreams of the country he had come from, and went home the long way, up the rivers, toward the girl and the crown and the whole second half of his life.
He went up the river road, back to the court of Kiev, and this time the arithmetic came out entirely in his favor. The prince Jaroslav received a very different man than the one who had left, a famous commander, a wealthy lord, a name known now from Norway to the Great City. And Harald married Ellisif, the prince's daughter, the marriage he had gone to earn, and the sagas remember her with warmth as his wife and, in time, the mother of his daughters. He had said, in effect, I will make myself worthy of her, and had gone to the ends of the earth and done it, a kept word across fifteen years and half a world. Whatever else Harald was, and he was many hard things, he finished what he set out to do.
He sent much of his fortune ahead for safekeeping, the saga says, and traveled north lighter, back toward the country he had fled as a bleeding boy. Fifteen years had passed. The boy who had been carried wounded out of a lost battle was coming home a legend, with a princess for a wife and more gold than the kings of the north had ever seen. But a crown does not simply lie in the road for a returning man to pick up.
Norway, in the years Harald had been away, had become a saint's kingdom and then somebody else's. After Saint Olaf fell at Stiklestad, the country had for a while been ruled from Denmark, and then the Norwegians had risen and brought home Olaf's young son, a boy named Magnus, and made him their king, and called him Magnus the Good, and by all accounts he deserved the name. He was Harald's nephew, the son of the very half brother who had died at Stiklestad, and he was king of Norway and by then king of Denmark too, young and well loved. So when Harald came north, rich and famous and royal and hungry, he came home not to an empty throne but to a full one, held by his own young kinsman.
This could have been the moment the whole warm story turned cold, uncle against nephew, war in the north, and for a short while it looked as though it might. Harald used his fortune to make himself impossible to ignore, to make the young king understand that his rich and famous uncle could be a very expensive enemy. But it did not, in the end, come to a long war. They came to an agreement instead, one of those arrangements the north was good at. They would share the kingdom, uncle and nephew, king beside king, and Harald would pour half of his great eastern fortune into the joint treasury as the price of his half of the throne. And so, around the year ten forty six, Harald Sigurdsson at last became what the wounded boy at Stiklestad could never have imagined. A king of Norway.
He was king beside his nephew for only a short time, because within a year or two the young Magnus fell sick and died, and the sources say he died peacefully and left Norway to his uncle Harald. And so the sharing ended not in blood but in a sickbed and a will, and Harald Sigurdsson, once a landless boy walking east out of a lost battle, was now, alone and entirely, the king of Norway.
Here the story gives him the name you know him by, and it is worth telling how he earned it, because it tells you the whole shape of the twenty years he now ruled.
The Norse called him Hardradi, put into English as Hardrada, and it means, quite simply, hard ruler, or hard in counsel, the stern one. And it was not, at first, a compliment. It was what the chieftains and the farmers of Norway called him, half in fear and half in grudging respect, because Harald ruled Norway the way he had done everything else in his life, without softness and without letting go.
Remember what Norway was, that ragged coast of proud independent families, each used to going their own way. His sainted half brother Olaf had died trying to bring them to heel. And Harald, who had watched that happen at fifteen, set out to succeed where his brother had failed, and he mostly did, by being harder than any of them. When a district defied him, he brought it low. When a chieftain grew too powerful, Harald made sure he did not stay so. Historians, looking coldly at the record, tend to agree that for all his hardness he was, by the measures of the age, a strong and effective king. He founded a market town at the head of a good fjord that grew into the city of Oslo, the modern capital of Norway, so that a traveler there today walks in a city a Viking who commanded the Varangian Guard laid out. He minted his own coins, some struck from silver he had carried home from the Great City, so that the wealth of Byzantium quite literally circulated in the pockets of Norwegian farmers.
But the name stuck, and it was fair. He was hard. He fought a long, grinding, on and off war for years with the king of Denmark, over the Danish crown he felt was owed him, a war of raids and sea battles up and down the coasts, none of it quite deciding anything, all of it costing a great deal. He won a great sea fight at a river mouth called Nissa, and still it did not win him Denmark, and at last, worn out, both old kings made peace and kept the crowns they had. It was a life at war, even the settled kingly part of it, a restlessness that never quite let him sit still in his own good hall.
And yet, hold the whole man, not only the hard half. This same stern king was, all his life, a maker of poetry. The Norse kings kept poets, skalds, at their courts, and poetry was the great art of the north, and Harald was not just a patron of it but a practitioner, and a good one. The sagas preserve verses they say are his own, made on the deck of a ship or on the eve of a battle. The hard ruler had a poet inside him. The man who beat down chieftains could turn a clean verse. He had crossed the whole world and sat in the greatest church on earth, and some of that width of the world stayed in him, and came out, now and then, as poems. It is worth remembering that the hardest men in these old stories are almost never only hard. There was a great deal of the world folded up inside Harald Hardrada, and he was, by every account, never once boring.
He married again, in the northern fashion of the age, a Norwegian noblewoman named Thora, alongside Ellisif, and between the two of them he had his children, daughters and two sons, Magnus and Olaf, who would rule Norway after him. He held the north in his fist for twenty years. And he might have died in his bed, an old hard king by a cold fjord, and this would already have been one of the largest lives of the century. It would have been enough.
And so it proved. Far across the North Sea, in the year ten sixty six, a great old kingdom lost its king and could not agree on the next one, and the news came north to Harald Hardrada, who was about fifty years old and had, in his long life, taken almost everything a man could take. Almost. There was one more crown in the world large enough to be worth the reaching, and it had just, that winter, come loose.
Let me set the year gently, because it is one of the most famous years in the whole history of the English speaking world, and you have almost certainly heard its number, ten sixty six, even if you have forgotten why.
In the first days of that year, the old king of England, Edward, called the Confessor, a pious and childless man, died in his bed in his new great church at Westminster, and left no son to follow him. And an England without a clear heir was a prize that the ambitious men of Europe circled like ships around a treasure adrift on the sea. Three men, that year, believed the crown of England should be theirs.
The first was an Englishman, the most powerful noble in the kingdom, Harold Godwinson, and when the old king died the great men of England chose him and crowned him at once, so that at the start of the year there was already a King Harold on the English throne. Keep the two names clear in your mind tonight, for the coincidence is one history plays as a cruel joke. Harold, the English king. Harald, our Norwegian one. Two men, almost the same name, both reaching for one crown.
The second man was across the narrow sea in Normandy, a duke named William, who believed the old king had promised the crown to him years before, and who was, that summer, gathering a fleet to come and take it. And it is William, in the end, who wins the year, and becomes William the Conqueror, but that, tonight, is another story, and it is not ours. Ours is the third man.
The third man was Harald Hardrada, king of Norway. His claim was the thinnest of the three, threaded back through old agreements between earlier kings of Norway and Denmark and England, a claim you had to want very badly to believe. But Harald had spent his whole life wanting things very badly and going to get them, and a thin claim had never in his life been a reason to stay home. And there came to him, that summer, a visitor who made the thin claim suddenly seem like an open door.
The visitor was an Englishman named Tostig, the English king's own brother, who had quarreled bitterly with that brother and been driven out of England, and had come north burning to get back what he had lost. He told Harald that England was ripe, that the north would rise for a strong hand, that the new English king was hated in half his kingdom, that a Norwegian fleet had only to appear and the crown would fall into it. He told Harald exactly what a hungry man of fifty most wanted to hear.
And Harald, who had crossed the world once already for a crown and a promise, and who could feel his own great restless life beginning, at last, to run short of years, listened, and believed enough of it, and decided to go. He gathered the largest fleet Norway had ever sent out, the histories say something like three hundred ships, the whole gathered strength of the north, and in the late summer of ten sixty six he put to sea, west across the North Sea, toward England, and the last crown, and the green valley where the story has been telling you all along that it was going to end.
Before he sailed, the sagas say, there were dark dreams among the fleet, a great bird over the ships, a woman on a wolf. It is the sort of thing the sagas add in hindsight, a shadow drawn over the departure once the writers already knew how it came out, and you should not let it darken the picture, because the men in the ships did not know. To them it was the greatest adventure of their lives, sailing behind the most famous warrior alive, toward the richest island in the north, and the sun was out, and the wind was good. Let them have that. The morning of a great voyage is its own kind of happiness, whatever waits at the far end, and they had earned it.
They came to England in September, and at first everything Tostig had promised seemed true.
The great fleet sailed up the eastern coast and into the mouth of a river, into the north of England, toward York, the chief city of the north. And the local English earls gathered what men they could and came out to stop the invasion at a place called Fulford, just outside the city, in the water meadows by the river. And there, on the twentieth of September, Harald Hardrada did what he had done in a dozen countries across fifty years. He won. The saga and the English record agree on it. The northern earls were beaten badly, and the way to York lay open, and the great city, rather than be stormed, came to terms and gave the Norwegian king hostages and its submission. It was a total triumph. The thin claim was becoming a real conquest. Half of Tostig's whole promise had come true in a week. Harald Hardrada stood in the north of England a victor, the greatest kingdom of the north seemingly falling into his hands, exactly as things had all his charmed and reaching life.
I want you to let him stand there a moment, in the low golden September light, at the very top of the wave, a boy from Stiklestad who had seen the Great City and now stood on the edge of a second and greater crown. Because he was, at that instant, as high as he had ever climbed, and he did not know, and could not know, though we do, that the wave was already at its crest, and the next thing that happened was the turn.
For the English king in the south, the other Harold, had not been idle. He had waited on the south coast all summer for the Norman duke, and when the news reached him that a Norwegian army had landed in the north and taken the submission of York, he did a thing that even his enemies remembered with astonishment. He marched his household troops north, the whole long length of England, faster than anyone believed an army could move, four days, perhaps five, gathering men as he went, covering something close to two hundred miles, and he came up on the Norwegians so fast that the first the invaders knew of it was the sight of an army where no army should have been.
And here the story gathers, gently, for its ending, at a place whose name has been carried down eight hundred years for this one day. A crossing of the little river Derwent, a few miles east of York, at a bridge, in a green valley, on a warm and cloudless day. Stamford Bridge.
Now I am going to keep the camera far away, up on the green hillside above the river, because you did not come here tonight for the sharp edges of it. We can see everything that matters from the hill.
The day, the sources agree, was unusually warm for late September, hot even, a bright still day with the sun full on the water. And the thing that undid the Norwegians was, in the end, that warmth and that surprise together. Harald's army was not gathered for a battle. Much of it was scattered, and the day was so hot that many of the warriors had left their heavy mail shirts behind at the ships, miles off, and stood in the meadow in only their tunics, at ease, expecting nothing but the arrival of more hostages from the country round about. And instead, over the rise, in the shimmer of the hot afternoon, came the dust and the glitter of the whole English army, marched two hundred miles in secret, arriving where it could not possibly be.
The saga keeps one image from that first moment that is worth having, because it is so human. Harald, seeing the great cloud of the approaching army and the shine of weapons within it, is said to have asked Tostig, almost quietly, whose army that could be. It is the recognition dawning in that question, the understanding that the hated English king in the south was neither slow nor far away, but here, now, in the field, faster than any man had a right to be. And the saga, which loved its hero, lets him meet it without flinching.
There is a small story the English long remembered from the battle's beginning, the kind of thing that survives when almost everything else about a day is lost. Between the two armies ran the little river, and across it the bridge, and the story says that one single Norse warrior, a giant of a man, planted himself alone on that narrow bridge and held the whole English army back by himself, one man on a plank of wood over a stream, buying his king an hour with nothing but his own body and the narrowness of the crossing. It is the sort of last stand the north loved to remember, one man against a nation, and whether it happened just so or grew in the telling, the English kept it for eight hundred years, which tells you how it struck them. Eventually they got past him, and crossed, and the two armies met at last in the meadow beyond.
And there, in the green valley, on the warm bright day, the wave that had carried Harald Sigurdsson up out of a lost battle at fifteen and across the whole known world and up to the very edge of a second crown, at last, gently, came down.
He fell at Stamford Bridge. The sources say he was struck in the throat by an arrow, out in front as he had always been, fighting, the histories agree, with a great and terrible joy, an old king of about fifty who had never in his whole life learned how to hang back. The saga says he sang a verse, even then, even there, a poet to the last breath. Tostig fell too, not long after, the exile who had brought the whole enterprise north with his burning promises, and the great invasion, so total a triumph five days before, broke apart in the meadow and was over. The English king, the sources say, offered peace even in the middle of the battle, offered his own brother his lands back if he would only stop, and it was refused. When it was done, the Norwegians who were left were given quarter and leave to sail home, and the histories tell the last small quiet fact that shows you the size of what had been lost. They had come with something like three hundred ships. They went home in fewer than thirty. That is all the words the old record spends on it, and it is enough.
Now let me tell you why this particular fall, in this small green valley, has been remembered for a thousand years as the end of something much larger than one king.
For three hundred years before that warm September day, the men of the north had been sailing out. From around the year eight hundred, the sails of the Norse had appeared on the horizons of half the world, from the rivers of Russia to the coasts of France, from Ireland to Iceland to Greenland, and beyond even that, briefly, to the shores of a new world they called Vinland, which was North America, five hundred years before Columbus. They had raided and traded and settled and founded kingdoms and carried their gods and then their new faith across a quarter of the earth. It was a vast, restless, three hundred year outpouring of a single small population of northern farmers and sailors, and historians call the whole of it the Viking Age.
And it was, by the year ten sixty six, already ending, softening, settling. The Norse were becoming Christian kings with settled realms, more like the rest of Europe every year. But the age had one last great figure, one man who still held all of it in a single life, the raiding and the trading and the river roads and the far cities and the reaching for crowns, a man who had personally stood in Constantinople and Kiev and Norway and, at the last, in England, one living thread running through the whole map of the Viking world. And when that man fell at Stamford Bridge, the historians have long agreed, the age fell with him. There would be Norsemen after him, and Norway after him, and even a raid or two. But the great outward tide of three hundred years had gone out for the last time, and Harald Hardrada was the last man in whom it had run at full flood. He is, in almost every history you will ever read, the last Viking. The end of the age, given a face, and it is his.
And there is one more turn, quiet and almost unbearable in its neatness, that the year ten sixty six kept for the very end, and I will give it to you softly, because it is not ours to dwell on but you should know it. The English king, the other Harold, who had marched two hundred miles and won so completely by the little bridge, had only days to enjoy it. For the wind changed in the south, and the Norman duke, William, crossed the narrow sea at last, and the English king had to turn his tired, victorious army straight around and march it back down the whole length of England, and meet a fresh enemy on a hill near a town called Hastings, and there, three weeks after his triumph in the north, he fell in his turn, and England passed to the Normans. So the year took all three of the men who reached for the crown that January, and gave it, in the end, to the one who came last. But Harald Hardrada was gone before that final act, spared the knowing of it, resting already in the green valley, his own vast story complete, needing none of the rest.
They took him home, in the end. Not that year, but afterward, his body was carried back north across the sea he had crossed so boldly, to Norway, to the city of Nidaros, to the north he had held so hard for twenty years, and buried there, in the country of the boy who had walked east out of a lost battle and come home a legend. He lies in the north, where he began. History, in its slow patient way, brought him home after all.
So. Let the story settle now, the way supper settles, the way a great fleet settles at anchor in a quiet harbor with the day's sailing done.
A boy of fifteen is carried, wounded, out of a battle where his brother the king has fallen, and instead of ending, he begins. He heals in a hidden farmhouse in a winter forest, then walks east, down the long river road, further than almost any man of his age will ever go. He serves a prince at Kiev and loves the prince's daughter and is told to come back rich. He reaches the greatest city on earth and stands under the greatest dome in the world and cannot tell earth from heaven. He commands the emperor's guard, and sails the warm seas, and beats a walled town by watching the little birds fly home to their nests, and stands three times in the treasure rooms of the richest palace on earth. He carries a fortune home up the rivers, and marries the girl who waited, and comes back to the cold north a legend, and takes a crown, and holds it hard for twenty years, and lays out a city that stands today, and turns clean verses on the decks of his ships. And then, still reaching, always reaching, he sails west one last time for one last crown, and wins a great battle by a river in the north of England on a hot bright day, and stands for one golden hour at the very top of the whole long climb, and then, gently, from the far green hill where we have been watching all along, comes down, and takes the whole Viking Age down with him into memory, the last of the sea kings, the man who lived three lifetimes in one.
You knew all this before the ship left the harbor. That was the promise. Nothing tonight was allowed to frighten you, and nothing did, because you already held the ending in your hand the whole way across the world, like a rail on a dark stair.
He was, whatever else, never afraid, and never still, and never small. The word they gave him meant hard, and he was, but the truer word for the whole of the life might simply be large. He wanted more of the world than almost anyone has ever wanted, and, for a while, he got it.
Your day is done too. Whatever it held, you crossed it, the way he crossed his seas, one stretch of water at a time, and it has carried you here, to a warm bed at the quiet end of things, the harbor every voyage in the whole age of sails was really always headed for. The fire is low. The wind off the water is far away and cannot reach you. The last of the sea kings is at rest in his northern ground, and has been for nearly a thousand years, and the sea he crossed so many times still comes and goes against that coast, patient, the way the sea is, the way history is, keeping him. He will be there tomorrow, whenever you want the story again.
Sleep now.
Goodnight. History will keep till morning.