TABLE II PETTY VIKING KINGS

TABLE II
II
PETTY VIKING KINGS
YNGLINGS
SKIÖLDUNGS
i Egil or Ongenþeow,
Ongenþeow Peace King
at Uppsala, b. c.450, k. c515
Halfdan of Denmak, who usurped the throne of
Sweden from Egil’s father Aun the Old
ii Ohthere or Ottar
Onela (Áli, Ole) = daughter
Peace King at Uppsala, ass. c530 usurped throne c530
Eanmund, k.
by uncle Áli
Thore - Halga or Helgi Hrothgar = Wealhþeow, kinswoman
K. of Denmark
of Beowulf
iii
iii Eadgils or Athils , put on throne with = Yrsa, raped by father
the aid of his kinsman Beowulf; later k.
by his horse c.575
Hreðric Hroðmund ? Valdar,
King of Skåne
Kings of East Anglia?
iv Eysteinn or Östen
Peace King, burned alive c.600
v Ingvar or Yngvar Harra,
Peace King, k. c615
Hrólfr or Hroðulf Kraki,
King of Denmark, famed in his
own saga, k. by his half-elven half-sister
Skuld, born of another of Halga’s rapes
vi Anund,
Anund Peace King, k. by avalanche c.640
vii Ingjald illråde (‘Ill-ruler’), King of Uppsala = Gauthild, daughter of
unified Sweden through arson, burned himself c.650 King Algaut of the Geats
Hild of the = Harald the Old, King of Skåne
Goths
or Scania (d. c.615)
Åsa = Gudrød, King of of Skåne
Solveig, dau. of = vii
viii Olaf I trételgja (‘Tree-Hewer’),
Guldtand of
King of Vermaland in Norway,
murdered by Åsa 640s
sacrificed by his people in a famine, c.710
Soleyar
Haldan the Valiant
murdered 640s
Ivar Vidfamne (‘Wide-fathom’), King at Lethra,
Ingjald Olofsson ix Hálfdan I hvítbeinn (‘White Leg’), = Åsa, dau. of King K. of Skåne, drove Ynglings from Uppsala c.655,
K. of Vermaland K. of the Upplanders in Norway,
Eystein of Oppland built huge empire, say sagas; drowned himself c.695
704?-?
Aud the Deep-Minded = Radbard
Hild, heiress of Eric Agnarsson = x Eysteinn Hálfdansson (‘The Fart’), King in Raumariké,
K.of Rus
King in Vestfold
(736?-780?) drowned by a witch
Randver
Sigurd I, K. at Lethra and Uppsala, d. 812
xi Hálfdan II hinn mildi (‘The Mild’), King = Liv, dau. of Dag Harold K. of Haithabu;
in Vestfold
K. of Vestmar
many descendents
Kraka = Ragnar Lodbrok, K. at Lethra
(1) Alfhild, dau. of Alfarin = xii Gudrød the Hunter = (2) Asa, dau. of K. of
Sigurd II Snake-eye
K. of Alfheim
King in Vestfold
Agder (k. by Gudrød)
and Raumariké, k. 810
Helgi the Dagling= Aslaug Björn Ironside,
by his wife’s page
K. at Uppsala
Sigurd Hjort, K. of Ringerike
Olaf II Geirstad-Alf (1) Ragnhild, dau. of K. = xiii
iii Halfdan
Halfdan the Black = (2) Ragnhild
Kings of Sweden to
K. of Vestfold
Harald of Sogn
K. of Agder, Sogn, &c.
the present day
k. sleighing c863
Ragnvald the Mountain-High,
K. of Vestfold, orderedYnglingatal;
d. c.850; his son K. of Dublin?
Harald, K. of
Sogn, d. young
xiv
xiv Harald Hårfagre
(Fairhair) Halvdansson
see Table III
Ivarr
Eysteinn Glumra
b. 810
Ragnvald
the Wise
Rollo (857-929), conquered Neustria and
reigned as first Count of Normandy; his
dynasty conquered England in 1066
2
Notes on Table II
PART I:
KINGS IN SWEDEN
Y
OU WILL RECALL FROM
TABLE I
that
the
Ynglingas, from whom
we derive our descent, were a
dynasty, we might almost say
family firm, of sacral kings,
reigning over the Svear or
Svealand (Sweden Proper, the
core of the nation) from their
temple at Uppsala.
In Scandinavian prehistory these kings would have
been hereditarily martyred,
success-ively sacrificed to the
unspeakable goddss Nerthus at midiwnter, so that their blood might sustain the new
harvest.
A rival dynasty, the Skiöldungas, meanwhile reigned over the Danes, and were
sacrificed for the Danes, at their own shrine of Letha. Our family history is a long
carnage of war and occasional inter-marriage with the hateful Skiöldungas. (I have
marked their cursèd bloodline in mournful purple on our family tree.)
By about the time of Christ, Scandinavian religion had mellowed, shifting its
devotion from Nerthus to Odin, wise, treacherous, self-sacrificing god of war. The
institution of sacral kingship mellowed as well. Although the blót or sacrificial revel
still called for carnage, shedding the blood of many male animals and humans, the
king was usually not among the victims.
The genealogy of these half-divine king-priests was obviously a matter of
public interest, and was preserved in folk-memory. The Norse sagas, composed very
much later (in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries), recorded these genealogies,
tracing the Ynglingas back to, of course, Odin.
The upper reaches of the Yngling line are doubtful, but modern scholarship
concedes that the genealogy becomes veridical about the beginning of the sixth
century; Ongenþeow, then, also know as Angantyr or Egil, is the first of our
forefathers who is evidently a figure in history, not legend.
3
T
– that is, the earliest event generally
accepted by kill-joy scholarship to be historical, not legendary, and to have
concerned a direct ancestor – occured in the year 515, give or take only a year or two
(but no more). In A.D. 515 our elderly great43-grandfather, Ongenþeow (remembering
þ is th), King at Uppsala, after a not very distinguished reign, was killed.
We not only know what happened to our forefather, we know the approximate
date and the exact place. We even have a painfully vivid picture of his death
preserved for us in poetry.
Ongenþeow or Egil, son of Aun the Old, was, history declares, not very warlike
– at least, not for an early Viking. He had a messy reign. Aukun’s son was Egil
surnamed Vendelkråke [or Vendelcrow, which means, dwelling at Vendel, the royal
estate], whose own bondman, Tunne, drove him from his kingdom; and though a
HE FIRST INCIDENT IN OUR FAMILY HISTORY
mere servant he joined in eight civil combats with his master and won supremacy in
all of them, but in a ninth he was finally defeated and killed. Shortly afterwards
however the monarch was gored and slaughtered. Thus records the twelfth century
Historia Norwegiæ, a Latin summary of our much older family epic, the Ynglingatal.
How did Ongenþeow get his death? By a ferocious bull, say the Scandinavian
sources. Plausible enough! It cannot be easy or safe for an elderly man to set about the
public, ritual killing of a bull, a large bull in lusty youth. Perhaps at Uppsala, where
the sacral kings were sometime sacrificed in legendary times, and were sacrificed
every nine years a little further back into prehistory, Ongenþeow sacrificed himself,
as it were, by mere regressive blunder.
Snorri Sturluson’s Yngling saga (1225), his adaptation of the Ynglingatal, rather
relishes our family’s ur-event. Sás of austr, Snorri says, áðan hafði /
brúna hörg / of borinn lengi, / en skíðlauss / Skilfinga nið / hœfis
hjörr / til hjarta stóð, which being interpreted means:
The hero’s breast met the full brunt
Of the wild bull’s shaggy front;
The hero’s heart’s asunder torn
By the fell Jotun’s spear-like horn.
– a Jötunn being a sort of idiot giant in Scandinavian mythology.
The story of the fatal bull thus hangs together (and here is a
convincing nineteenth century sketch of the event). We could
believe it.
However, as it happens, the death of Ongenþeow is more vividly attested by
Anglo-Saxon sources, and there is a convincing reason to think the Scanndianvaians
are wrong about this first certain event in our family history, while the English are
right. For they English have on their side the witness of the first great literature in
our language – Beowulf.
4
B
EOWULF! Living in sixth-century Scandinavia was like
living in Proust’s Paris or Shakespeare’s London or
Homer’s Troy: everyone’s doings got jotted down in a
notebook, and then sucked into the literary canon. Beowulf
has trapped our ancestors in immortal amber.
In the early sixth century, while the barbaric Geats
and Swedes and Danes were pursuing their immemorial wars,
various barbaric cousin-nations, the Jutes and Angles and
Saxons, were sailing across the North Sea and over-running
Britannia, that abandoned Roman province. The invaders
took with them the memory of local politics, especially the
feud between our bracing Yngling ancestors and the vile
Skiöldungas (Scyldings, as they called them in the AngloSaxon or Old English tongue).
Some centuries later, a Christian English poet turned these
traditions into an epic, Beowulf, which is the national epic of
England, even though it is set back in the old country, the Baltic
lands.
The plot of the poem is as follows. A noble Swede of the
House of Wyfling (and a cousin of ours, we expect and very much
hope) was exiled to Geatland, where he married the daughter of the
Geatish king, Hrethel. Their son, Beowulf, has grown up as a sort of
noble free-lance.
In the course of the poem, Beowulf sails (above) to the GarDenas, the ‘Spear Danes’, to rescue Hrothgar, their Skiöldung king.
Hrothgar lives, of course, at splendid Lethra, called Heriot in the
poem, with his elegant wife, our great45-aunt, and also, it appears,
Beowulf’s aunt, Wealhþeow (left). Heriot is haunted by Grendel, a
creature impervous to swords which creeps into the hall at night and
devours Hrothgar’s men. Beowulf kills Grendel by tearing off an arm,
and then, more bravely still, dives into a lake and kills Grendel’s
monster-mother in an underwater cavern.1
1 Lynd Ward’s illustration, ‘Geats Sail for Denmark’, in Ellery Leonard’s translation of Beowulf; Virgil Burnett’s
illustration, ‘Wealhtheow carried the cup’, in Kevin Crossley-Holland’s translation. Francis Barton Gummere’s
translation, which I quote, is online at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/bwulf11.txt
5
D
ESPITE ITS MONSTERS,
Beowulf has remarkable historical heft. When the poem
can be checked against archæology or independent documents, it is vindicated.
And Beowulf has a vivid and credible account of how Ongenþeow died.
(It is of course a great grief to us that Beowulf – being composed in England,
conquered by Skiöldung or Scylding barbarians – is on the side of our dynastic enemy,
the Skiöldungas, and is written so much from their obnoxious point of view.)
According to the poem, when King Hrethel of Geatland, Beowulf’s
grandfather, died, he was succeeded by his son, Beowulf’s uncle, Hæþcyn (never
forgetting that þ or thorn is simply th). The Geats were involved in a war with the
Swedes, who were led by our great43-grandfather, King Ongenþeow. Nature compells
us to cheer for the Yngling side, but Beowulf would have fought with the horrid
Skiöldungas, if he hadn’t been off in Denmark exterminating the Grendel family.
In this war, Hæþcyn captured Ongenþeow’s treasure and his nameless wife,
our great43-grandmother, and their two sons, Ohthere, our great42-grandfather, and
Onela, locking them up at a hill-fort called Hrefnesholt (almost certainly the modern
Ramshult, in the island of Orust). Ongenþeow arrived at Hrefnesholt with his army,
and in the ensuing battle managed to rescue his (and our) family, kill Hæþcyn, and
besiege the surving Geats. This is how Beowulf puts it:
Soon [Ongenþeow, yaay] the sage old sire of Ohtere [yaay],
ancient and awful, gave answering blow;
the sea-king [Hæþcyn, boo] he slew, and his spouse [Granny43, yaay!] redeemed,
his good wife rescued, though robbed of her gold [damn it],
mother of Ohtere [yaay] and Onela [boo, in fact; just wait].
Then he [Ongenþeow, yaay] followed his foes, who fled before him
sore beset and stole their way,
bereft of a ruler, to Ravenswood [that is, Hrefnesholt or Ramshult].
With his host he besieged there what swords had left,
the weary and wounded; woes he threatened
the whole night through to that hard-pressed throng:
some with the morrow his sword should kill,
some should go to the gallows-tree
for rapture of ravens
– as would serve them right. Unfortunately Hæþcyn’s young brother Hygelac, arrived
to drive off the Swedes, a day late.
But rescue came
with dawn of day for those desperate men
when they heard the horn of Hygelac sound,
tones of his trumpet
6
This Hygelac, promptly hailed by the Geats as their new king, carried the war into
the peaceful Swedish homeland. Hot after Grandfather Ongenþeow came
with slaughter for Swedes the standards of Hygelac
o’er peaceful plains in pride advancing,
till Hrethelings fought in the fenced town
– which seems to mean that the Geats, heirs of King Hrethel, stormed into Uppsala
itself. Was our great forebear, the elderly Swedish king, dismayed? He was not,
although he had to face two Geatish warriors at once, the brothers Wulf and Eofor.
This is the sort of caddishness we have come to expect from Geats.
Then Ongentheow with edge of sword,
the hoary-bearded, was held at bay,
and the folk-king there was forced to suffer
Eofor’s anger. In ire, at the king
Wulf Wonreding with weapon struck;
and the chieftain’s blood, for that blow, in streams
flowed ‘neath his hair.
A lesser Viking cheiftain might have thrown in the towel, but not our ancestor. No
fear felt he, declares Beowulf,
but straightway repaid
in better bargain that bitter stroke
and faced his foe with fell intent.
Nor swift enough was the son of Wonred [that is, horrid little Wulf]
answer to render the aged chief;
too soon on his head the helm was cloven;
blood-bedecked he bowed to earth,
and fell adown;
‘Dead!’, we cry ‘One up to the Ynglings! Cue raven-rapture.’ But no, alas:
not doomed was he yet,
and well he waxed, though the wound was sore.
Then the hardy Hygelac-thane, [that is, Eofor, thane or vassal of King Hygelac]
when his brother fell, with broad brand smote,
giants’ sword crashing through giants’-helm
across the shield-wall: sank the king,
his folk’s old herdsman, fatally hurt….
‘Gramps!’ we shout. ‘Say it isn’t so!’ But it is. Our father in the 44th degree is dead.
7
Eofor took from Ongentheow,
earl from other, the iron-breastplate,
hard sword hilted, and helmet too,
and the hoar-chief’s harness to Hygelac carried,
who took the trappings, and truly promised
rich fee ‘mid folk, – and fulfilled it so.
For that grim strife gave the Geatish lord,
Hrethel’s offspring [that is, Hygelac], when home he came,
to Eofor and Wulf a wealth of treasure.
It was a jolly moment to arrive at the Geatish capital. Young Beowulf was back from
killing monsters in Denmark just as Eofor and Wulf returned from cleaving the heads
of old gentlemen in Sweden. King Hygelac gave Eofor his daughter in marriage as a
reward for slicing Grandfather’s skull, and there was a jolly time in the halls of the
Viking Geats. Grrr.
T
ENGLISH LITERATURE, in the form of Beowulf, reports of our first
historic ancestor’s death. We have to accept its authority, and acknowledge that
Ongenþeow was butchered by Beowulf’s chums, rather than dying of mere
ecclesiastical clumsiness at his own temple and amidst his own subjects.
Moreover, the following four philological point has been made by certain
Teutonics scholars (their grisly names were Schück and Nerman). Snorri’spoem says
that flæming, the sword, farra trjónu, of its farra snout, jötuns eykr. the giant (that is,
giant beast) coloured, á Agli rauð on Egil red. Farra meant bull for Icelandic, and so
Snorri writes that the giant beast coloured the sword of its bull-snout red on Egil.
But in Old Swedish, from which his information must ultimately come, farra
did not mean bull but boar (it’s the origin of the English word farrow, a piglet). It was
a boar that reddened its sword on the king; and the name Eofor means boar. So
Snorri’s sources might well have said, with the usual dense epic flourishes, that Eofor
killed Egil-Ongeþeow.
Snorri, although he misunderstood, does not contradict what Beowulf says of
our dynastc primal scene. He reports the same event, a little mangled by poetry.
HAT IS WHAT
H
where saga and epic poem and history”, remarks
Moncreiffe. Many of the Danes, Geats and Swedes in Beowulf are familiar not
only from the Ynglingatal, but from independent records.
Soon after his thanes had killed poor Grandfather death, young King Hygelac
is said by the poem to have sailed off on a Viking raid into Frisia, where he got
himself killed. Beowulf tells us of the hand-to-hand battle, in which Beowulf fought:
ERE WE ARE IN THE REALM
where Hygelac fell,
when the ruler of Geats in rush of battle,
8
lord of his folk, in the Frisian land,
son of Hrethel, by sword-draughts died,
by brands down-beaten.
We are pleased to hear of it, and hope that Wulf and Eofor were numbered among
the Geats lost in that carnage at Rhine-mouth. On the other hand, our spite does not
extend as far as the hero himself, and he are relieved to hear that Beowulf escaped
through strength of himself and his swimming power,
though alone, and his arms were laden with thirty
coats of mail, when he came to the sea!
On the other side of the great divide between civilisation and barbarism, St.
Gregory of Tours records that the Merovingians defeated a horrid pagan fleet at the
mouth of the Rhine, killing their ‘King Chlochilaicus’ – which is how the hairy name
Hygelac must have sounded to a last-of-the-Romans like Gregory; or perhaps
Chlochilaicus was his way of saying Mumbo-jumbo or Oonga-boonga. In any case,
from Gregory’s annals we can date this sea-battle to 516, give or take a year but no
more. That is important exactitude, because it allows us to date the death of
Ongenþeow, back in the Baltic, the first fixed event in our family history, to A.D. 515.
In any case we are relived to see our ancestor’s bane sail off into the sphere of
Latin historiography and Catholic arms, and there to pay for his crime with death.
W
HAT? We
Anglo-Saxons angular, sexless –
often have ogled in our ordinary orderliness
at Vikings in narratives vaunting, naughty Norsemen,
sea-wolves, wanderers sucking up women and weregild
proof against priesthood
prone to pole-axe policemen
vexingly valiant
fixated on fame in Valhalla.
Kent is a kinder coast Cornwall is closer to Christendom,
nearer Mare Nostrum native meer, nest of man’s needy mind.
Dear Troy of the heroes Hector, the tamer of horses
dear Palestine
pale of the prophets and Paracelete
Rome, august such are our rightful ancestors.
Matilda is an English maid everywhere easy, mild:
Oscar too
opened his orbs first on Tuscany.
Loathe are we listening to these weird loppings of war-lords,
Fane we would follow forebears of whimsical folly.
But even with Egil butchered evil brutes burden us ….
9
O
HTHERE OR OTTAR
(generation
generation ii of our historical descent) became king after Egil
was killed. Ohthere is not admired by the poem Beowulf, for, with his brother
Onela, he rekindled the terrible Swedish-Geatish wars, which as we have seen were
no picnic.
There was strife and struggle ‘twixt Swede and Geat
o’er the width of waters; war arose,
hard battle-horror, when Hrethel [the Geatish king, you’ll recall] died,
and Ongentheow’s offspring grew strife-keen ….
Two Danish jarls or earls assassinated Ohthere, and he was, according to the sagas,
interred in a barrow. According to the sagas, and according to archaelogy. In 1915
archæologists excavated a ertain artificial hillock in
Vendel parish, which had always been known as
Ottarshögen or Ohthere’s Barrow (at left; sixteen
feet high, 130 long). Sure enough, our ancestor was
found lying there, surrounded by royal treasure,
and wearing as a sort of talisman round his neck an
imperial Roman coin. The last Western Cæsar had
been fading away about the time Ohthere was
being born, and the poor wild chieftain perhaps felt
nostalgic for the Empire, as we all do. Anyway,
here is an ancestral grave, an actual image of all
that remains on earth of an ancestor of ours.
After Ohthere’s assassination, his brother
Onela or Ole usurped the throne. Onela, our great43-uncle, was, according to Beowulf
(line 62) married to the sister of King Hrthogar of Denmark – a Skiöldung! Such
alliances were never a good idea for Ynglingas. Onela’s nephews Eanmund and
Eadgils fled to the Geats, and to their hapless young king, Hygelac’s son Heardred.
(When Beowulf got back from the disaster at Rhine-mouth, Hygelac’s widow Hygd
offered him the Geatish throne, fearing that her very young son Heardred wasn’t up
to the task. But Beowulf honourably propped him up.) Headred gave Eanmund and
Eadgils sanctuary, but fierce old Onela attacked; Eanmund was killed, and King
Headred as well. So Beowulf at last became King of Geatland, and set about restoring
Eadgils, our great42-grandfather, to the Swedish throne.
This is a much happier turn of events than the wars between Beowulf’s people
and Egil-Ongeþeow. We don’t relish beginning our family history as baddies,
antagonists to the first hero of English literature. It is nicer to remember that Eadgilse
wearð fea-sceaftum feondi, To friendless Eadgils he [Beowulf] proved friend. With
Beowulf’s help, at the Battle on the Ice of Lake Vänern, the usurper Onela was killed,
and Eadgils became King of the Swedes. Huzzah.
10
E
ADGILS OR ADILS (generation
generation ii
iii), Beowulf’s protégé and chum, introduces
melodrama into our family story.
In the Ynglinga saga Snorri tells us that King Eadgils led a raid on the Saxons
(who lived round the base of Jutland, but were in the process of migrating to Britain
and becoming the English). The Saxon king and queen were away, so the Swedes had
a fine time sacking the palace at lesiure, finding a beautiful young woman, Yrsa,
whom Eadgils carried off to his ships to rape. Back in Uppsala, Yrsa reigned as Eadgils’
queen. On a Danish counter-raid some time later a certain Halga, of the antagonistic
Skiöldung dynasty (son of the Halfdan who exiled Aun the Old),
carried away Yrsa from Uppsala, raping her in turn.
This Halga was a monstrous ravager of women, even by
Viking standards; he once assaulted a she-elf, who produced a
sinister child named Skuld. On Yrsa Halga begat a son named
Hrólfr or Hroðulf.
Some years later, the Saxon queen divulged that the girl
taken from her palace by the Swedes, Ysra, was Halga’s own
daughter, born of his rape of a slave-girl. Horrified (right), Ysra
hurried back to Eadgils and Sweden, abandoning her son Hrólfr,
that spawn of incest.
Other sagas have even more lurid versions of these family
misadventures, involving burning courtiers alive at feasts, even more serial rapes,
trolls disguised as boars, a hero who drinks himself to death in joy, and a dog that is
made king of Denmark. It seems to us that the incest is quite vivid enough. Poor Yrsa
is after all our great44-grandmother, and we wish to draw a line somewhere.
We remain disgusted with Halga, our Skiöldung great44- and great45grandfather. He seems to us typical of that whole frightful family.
Hrólfr, Yrsa’s son, our ancestral uncle and cousin, has a cameo in Beowulf as
Hrothgar’s nephew and trusted lieutenant, although Hrothgar’s Queen, Beowulf’s
auntie Wealhþeow, suspects his intentions towards her own sons, Hreðric and
Hroðmund (lines 1181-1188). And right she was; when we next catch sight of Hrólfr,
in his very own saga, Hrólfs saga kraka, a poem full of specious praise of the
Skiöldungas, Hreðric and Hroðmund (our ancestral first cousins) have vapourised and
he, Hrólfr, is King of Denmark.2
But were the boys simply done in? Are Wyflings Wuffings? Are Wuffings Scylings? Are Wyflings Ynglings?
These are pressing questions for us. The Kings of East Anglia were of the House of Wuffa, self-reportedly
descended from an eponymous King Wuffa (d. c.578), whose great-grandfather was a certain Hroðmund – and it is
suggested that this Hroðmund was the Danish princeling, who got away and lit out for the territories, which is to
say Britain, the wild west of sixth-century Scandinavia. It would be nice to think so. Alternatively, King Wuffa
might be a mistake, and the Wuffings might actually be a branch of the Wyflings, Beowulf’s own dynasty. That
would be nice too, especially if Beowulf, Swedish by descent, were of our own Swedish royal house. Of course the
2
11
In the sagas, Hrólfr is the inveterate enemy of Eadgils – who is, through the
convoluting workings of incest, both his step-father and brother-in-law. Eadgils is
represented as rich and greedy. But given the state of Skiöldung-Yngling relations in
this era, we chose to take such insults cum grano salis. Incidentally, Hrólfr was done
in by the semi-elf Skuld, whom Halga’s endless rapine had made both his half-sister
and aunt.
Great44-gandfather Eadgils was a great horseman, and was particularly fond of
a stallion named Raven, which he had taken from wicked uncle Onela or Ole. From
Raven he bred a fierce horse also named Raven, which he once rode round the shrine
of the goddess Disa at her blót. Raven Junior threw him, and Eadgils landed head-first
on stone. Church-going was a dangerous business for our ancestors. Snorri says
Eadgils
Fell from his steed – his clotted brains
Lie mixed with mire on Upsal’s plains.
Such death (grim Fate has willed it so)
Has struck down Ole’s deadly foe.
Eadgils’ burial mound can still be seen at Uppsala (and in this snap, on the left; the
mound on the right is said to be Egils’). They dug up Eadgils in 1874, and found “a
powerful man” – nice to learn our forebears weren’t squirts – lying “on a bear skin
with two dogs and rich grave offerings. These remains include a Frankish sword
adorned with gold and garnets and a tafl game with Roman pawns of ivory. He was
dressed in a costly suit made of Frankish cloth with golden threads, and he wore a
belt with a costly buckle. There were four cameos from the Middle East which were
probably part of a casket.”3 Tafl was a board-game for those too dim to play chess.4 He
are disappointed to learn great44-grandfather Eadgils played tafl.
East Anglian kings themselves didn’t admit to being either Danes or Swedes; they asserted they were Angles, and
moreover Scyldings, sprung from Odin’s son.
See our Table I, and Sam Newton’s Wuffingas page http://www.wuffings.co.uk/Wuffingas/WuffingPage.html
3 Wikipedia article on ‘Beowulf’, quoting Birger Nerman, Det svenska rikets uppkomst (1925).
4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl
12
E
YSTEINN, Eadgils’
son and heir (gen
generation
generation iv
iv), died miserably: a ‘sea-king’, that is,
pirate, named Sölve, surrounded Eysteinn’s hall at night, while he was at feast,
and burned it. This Sölve, who cannot have been of divine blood, tyrannised the
Swedes for a while, but then they killed him, and restored the Ynglings in the person
of Eysteinn’s son:
I
NGVAR, OR
YNGVAR HARRA (generation
generation v), a competent warrior-king who fought
the Danes to a standstill and then was slaughtered in Estonia, taking the war home
to those Baltic pirates.
A
(BRØT-ANUNDR OR BRAUT-ÖNUNDR) (generation
generation vi)
vi is an attractive figure.
Sweden was at peace in his time, the harvest were good, and Anund started
laying out roads throughout his rugged kingdom.
On one of these peaceful expeditions he was crushed in a landslide, which just
goes to show.
NUND
I
Anund’s son and successor(generation
generation vii),
vii is not an attractive figure. With
Ingjald the long duel between the beastly Skiöldungs and our own Yngling family
came to a climax, and I’m sorry to have to report we lost – and lost everything.
It was all the fault of CHILD PSYCHOLOGY. Because Ingjald was a milksop as a
boy, he was fed a roasted wolf’s heart. Do not try this remedy at home: it turned little
Ingjald into a psychopath.
Sweden had been devolving into petty kingships, and when Ingjald succeeded
his father (about A.D. 640), he was furiously resolved to reverse the centripetal trend.
He built a hall as grand as the
ancient family pile in Uppsala,
named it the Hall of the Seven
Kings, and invited his six lesser
royal colleagues, most of them
kinsmen, to his enthronement
feast. Ingjald slipped out half way
through dinner and had the hall
burned to the ground. Later he
incinerated two more feasting
kings, and later still murdered
five more by conventional means,
thus unifying the realm of
Sweden, but earning opprobrium.
Ingjald’s daughter Åsa was
of his own kidney – or perhaps he
NGJALD,
13
had fed her roast wolf-heart too. Ingjald married her to a Skiöldung, hiss, Guðröðr or
(to express the name less hairily) Gudrød or (to make it polite) Godfrey, the King of
Skåne or Scania, which is to say the southern-most part of what is now Swedish, but
remained Danish until the seventeenth century, and is still said to be oddly Danish in
spiritual flavour. This Gudrød was probably the grandson of Wealhþeow and
Hrothgar, Beowulf’s adoptive father. In any case, the Yngling Åsa persuaded the
Skiöldung Gudrød to kill his own brother Halfdan the Valiant; she then murdered
Gudrød, and fled back to her father. For Ynglingas, marriage with Skiöldungas is even
bloodier than war with Skiöldungas.
The Vikings were not soft people, but King Ingjald and Åsa had gone too far.
Unifying Sweden was all very well, but there had been too many atrocities, which
earned Ingjald the cognomen illråde or Ill-Ruler – mild abuse, we might think; in any
case, Ingjald wrecked the reputation of the Ynglings among the Swedes.
A Skiöldung, Ivar Vidfamne (‘Wide-fathom’), Halfdan the Valiant’s vengeful
son, led a revolt against the bloody Ingjald and his bloodier daughter. Their enemies
closed in on them at the royal hall at Ræning. Ingjald lit a fire from his own hearth,
and perished terribly (right) hand-in-hand with Åsa.
A century and a half later St Alcuin, Charlemagne’s York-born ideas-man, was
outraged to learn that the monks of Lindisfarne were wasting their time listening to
the pagan sagas. ‘Quid enim Hinieldus cum Christo? What has Ingjald to do with
Christ?’ he demanded (A.D. 797). We might reply that the sagas were the memories of
their race, of course, and if monks didn’t preserve them, not one would. Anyway,
Christian monks of the Dark Ages were not abashed by such reproaches; they did
keep for us the story of our appalling forebear Ingjald and our fatal ancestral aunt.5
5
Unless Alcuin didn’t mean our Ingjald, though, but the other one, the Heaðobard (no one knows
what a Heaðobard was, but it might be much like a Langobard). The Heaðobard Ingjald is mentioned in
Beowulf; it seems he is fated to overthrow the Skiöldungas of Denmark and burn Heriot-Letha. St
Alcuin, of course, would have affected not to be able to tell them apart.
14
PART II: WESTWARD WANDERERS
G
Yngling!
The incineration of Ingjald and Åsa, which occurred in about 650, was
not a temporary setback for our line, but permanent overthrow. The Ynglings
were never restored at Uppsala. Ivar and his descendents have held Sweden pretty
much ever since.
So what was our family to do? A lesser dynasty might have faded away after
the fire at Ræning, dwindling into being civilised courtiers of the new dynasty, the
antipathetic Skiöldungas. But the Ynglingas had divine blood in their veins, or
believed they had, which is almost the same, and were indomitable. Rather than be so
tamed, they decided to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest”.
With the death of Ingjald the westering theme enters the story of our family,
which stepped from Uppsala to West Götaland, from West Götaland to Nerike, from
Nerike to the Norwegian mountains, from the mountains to the Atlantic fjords, where
they paused for nearly a thousand years; then from the fjords in huge leaps to North
Dakota, and so on to Seattle. Lately an orientalising habit has set in: we have
regressed eastward from Seattle to New York, to London, Florence, and India …. But
for thirteen centuries after Ræning burning, our lineage tended toward the sunset.
O
O WEST, young
LOF,
Ill-Ruler’s son (generation
generation viii),
viii was brought up by his mother’s family in
West Götaland, off on the edge of the Geatish realm, and so escaped the debacle
at Ræning. With his family dead and his dynasty overturned, he gathered whoever
would follow him, and left Sweden.
The wild west in those days, the mid-seventh century,
was the mountainous waste over toward the Fold – what is now
called the Oslofjord. Thither went Olof, established himself in
Nerike. The Swedes did not leave him in peace, but drove them
further west, through the mountain forests of Kilsbergen, past
Lake Vänern (where Beowulf had restored Olo’s great-greatgreat-grandfather at the icy battle), to the estuary of Klarälven,
which was mere wilderness. But Olof and his followers did not
perish: they cleared the forests and built a new province or
petty-kingdom, Värmland or Vermland. The Swedes gave King
Olof the patronising nick-name, Trätälja or Tree-feller. He is a
frontiersman, our family’s first near-American.
Like America, Vermland suffocated from its own success
at attracting immigrants, Swedes eager to flee the harsh tyranny of Ivar Vidfamne.
The frontier province of Vermland could not feed them all; the settlers accused Olof
of being to blame for the famine, because he had neglected sacrificing to the gods, or
15
simply because he was their sacred king, appointed to blame and sacrifice. The rebels
surrounded his wooden palace on the northern shore of Lake Vänern and fired it. So
by flame he went to father Odin. Archæology has found that one of the hillforts on
the lake, Villkorsberget, was burnt about this time (680); that is presumably where
our great35-grandfather died.
H
I, HVITBEINN (‘WHITE-LEG’) (generation
generation ix)
ix was Olof’s second son. He
and his elder brother, Ingjald Olofsson, were brought up further west in the
petty Norwegian kingdom of Soleyar, where there mother had been a princess and
their great-uncle was king. The rebels who killed Olof came pouring over the Ed
Forest and slaughtered the King of Soleyar; they found Halfdan among their prisoners,
and shamelessly elected him the new king. He was in fact the classic lucky younger
brother, marrying Åsa, heiress of the little kingdoms of
Oppland and Hedmark, conquering Hadeland and part of
Vestfold, inheriting Värmland when his elder brother
died.
These kingdomlettes may not sound impressive to
us, but everything’s a matter of scale: Halfdan was no
doubt almost an emperor by his own lights, and indeed
by the lights of the Ynglinga saga (right). He died, full of
ages and riches and diminutive royalty, and lies under a
mound in Skiringssal.
E
ALFDAN
(generation
generation x), Halfdan White-leg’s son and
successor, was nicknamed Halfdansson, Eystein the
Fart. His wife was Hild, daughter and heiress of the
kingdom of Vestfold. This Eystein was a rollicking seaking or Viking raider; one day in the 780s he made the
mistake of attacking another petty king called Skjöld,
who was an accomplished warlock. Skjöld stood on the
beach and waved his cloak ar Eystein’s approaching ships.
A wind blew up, a boom swung round, Eystein was knocked into the water and
drowned. No other ancestor has died quite like this. They fished him out and buried
him in a barrow.
YSTEIN
16
H
II,
generation xi),
II (generation
xi Eystein the Fart’s son and heir, was called Hálfdan
hinn mildi, which is Old Norse for ‘the Mild’. If you cannot imagine a mild
Viking, you are right. The nickname seems to come from his habits with spoil: “He
was a great warrior who had been long on Viking cruises, and had collected great
property”, records the Yngligna saga, and was generous with gold, although
irritatingly mean or ‘mild’ as regards rations. Perhaps he wanted to keep his Vikings
hungry and angry. He managed to survive all those ‘cruises’ and die in bed in about
the year 800.
To the south,
the Viking’s cousins
the Franks, who had
set out from the same
Baltic
lands
four
centuries before to
destroy the Roman
Empire, had by now
become the new,
revived,
Western
Roman
Empire.
Charlemagne was the
Catholic
champion;
civilisation
was
regaining its nerve
after the Germanic
deluge. But the Norse
and Danes and Swedes
were still ravening unconstructed heathen, and in the ninth century Halfdan the Mild
and his like nearly undid what Charlemagne had done, destroying Europe anew.
Halfan’s younger brother Harald managed to establish himself as King of
Haithabu in southern Jutland, and this branch of the family lasted a long time. One of
their princesses married a petty ruler in Flanders, and one her descendents married
into the Norman aristocracy of England; her uncountable seed include Thomas
Jefferson, gentleman, of Virginia.
And Halfdan the Mild’s younger son, Ivar, is genealogically important because
his great-grandson was Ganger Hrólfr. – Ivar’s son Eysteinn Ivarsson Glumra ‘the
Noisy’, petty king in the fjords round the beginning of the ninth century, married
Ascrida Rognvaldsdatter, who presented him with Ragnvald the Wise, who founded
the Norse Earldom of Orkney, which lasted for almost seven centuies, and whom
we’ll meet again as a hair-dresser. Hilda bore Ragnvald the great Ganger Hrólfr,
nicknamed ‘the Walker’ because he was too big for any horse. This Hrólfr came
tearing out of the North in 911 to conquer that part of France hitherto known as
ALFDAN
17
Neustria, and hereafter known as Normandy, land of the Northmen. Hrólfr,
Frenchified as ‘Rollo’, founded the dynasty of the Dukes of Normandy; his greatgreat-great-grandson, Duke William, killed King Harold and conquered England in
1066. It pains us horribly to think of England conquered by anyone, and the Battle of
Hastings is an ache in our imagination, but there is an element of pleasing dynastic
come-uppance to it. It may have seemed like a battle between sophisticated Catholic
Anglo-Saxons and slightly more homespun Catholic Frenchmen, but in fact it
reprised the Viking dynastic feud that had been going on since before the birth of
Christ. At Hastings William, an Yngling, avenged the overthrow of his family, which
is to say our family, by the Scyldings, of whom Harold was one.
Ha!
But enough of these side-branches. Our own line continues with Halfdan’s
elder son and heir,
G
UDRØD VEIÐIKONUNGR (‘THE HUNTER’),
(generation
generation xii),
xii who inherited his father’s
petty kingdoms and married Alfhild, the heiress of another petty kingdom,
Alfheim. Their son was called Olaf Gudrødsson. After Alfhild died, Gudrød
demanded the hand of Åsa,
Åsa daughter of the king of Agder, Harald; when Harald
declined, Gudrød attacked the royal hall of Agder at night, killing Harald and his son
Gyrd, and carrying off Åsa to rape and enthrone. Our family has had an unlucky
experience of rape: our forceable wives have tended to kill us. One eveming in the
autumn after this particular rape, as Gudrød staggered drunkenly down the gangplank of his Viking longboat, Åsa’s page-boy ran him through with a spear. The
assassin, whom we admire, was instantly slaughtered; Åsa, our much-wronged
great32-grandmother, admitted she had set him on (we wonder how). Thus Harald,
our great33-grandfather, and Gyrd, our great33-uncle, were avenged.
In this little map, Gudrød’s domains are scarlet: I’ve marked
Varmland, which Olof Tree-feller had founded, with a V.; Vestfold is
the smaller patch of red, on the sea; Agder is green, Alfheim yellow;
nothing is very big.
OLAF, Gudrød’s son by his first wife, was twenty when he came
to the throne of Vestfold, and is said by the Ynglinga saga to have been
handsome, strong and big – even by Viking standards:
Long while this branch of Odin’s stem
Was the stout prop of Norway’s realm;
Long while King Olaf with just pride
Ruled over Westfold far and wide.
At length by cruel gout oppressed,
The good King Olaf sank to rest [this couplet may not sound funny in Old Norse]:
18
His body now lies under ground,
Buried at Geirstad, in the mound.
Olaf’s afterlife was more interesting than his
life. He became an elf, or in other words one of
the beautiful, human-sized immortals, and was
worshipped as Olaf Geirstad-alf (‘the elf of
Geirstad’). Elves later dwindled into the pretty
insect-winged elfs, but in the mythology of the
early ninth century, when great32-uncle Olaf was
venerated, to be an elf was to be apotheosised.
And then Olaf Geirstad-alf became an
artifact. Near Geirstad or Gjerstad is a farm named Gokstad, and in 1880 archæologists
dug up the Gokstad Ship, which had been used for a royal Viking burial. Olaf lay
there in great skeletal splendour, with some of his slaves lying slaughtered beside him,
so that he might have service in the afterlife. Replicas of the ship have crossed the
Atlantic (this one is called the Gaia). The picture of our great32-uncle below is
agonisingly vulgar, and the Gokstad ship in the background is inaccurately rendered,
but at least with Olaf we see our kin breaking, for the first time, into modern popular
culture. Hail, uncle Olaf!
Olaf Geirstad-Alf’s son RAGNVALD, with the attractive nickname ‘the
Mountain-High’, succeeded him as petty king of Vestfold. It was King Ragnvald who
commissioned his skald or court-bard Þjóðólfr Hvinir (Tjodolf of
Hvin) to compose a poem about the Ynglings: the Ynglingatal, the
source of most of what we know about our family to this point.
Tjodolf ends with ecstatic praise of his employer:
Under the heaven’s blue dome, a name
I never knew more true to fame
Than Rognvald bore; whose skilful hand
Could tame the scorners of the land, –
Rognvald, who knew so well to guide
The wild sea-horses [Viking ships, of course] through the tide:
The “Mountain-high” was the proud name
By which the king was known to fame.
So ends the Ynglingal saga; and so ends the senior line of the Ynglings – unless, as
seems probable, this Ragnvald was the ancestor of the Viking Kings of Dublin, whose
realm lasted until the Normans arrived in the 1170s (Ynglings fighting this Ynglings
this time).
Our ancestry, however, does not pass through Olaf the excavated elf and
Ragnvald, patron and hero of the Ynglingatal. It comes through Olaf’s half-brother:
19
III GUDRØDSSON SVARTI (‘the Black’) (generation
generation xiii)
xiii was
born of the rape of a woman who through the agency of a child
killed his father (a man who killed his grandfather and uncle). Yes,
I’m afraid there’s something inherently unclean about Halfdan the
Black, our great31-grandfather. He was himself killed by cow-dung.
We find him an eerie sort of villain.
After the gang-plank assassination, Åsa took the year-old
Halfdan back to Agder, where he was raised, and where he became king at about
eighteen.
We know both too much and too little about his subsequent career: for we are
now at last outside the scope of the Ynglingatal, and once the Ynglingatal is finished,
Snorri’s anthology of Norse sagas, the Heimskringla, breaks into lush biographical
sagas of the kings. 6 Halfdan the Black is the first king to get his own saga (above is the
initial H drawn for Halvdan Svartes saga by one Munthe). As history, Halvdan Svartes
saga does not quite convince. Nor is it quite nice. But then you wouldn’t be reading
family history if you valued niceness, and we shall quote at length, for it is quotable.
Halfdan forced King Gandalf of Vingulmark to give up half his kingdom;
Raumrike was bloodily conquered, and the local dynasty exterminated; Gandalf’s sons
were killed; and so on and so on. So much for war.
Meanwhile, Halfdan married Ragnhild, daughter of King Harald Gulskeg
(‘Goldbeard’) of Sogn; she presented Halfdan with a son, Harald, who was brought up
in Sogn as the heir. Then old Harald died, then Ragnhild, then young Harald. Halfdan
arrived in haste and added Sogn to his pile.
And so forth. Halfdan lived and died a heavy-weight only among the petty
kings of Norway – a grand petty king, you might say. His seed, our ancestors, would
perhaps never have been more than that, if Halfdan, in unwholesome middle-age, had
not heard that a certain fifteen year-old princess, also called Ragnhild, Ragnhild
Sigurdsdotter, had been kidnapped by an ogre. He rescued her, and married her, and
with that marriage our family affairs, in eclipse since the mass-murders od Ignjvald
and Åsa, took a turn towards grandeur. For this Ragnhild was evidently a great
woman, who produced a great son, our family hero. And although Ragnhild was only
the daughter of the petty king of Ringerike, Sigurd, of the Dagling or Dögling dynasty,
on his mother’s side Sigurd sprang from the Skiöldungas, from thrice-cursèd Ivar,
nemesis of the House of Yngling. With the marriage of Halfdan the Black and
Ragnhild Sigurdsdotter our genealogy reaches its climax (before us, of course), and we
therefore trace her own descent (which is also, of course, ours).
ALFDAN
6
Original at http://www.heimskringla.no/original/heimskringla/index.php;
English translation at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Heimskringla
20
PART III: OUR DESCENT FROM
IVAR VIDFAMNE AND RAFNAR LODBROK
I
VAR VIDFAMNE,
bane of the Ynglingas, overthrow of our line! – may he rot in the
Hades of usurpers. Yet, through the marriage of his descendent Ragnhild with
Halfan the Black, two centuries later, he is our direct ancestor, our great38-grandfather,
as well as our ancestral first cousin (that is, our first cousin thrity-eight times removed,
or the first cousin of our great35-grandfather).
This descent is important enough, and scary enough, to be worth tracing; and
in this section (only), we mark Ivar and our other actual ancestors in bold print.
int
(Generally, of course, we use bold print only for our ancestors in the direct line we
trace from Odin.)
Having taken Uppsala from the Ynglingas – forever! – Ivar set about empirebuilding, and, accroding to the fantasies of the sagas, his domain stretched from
Yorkshire to Russia. It was run on gangsterism. Thus Ivar married his daughter, Audr
the DeepDeep-Minded,
Minded to the king of Zealand; she slept with the king’s brother; Ivar
Vidfamne told the king, who killed his brother; then Ivar killed the king and took
Zealand. Audr fled to Russia, where the Vikings were forming the embryonic state of
Rus amidst the Slavic anarchy, and married its king, Radbard. Ivar followed with a
large army, bretahing thunder; but he must have had a certain imaginative sensitivity.
The story is that he suffered a strange dream, and asked his foster-father Hörð for
interpretation. They were on a high moonlit cliff above the Gulf of Finland. The
dream foretells your death, and the end of your evil deeds, suggested Hörð. Ivar was
so enraged by this remark that he threw himself into the sea. After, we imagine, an
embarassed pause, Hörð followed suit. It’s hard to see who reported their
conversation, but still, we’re glad to report the ruin of the man who ruined our family
forever, at least in Sweden.
Audr the Deep-Minded’s son by the King of Rus, Randver,
Randver briefly King od
Denmark, died in England; with his son Sigurd Ring,
Ring sacred king at
both Lethra and Uppsala, the Skiöldungas reach their apogee; and
Sigurd’s son Ragnar Lodbrok (‘
(‘ShaggyShaggy-Britche
Britches
itches’), who ruled the
34
Danes from Lethra, our great -grandfather, reaches another
extreme. Ragnar Lodbrok was the
Unpleasantest Viking of All.
Ragnar is a figure both in history and
legend. On the one hand, he has been given
a frankly mythical wife, Kraka,
Kraka daughter of
the shieldmaiden Brynhildr – whom we
remember best as Wagner’s Brunnhilde (our
21
great35-grandmother; we know all her songs). King Ragnar ordered Kraka to appear
before him neither dressed nor naked, neither hungry nor full, neither alone nor in
company: she turned up in a net, nibbling an onion, with only a dog. Charmed – by
her drollness, we suppose – Ragnar married her.
Kraka bore Ragnar ‘Shaggy-Britches’ four alarming sons. Sigurd SnakeSnake-inin-thethe33
eye,
eye our great -grandfather, was so-called because he was born with an ouroborous, a
snake awallowing its tail, encircled his left pupil. Hvitsärk was eventually
captured while raiding in Russia; asked how he wanted to die, said he’d
on balance he’d like to be burned alive. Björn Ironside’s raids took him
into Africa and Italy, where he sacked the Tuscan town of Luna under
the impression it was Rome. Ivar the Boneless was a cripple, and the
nastiest Ragnarsson of all despite having to be carried everywhere.
These four tough, thick boys are celebrated in their own saga, the
Ragnarssona þáttr, the Tale of Ragnar’s sons; also in a 1958 film, The
Vikings (Ernest Borgnine as great34-grandfather Ragnar [right], Kirk
Douglas as great34-uncle Ivar, Tony Curtis as a pretty slave named Erik).
And yet the Ragnarssons and their
father are perfectly historical, too, and even
historically significant. Ragnar was a
horrifically succesfulraider. He captured Paris on 28 March
845, nearly bringing down the French Kingdom.
Charlemagne’s miserable grandson, Charles II ‘the Bald’,
had to buy Paris back with an incredible sum of silver.
Modern pseudo-pagans keep 28 March as Ragnar Lodrok
Day – damn fools.
But even Ragnar over-reached himself when he
attacked England. The King of Northumbria, Ælla II (of
course a Scylding) defeated and captured him, and threw him into a snake-pit to die.
Ragnar had a magic shirt, given him by Kraka, which kept off the snakes for a bit, but
they pulled it off, and so he died, remarking to Ælla: “How the little pigs would grunt
if they knew the situation of the old boar!”
He was right. Back in Denamrk, his four boys did not take the news well. Here,
in August Malmström’s King Aella’s messenger before Ragnar Lodbrok’s sons (1857),
you will observe Sigurd Snake-in-the-eye
trimming his nails – he cut through to the
bone; Hvitserk is playing tafl, that stupidman’s
game, and grips the piece so hard his
fingernails bleed; Björn Ironside is seizing a
spear so tightly he left an impression; Ivar
does what he can without being able to stand.
22
The four piglets worked out their grief by invading England with what
horrified chroniclers centuries afterward were still calling ‘the Great Heathen Army’.
They captured York and put Ælla to death (21 March 867), employing that supreme
Viking brutality, the Rista Blodörn or Blood-Eagle. Eagles were of course sacred to
Odin, and to humour or honour the war-god, the brothers cut King Ælla’s ribs along
the spine and broke them outward, so as to resemble bloody wings, with the lung
dangling. Salt was then sprinkled in the wounds – which strikes us as gilding the lily,
torturewise; still, we are not experts in such matters, despite having an American
diplomat for a mother, and humbly suppose that great33-grandfather Igreat34-uncles
Ivar, Hvitsärk and Björn new their work.
Ragnar’s snake-pit was changing the course of
history even more than Ragnar’sseige of Paris (right),
for the Ragnarsson brothers weren’t satisfied merely
with burning and torturing. They decided to stay. For
the next century it looked as if England would be
absorbed by Denmark; only with Alfred the Great did
the English escape the tyranny of the piglets’ heirs,
Incidentally, great34-uncle Ivar, in the course
of ravening, gave God a saint, martyring Edmund of
East Anglia in 869 by using that captured king for
target practice in a handy church nave.
Great34-uncle Björn didn’t remain in England,
but went back and made his proegeny kings of
Sweden – of all Sweden, not just the usual Svear bit
his ancestors had robbed from ours. Björn’s son Eirik,
one the real kings so admired by Gyda, annexed Beowulf’s Geats. The King of Sweden
is still styled Sveriges, Götes och Vendes konung, King of the Swedes, Goths [or Geats]
and Wends. Wends are rather mysterious, and perhaps do not exist, unless you
believe that the Kashubs and Sorbs are Wends, as some people do. But the powers of
Europe are resolved that should Wends appear, the heir of Ivar Wide-fathom and
Björn Ironside is their king. It was Eirik’s great6-grandson who finally made Sweden
Christian – this was in the late eleventh century, late in the day even by Nordic
standards. The kings at Uppsala gave up performing human sacrifices to Odin, and
that was the end of our first family business. The Christians built a large church over
the site of a millennium and a half of horror.
The descendent of Ivar and Björn, Charles XVI Gustaf, our thirty-sixth cousin
wtice removed, still reigns as King of Sweden; which is very nice, although we do not
forget his throne was stolen from us.7
7
Monceiffe, Royal Highness, pp. 113-4.
23
Sigurd Snake-in-the-eye went back and made his progeny kings in Denmark –
of all Denmark, in the end; his great-great-grandson, Gorm the Old, unified that
country, as Gyrd also pointed out to the messengers. Gorm’s descendent Queen
Margaret II, our thirty-fifth cousin once removed, still reigns there.
But our concern is with Snake-in-the-eye’s daughter, Aslaug,
Aslaug who married a
Norwegian kinglet, Helgi of Ringerike (a hazily beautiful name for a small kingdom
far from anywhere). This Helgi was a member of the ancient Dagling dynasty. Aslaug
bore him a son, King Sigurd Hjort of Ringerike, our great32-grandfather, “stouter and
stronger than any other man, and his equal could not be seen for a handsome
appearance” says Snorri.
It is told of Sigurd that when he was only twelve years old he killed in single
combat the berserk Hildebrand, and eleven others of his comrades; and many are
the deeds of manhood told of him in a long saga about his feats
– a saga that is since lost, which is a great shame. Sigurd’s feat at twelve staggers the
imagine, for a berserker was a warrior who went an uncontrollable trance of fury in
battle – the berserkergang – weilding a battle-axe, howling, dressed in wolf or bear
skins. We reach the summit of pure Viking dreadfulness with the berserkers, and
we’re proud that one of our kin eventually outlawed them. Meanwhile, how was it
done? Saxo Grammaticus, the panic-stricken chronicler who is our source for pagan
Uppsala, says they drank bear or wolf blood. Childish moderns have wondered it was
fly agaric mushroom, which gets you high, or bog myrtle, used to spice Viking beer,
which gives you a terrible hangover (though surely a headache couldn’t lift even a
Viking into berserkergang). Even sillier suggestions by modern academics have
included mild epilepsy, rabies (mild rabies?), ‘hysteria’, clinical depression (‘bipolar
disorder’), or actual spirit possession by a critter – for academics will believe anything
thye come across, if you let them, except of course the Nicene Creed.
In any case, the incomparable Hjort married Ingeborg, the daughter of the
Jutish chieftain Harald Klak. They lived and reigned, happily we hope, at Stein, with
tow children, Ragnhild Sigurdsdotter, “then twenty years of age, and an excellent
brisk girl”, the climax and point of this footnote, and her brother Guthorm, who at
the time of the disaster I’m about to report was a youth, but whom we’ve met as
Harald’s uncle and guardian.
Sigurd … had a custom of riding out quite alone in the uninhabited forest to
hunt the wild beasts that are hurtful to man, and he was always very eager at this
sport. One day he rode out into the forest as usual, and when he had ridden a
long way he came out at a piece of cleared land near to Hadeland.
– and there another berserker, named Hake, was waiting, having sipped his wolf
blood or slipped into chuckling bipolar mania. Hake attaked the king with thirty men,
which makes us a little suspicious of quite how deranged a berserkergang we are
24
talking about; our heroic ancestor killed twelve of Hake’s minions and cut off Hake’s
hand before he fell. Hake then sacked Stein, and carried off Guthorm and Ragnhild to
Hadeland.
It takes even a Viking berserker a little to be fit for raping captives once he’s
shorn of an extremity, and that gracious interval, while Hake lay alone in bed
growling, extended itself “all the autumn and beginning of winter”; duirng which
Haldfan the Black learned that the beateous Ragnhild was in the hands, or hand, of
the villian.
Now King Halfdan was in Hedemark at the Yule entertainments when he heard
this news; and one morning early, when the king was dressed, he called to him
Harek Gand, and told him to go over to Hadeland, and bring him Ragnhild,
Sigurd Hjort’s daughter. Harek got ready with a hundred men, and made his
journey so that they came over the lake to Hake’s house in the grey of the
morning, and beset all the doors and stairs of the places where the houseservants slept. Then they broke into the sleeping-room where Hake slept, took
Ragnhild, with her brother Guthorm, and all the goods that were there, and
– but we know what’s coming –
set fire to the house-servants’ place, and burnt all the people in it. Then they
covered over a magnificent waggon, placed Ragnhild and Guthorm in it, and
drove down upon the ice. Hake got up and went after them a while; but when he
came to the ice on the lake, he turned his sword-hilt to the ground and let
himself fall upon the point, so that the sword went through him. He was buried
under a mound on the banks of the lake.
I think the point here is that you need two hands to balance on the ice, so that Hake,
the brute, saw that he had lost his poppet.
When King Halfdan, who was very quick of sight, saw the party returning over
the frozen lake, and with a covered waggon, he knew that their errand was
accomplished according to his desire. Thereupon he ordered the tables to be set
out, and sent people all round in the neighbourhood to invite plenty of guests;
and the same day there was a good feast which was also Halfdan’s marriage-feast
with Ragnhild, who became a great queen
– and our ancestress; and mother of Harald, in whom the blood of the Ynglingas and
Skiöldungas was united, and almost reconciled; from which union Norway became a
nation; from which union we spring.
25
PART IV: HALFDAN, RAGNHILD, HARALD
There never was a happy Yngling-Skiöldung marriage, and Harald
did not love Ragnhild Sigurdsdotter for long.
She was too good for him. Here’s what Snorri’s saga has to
say: Ragnhold “was wise and intelligent”, and
dreamt great dreams. She dreamt, for one, that she was standing
out in her herb-garden, and she took a thorn out of her shift; but
while she was holding the thorn in her hand it grew so that it
became a great tree, one end of which struck itself down into the
earth, and it became firmly rooted; and the other end of the tree
raised itself so high in the air that she could scarcely see over it,
and it became also wonderfully thick. The under part of the tree
was red with blood, but the stem upwards was beautifully green
and the branches white as snow. There were many and great limbs
to the tree, some high up, others low down; and so vast were the
tree’s branches that they seemed to her to cover all Norway, and even much
more.
Not so hard to interpret, you’d think, and the first mention in this genealogy of Oscar
and me, since we are among Ragnhild’s progeny: those leaves that block out the sky,
wonderfully thick, the ‘even much more’.
More subtly, Snorri records that Halfdan himself “never had dreams, which
appeared to him an extraordinary circumstance”, but not to us: I don’t suppose Henry
Ford or Napoleon had an interesting sleep-life either; for these frantically ambitious
men, all existence is a long hot wet-dream from which they never wake. Still,
Halfdan was worried enough to consult the mid-ninth century Viking version of a
shrink, one Thorleif Spake (‘the Wise’).
Thorleif said that what he himself did, when he wanted to have any revelation
by dream, was to take his sleep in a swine-sty, and then it never failed that he
had dreams. The king did so, and the following dream was revealed to him. He
thought he had the most beautiful hair, which was all in ringlets; some so long as
to fall upon the ground, some reaching to the middle of his legs, some to his
knees, some to his loins or the middle of his sides, some to his neck, and some
were only as knots springing from his head. These ringlets were of various
colours; but one ringlet surpassed all the others in beauty, lustre, and size. This
dream he told to Thorleif, who interpreted it thus: – There should be a great
posterity from him, and his descendants should rule over countries with great,
but not all with equally great, honour; but one of his race should be more
celebrated than all the others. It was the opinion of people that this ringlet
betokened King Olaf the Saint.
– the incompetent martyr whom we’ll meet later on. We shan’t much take to him.
26
Meanwhile, before Halfdan and Ragnhild could have all these heavilyadvertised descendents, they needed to have a child; which they did.
Queen Ragnhild gave birth to a son, and water was poured over him, and the
name of Harald given him, and he soon grew stout and remarkably handsome.
As he grew up he became very expert at all feats, and showed also a good
understanding. He was much beloved by his mother, but less so by his father.
One of those families, then. Family hatred culminated one Yuletide – Christmas had
not yet reached Scandinavia: The year was A.D. 860; little Harald was ten.
King Halfdan was at a Yule-feast in Hadeland, where a wonderful thing
happened one Yule evening. When the great number of guests assembled were
going to sit down to table, all the meat and all the ale disappeared from the table.
The king sat alone very confused in mind; all the others set off, each to his home,
in consternation. That the king might come to some certainty about what had
occasioned this event, he ordered a Finn to be seized who was particularly
knowing, and tried to force him to disclose the truth; but however much he
tortured the man, he got nothing out of him. The Finn sought help particularly
from Harald, the king’s son, and Harald begged for mercy for him, but in vain.
Then Harald let him escape against the king’s will, and accompanied the man
himself. On their journey they came to a place where the man’s chief had a great
feast, and it appears they were well received there. When they had been there
until spring, the chief said, “Thy father took it much amiss that in winter I took
some provisions from him, – now I will repay it to thee by a joyful piece of news:
thy father is dead ….”
This happy event had occurred by unusual means.
Dung is warm enough to melt ice. This is an crucial fact – one of the few truths
that can be discerned in the Dakotas, where Halfdan’s descendents, our ancestors,
were to end up. In North Dakota there is nothing much to look at over thousands of
miles, for eight months of the year, except cow-dung making tiny pockets in the
howling anarchy of ice. Somehow this great principle slipped King Halfan’s mind: he
was driving from a feast in Hadeland, and it so happened that his road lay
over the lake called Rand. It was in spring, and there was a great thaw. They
drove across the bight called Rykinsvik, where in winter there had been a
pond broken in the ice for cattle to drink at, and where the dung had fallen
upon the ice the thaw had eaten it into holes. Now as the king drove over it
the ice broke, and King Halfdan and many with him perished. He was then
forty years old.
Each of his four scattered kingdoms wanted Halfdan’s body, for he was, after all,
sacred king of these poor deluded pagans. They believed “that those who got it would
have good crops to expect.” Eventually they chopped him in four, and stowed him in
four different barrows. Exit, or rather exeunt, Halfdan the Black. We farewell our
precusor with a shudder.
27
PART V: HARALD TAKES AN OATH
H
(generation
generation xiv)
xiv was boy-king now, and his host, the
Finnish chief, cheerily announced: “thy father is dead; and
now thou shalt return home, and take possession of the whole
kingdom which he had, and with it thou shalt lay the whole
kingdom of Norway under thee.”
This didn’t seem very likely, and for the first few years of
Harald’s reign, his uncle and regent, Ragnhild’s brother Guthorm,
struggled to maintain even the tiny patchwork empire the boy
had inherited (scarlet on the map. Varmland, you’ll note with
dismay, has slipped into the orbit of Sweden and the interloping
Skiöldungas. Hålogaland in the remote north is pink; you should
remark the far western lands of Trønder, to the south of
Hålogaland, and Mører, to the north of Sogn; that’s where our
family is ultimately headed).
Gandalf of Vingulmark, the smaller yellow blob, was the
great enemy of Harald’s boyhood, but Guthorm and Harald killed
him, as also four other kings (by the classic Ynglign methods of
burning their meeting hall by night). “Hedemark, Ringerike,
Gudbrandsdal, Hadeland, Thoten, Raumarike, and the whole
northern part of Vingulmark”: these were impressive gains;
Harald was secure.
But the fact was that in 866 the teenaged Harald was simply
a petty Norse king, as his fathers had been before him since Olaf
Tree-feller fled west from Sweden. And perhaps he’d have died a
petty king, if he hadn’t fallen in lust with a certain witty Gyda,
Gyda
daughter of King Eirik of Hordaland (an attractive dark teal on
the map), our great30-grandmother, and sent messengers to
collect her.
ARALD
The king wanted her for his concubine; for she was a remarkably handsome girl,
but of high spirit withal. Now when the messengers came there, and delivered
their errand to the girl, she answered, that she would not throw herself away
even to take a king for her husband, who had no greater kingdom to rule over
than a few districts. “And methinks,” said she, “it is wonderful that no king here
in Norway will make the whole country subject to him, in the same way as Gorm
the Old did in Denmark, or Eirik at Upsala.” The messengers thought her answer
was dreadfully haughty, and asked what she thought would come of such an
answer; for Harald was so mighty a man, that his invitation was good enough for
her. But although she had replied to their errand differently from what they
wished, they saw no chance, on this occasion, of taking her with them against
28
her will; so they prepared
to return. When they
were ready, and the
people followed them out,
Gyda
said
to
the
messengers, “Now tell to
King Harald these my
words. I will only agree to
be his lawful wife upon
the condition that he shall
first, for my sake, subject
to himself the whole of
Norway, so that he may
rule over that kingdom as
freely and fully as King
Eirik over the Swedish
dominions, or King Gorm
over Denmark; for only
then, methinks, can he be called the king of a people.”
Now came the messengers back to King Harald, bringing him the words of the
girl, and saying she was so bold and foolish that she well deserved that the king
should send a greater troop of people for her, and inflict on her some disgrace.
Unspeakable cads.
Then answered the king, “This girl has not spoken or done so much amiss that
she should be punished, but rather she should be thanked for her words. She has
reminded me,” said he, “of something which it appears to me wonderful I did not
think of before. And now,” added he, “I make the solemn vow, and take God to
witness, who made me and rules over all things
– it’s extremely rum to find Snorri ascribing monotheism to Harald, Odin-born sacral
kinglet as he was; does he mean that Harald was suddenly inspired? Or is it a blunder?
I suppose that even Snorri nods. In any case, this was the boy-king’s oath:
that never shall I clip or comb my hair until I have subdued the whole of
Norway … or if not, have died in the attempt.
His hair was soon in such a matted state people started calling him been called Lufa,
which means “Shockhead” or “Tanglehair”. It was to be ten years before Harald had
earned his hair-cut.
_______________________________________________________________________
Above, Christian Krogh’s illustration of Gyda’s pertness to the messengers (‘Gyda sender bud til kong
Harald’) from an edition of the Heimskringla (Stenersen & Co, 1899).