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- [00:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
Thank you for listening to the Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series and membership of our much loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club that is thereestishistory.com this season a new hot deal.
- [00:18]
Tom Holland
Has arrived at Metro.
- [00:20]
Dominic Sandbrook
$25 a line for four lines.
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Tom Holland
With all the data you need and four free Samsung Galaxy A15.5G phones, getting.
- [00:26]
Dominic Sandbrook
Metro's best deals is easy. No ID required, no activation fees. Get a new number or keep your own. It's up to you.
- [00:33]
Tom Holland
That's four lines for $25 a line plus four free phones. Visit a store or go online today only at Metro by T Mobile. When you join Metro plus Tax for a limited time and subject to change max one offer per account. This episode is brought to you by 20th Century Studios. The Amateur when his wife is murdered, Charlie Heller, the CIA's most brilliant computer analyst, must trek the globe and use his only weapon, his intelligence, to hunt down her killers and enact revenge. Starring Academy Award winner Rami Malek and Academy Award nominee Laurence Fishburne, The Amateur rated PG13. Only in theaters April 11. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Olaf and Harold crashed into the enemy line like a storm ripping into a forest. Men were falling on every side, shards and splinters and splatters of blood flying into their faces. But soon the Norwegians were pressing back, using their numbers to hem Olaf's men in, squeezing them, crushing them together. More missiles rained down, spears, arrows and throwing axes. The ground was slippery with blood. For a moment Harold lost his footing, but then a hand was dragging him back up. Andalf the Icelander flashed him a grim smile. Olaf raised his voice again, rallying his men for another charge, the sea serpent waving proudly overhead. Yet in the corner of his eye.
- [02:44]
Dominic Sandbrook
Harald could see the terrifying figure of.
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Tom Holland
Thorir the Hound, his teeth bared with.
- [02:51]
Dominic Sandbrook
Savage laughter, his black spear dripping with.
- [02:55]
Tom Holland
Blood, cutting through the crowd towards his brother. And it was now, as the battle hung in the balance, that the heavens proclaimed their verdict. So that unbelievably manly and buccaneering prose is from Adventures in Fury of the Vikings, Dominic's excellent book on the Vikings, and it describes one of the many thrilling scenes from the life of Harold Hardrada who will go on to become one of the stars of the great drama of 1066. But, Dominic, this is not a description of a battle fought in 1066, but in 1030. And it's the Battle of Stikla Stad in Norway, one of the most celebrated events in the history of Norway, and particularly of Norwegian Christianity. But we will come on to that in due course. So, Dominic.
- [03:50]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
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Tom Holland
Harald Hardrada. Two episodes on the thunderbolt of the north, as Adam of Bremen called him the last Viking, the greatest warrior of his day. Take him away.
- [04:01]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. So, Tom, we've done a lot of great characters, and the rest is history. But I think Harald Hardrada has a claim to be the most exciting. Certainly his life is the most dramatic and unexpected. So you and I, when we studied 1066 at school. Yeah. Howard Hardrada is really an exciting supporting character, isn't he? He's one of the three contenders in the great Game of Thrones. Arrives suddenly in the middle of 1066. He crosses the North Sea. He leads an army into York, and then he faces Harold Godwinson in this sort of thrilling showdown at Stamford Bridge. But his story before that is so colorful that I think I would be interested to know what you think. I think it's surely a contender for the most exciting life in medieval history.
- [04:47]
Tom Holland
Well, as written several. I mean, a couple of centuries later, so definitely ornamented. But the basic outline of it, I agree, is astonishing. And we did an episode before on the Vikings going eastwards, and we talked about the strangeness of. It's kind of like two different periods of history rubbing up against one another, the Viking Age and the Roman Age. Because you have Harold walking around Constantinople, and we've been doing this series on. Focused very much on England and the North Sea and Northern France, but there are all kinds of links to the Mediterranean, to the Byzantine Empire, to the Holy Land that we will be exploring over the course of these episodes. Looking at Harald Hardrada's life.
- [05:31]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. So to give people just a little preview, he fights that first battle when he's a teenager. He flees Norway into exile. He ends up as a mercenary for the Grand Prince of Kyivan Rus. He crosses the Black Sea to Constantinople, joins the Varangian Guard. He fights everywhere from Sicily to Armenia. He becomes engulfed quite literally in the snake pit of Constantinople.
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Tom Holland
Politics, one might say. The dragon pit.
- [05:57]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. And then he returns to claim the throne of Norway. So it's a very kind of Aragorn trajectory, the guy who disappears into exile as a sort of mercenary Or a ranger from the north and then returns to reclaim his throne.
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Tom Holland
Although he's a bit more kind of brutal, isn't he?
- [06:14]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes. Aragon, bit more wading through the blood of other people, I think it's fair to say. But I think there are two important dimensions of it, sort of more seriously. So one is, as you've said, it is a brilliant reminder of the interconnectedness of this world. So 11th century Europe, so these trading networks, cultural networks, political and so on, that link, you know, the fjords of Norway to the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Middle east and so on, these are not completely different spheres of action. People move between them.
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Tom Holland
Right. And the great silver hordes that you get in Viking Scandinavia, yeah. They're not just coming from England, they're also coming from Byzantium and from the.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Caliphate, these much richer parts of the world, quite frankly. And then the other thing is, you described him, as people do, as the last Viking. And, you know, we'll discuss that in more detail later on. And his life undoubtedly is a window into the last sort of embers of the Viking age. So a changing Scandinavia. We've hinted at this in the last series we did, about the roads, 1066. So the way in which villages are becoming towns, warlords are becoming kings, pagans are becoming Christians, and the Viking age is passing into history. And his life seems to be the perfect punctuation point, I would say. Now, the other point, we shouldn't perhaps labor too much. You've alluded to it. The best sources for his life are these sagas, like Heimskringler, great saga, sometimes written by Snorri Sturluson, the great kind of saga writer written in Iceland centuries later. What are we talking, sort of 12th, 13th century sagas? So they're written long after the event. And as we will see, there are a lot of fictional and fantastical elements which some scrupulous historians would cut, you know, they would do their best to eliminate from the podcast. We've done the opposite. Well, I've certainly done the opposite. I think it's best to play those up. Because, Tom, as we always say, it's important to see the world as they saw it, isn't it?
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Tom Holland
I suppose what I would say, we would see the world as Snorri Sturlison, right, in medieval Iceland, would see it, whether that matched on exactly to how Harold sees it. And we will explore that.
- [08:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
But the good news for everybody is this is a podcast and not a PhD, so if you're hoping for giant serpents, you'll get them berserkers covered in birds screaming, you know, at the top of their voices. This is the podcast for you, but let's start in history with what we know of the historical Harold Sigurdsson. So he's born in the uplands of Norway, probably in 1015. His father is a kind of local king, what they called a petty king, a kind of regional big man. And his father had the brilliant name Sigurd Seer, Sigurd the Sow. And he had this nickname, the Sow, because he preferred farming to fighting. And sometimes people think, well, obviously this is derogatory. They imagine him as a kind of, you know, a lazy man who doesn't, you know, doesn't go out and. And smite, you know, his neighbors or whatever. But actually, in the sagas, the portrait of Sigurd is quite generous. And I quote, he was a careful householder who kept his people closely to their work and often went about himself to inspect his crops and meadows, the cattle and the smithies.
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Tom Holland
I mean, I imagine him as a kind of a slow moving, but you wouldn't want to annoy ox.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, I think that's fair. Much loved by his. By his vassals or whatever, I would imagine respected.
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Tom Holland
They would put kind of daisy chains around his horns, but do not provoke his wrath, that kind of thing.
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Dominic Sandbrook
And he is married to this woman called Orster. She's the widow of another kind of provincial bigwig in the Westfold of Norway, and she's had a son with this guy called Olaf the Stout. Now, when Harald is born, so Olaf, his half brother, is about 20. He's going to play a massive part in Harald's life because Harald is going to hugely look up to him. So Olaf, we know more about Olaf at this point than we do Harald. Olaf has been involved in war from a very young age. Supposedly, according to the sagas, he first went into battle when he was 12, and he fought in Finland and Estonia. He was part of that Scandinavian horde who descended on England in the years of Ethelred the Unready. So he served with this bloke, Thorkel the Tall, who we talked about last time, and he actually ended up was one of the people who has ended up as a mercenary, fighting for ether at the unready.
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Tom Holland
Yeah, he's the guy who supposedly pulls down London Bridge.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly.
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Tom Holland
Thereby inspiring the nursery rhyme.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Now, he's also spent time in Normandy, a place we talked a lot about last time. A crucial sort of node in the network across the sort of North Sea in the Channel. He'd been baptized a Christian in Rouen and he later becomes a great champion, or he's seen as a great champion of Christianity in Norway. But whether he's very pious, I think is dubious. I think for him Christianity is about power and about status and about generally smiting his enemies and making himself king.
- [11:03]
Tom Holland
So Snorri says that his eyes are harder serpents.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Right. Jesus wouldn't like that some, would he?
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Tom Holland
It's more adventures in time, it has to be said.
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Dominic Sandbrook
It is his skulls. His poets said that he was the ember breaker of battle. He gave gold to his loyal men and carrion to the ravens. That's what I like. I like that in a king. And actually in all the poems that were composed about him when he was alive, there's no mention of being kind or turning the other cheek, but there's an awful lot of mention of like smashing people's heads in with hammers and stuff. So anyway, thanks to this head smashing, Olaf has actually stamped his authority on the different kind of strong men of Norway. And around the time of Harald's birth, so 1015, he's recognized as the king of Norway. So another brilliant example of the way in which the Viking age is passing into history and being replaced by a kind of more ordered, more structured kind of world.
- [11:56]
Tom Holland
We talked in the previous series about Olaf Tryggvason, this kind of sinister reader of bird bones. I mean, he establishes a Christian monarchy. He does it by committing spectacular atrocities in the name of Christ. And I think Harold Sigurdsson is cut.
- [12:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
From similar cloth very much in that kind of line. Absolutely. So Harold, at this point he's still only little boy. Our first anecdote about him as a boy is in 1018 or so, his father has died, so Sigurd has died, and Olaf comes to visit his mother. So this sort of 20th, early 20s guy who's become king, his half brother, he comes to visit their hall in a place called Ringerike. And the story is that Harald is there with his older brothers Guthorm and Halfdan, and they're very shy of their relative the king, and they can't meet his eye. They have the hearts of girls, they do. But Harald, who is three years old, sits on Olaf's lap and tugs his moustache.
- [12:53]
Tom Holland
Ah, the marker of a king.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. Olaf says, brother, you will be a fighter one day. And then next Olaf is walking with his mother. They're having a chat in the sort of the fields and they come across the boys playing by the stream and the other boys are playing as farmers. But Harold Hardrada, the future Harold Hardrada is sort of playing with long 10 long ships. And Olaf says to him, the day may come, brother, when you command real ships. And then he says to them, and I'm sure this definitely happened, Tom, he says, what would you like? What would you like most in life? And Guthorm says, I would like a lot of fields. And Halfdan says, I would like cows. And Harald, age 3, says, Housecarls, so many they would eat all Halfdan's cows at a single feast. And Olaf says to Auster, his mother, he says, well, well, mother, you are bringing up a king. So this is all very impressive and I'm sure that this all happened, but actually all the sources agree and there's no reason to doubt them, that Harald is an exceptionally formidable character. So Snorri Sturlason in King Harald Saga says, Harald was a handsome man of noble appearance, his hair and beard yellow. He had a short beard and long mustaches. Peculiarly, the one eyebrow was somewhat higher than the other. So he's kind of Roger Moore like in that respect, you know, he can raise an eyebrow at a merry quip.
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Tom Holland
Yeah, he's brutal but suave.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Suave, exactly. His height was five Ls, he was stern and severe to his enemies and cruelly punished all oppositional misdeed. So five Ls, as historians point out, that would make him seven and a half feet tall. And the sources do say he's very, very tall, but he's probably not seven and a half feet. I mean, the one thing that people know is that Stamford Bridge, at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, he says of Harold Godwinson, what a small man.
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Tom Holland
But also Harold then turns it, doesn't he, and makes a famous joke about his height, which we will come to.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, exactly due course. He's definitely a huge man. I don't there's any doubt about that.
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Tom Holland
And he is good looking because one of the other name that he gets as well as Hardrada is fair hair.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Yes. So he's blonde haired. He's incredibly impressive. And the portrait we get of him generally, and I think in the sagas, captures that last of the Vikings feel. There's definitely a sort of he's huge, he's ruthless, he loves gold, he likes fighting and the sagas always have him. There's a brilliant book called Laughing Till I Die by Tom Shippy, the great kind of expert on kind of Norse and Anglo Saxon literature, has written a lot about Tolkien. Tom Shippy says one of the defining Things about Harald Hardrada and the sagas is he's always making quips and composing poems in the face of danger and stuff. The Vikings took that. That's very much a Viking sensibility that, you know, there's a fatalism coupled with a sort of I laugh in the face of death, which I don't doubt, because you can tell that from the way he behaves. I don't doubt that that's true to his character to some degree.
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Tom Holland
Well, I mean, I guess the sagas preserve poetic traditions that definitely go back to the Viking age. And if this is part of the context in which Vikings are growing up, then they're going to model themselves on what they're reading in the epics.
- [16:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly.
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Tom Holland
It's a kind of a virtuous circle.
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Dominic Sandbrook
As he sits around the hearth, Tom, listening to the bards or the skulls, kind of telling their stories about Ragnar Lothbrok or whatever. He wants to live up to that.
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Tom Holland
He wants to model himself on that.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly.
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Tom Holland
The fact that they have become Christian, that they have become kings, that they can now command the vast resources almost of a kind of an emergent state, doesn't make them less of Vikings. Because if you think of Canute or. Yeah, Sweyn Fortbeard, Knut's dad, they're Vikings on a terrifying scale. And there's that intersection point, isn't there, where Viking brutality and the resources available to a Christian king intersect. And it's very bad news for their neighbours.
- [16:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. So they're not really going on this piddling little raids anymore. What they're doing are launching proper invasions and seizing kingdoms and piling up gold on the skins of oxes. That's what they're doing. So he next appears in the sagas in the spring of 1030, when he's 15 years old. And a lot has changed since the days when he was, you know, tugging people's beards. So his brother Olaf, Olaf the Stout, this guy who'd united Norway, has had a massive falling out with Knut, the king of Denmark and England, who we talked about in the last series. Now we know that Knut and Olaf did know each other. Their paths had undoubtedly crossed in England back in the days of Svein Fort Beard and so on. And some Scandinavian historians think that what had basically happened is that Olaf had probably promised to be kind of Knut's vassal and had reneged on the deal, which is a big theme of kind of Danish and Norwegian history.
- [17:34]
Tom Holland
Well, because they'd fought each other on opposite sides in England, Exactly.
- [17:38]
Dominic Sandbrook
So in 1028, so two years before 1030, Knute had sailed from England with 50 warships and had actually been welcomed by the Norwegians with open arms. So it's pretty clear that in the north, in particular of Norway, the local magnates actually didn't like Olaf and wanted him out. And Canute, we're told, when the sagas had bribed them with enormous quantities of gold and silver, every man who came to him and wished to be his friend had his hands filled with coins. So Olaf, Harald's brother, has fled. He flees over the mountains to Sweden with a handful of his closest friends and his son Magnus, who will come up again on Thursday. And from Sweden, he took a ship across the Baltic and he vanished into the forests of what is now Russia. Now, we'll come back later in this episode to this side of things, but basically, for 200 years, this has been the kind of wild east of the Viking world. They've got all this network of forts and towns and so on. They're going all the way down the rivers into Ukraine towards the Black Sea in Constantinople, which is obviously the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. And Olaf has taken shelter probably in Kyiv with the Grand Prince Yaroslav of Kyiv, who's basically of Scandinavian descent and.
- [18:53]
Tom Holland
Who will be a key figure in the story we're going to tell.
- [18:55]
Dominic Sandbrook
So Olaf has been gone for two years. And then in the spring of 1030, a dramatic twist, one of many in this story, word reaches Norway that Olaf is on his way back. He's got about 200 warriors who are kind of Slav mercenaries and Norwegian exiles.
- [19:14]
Tom Holland
I mean, the phrase Slav mercenaries is never something you want to hear if you're a peaceful villager, is it?
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Dominic Sandbrook
It's a phrase that you definitely want to be using on a podcast when you're talking about Slav mercenaries. You're living the dream. So he goes back and he arrives in Sweden, and the Swedish king, who's called Onund Jakob, he gives him some more men, and then he recruits some more troops in Sweden, some more Norwegian exiles and so on. And so Olaf has this force of about 2,500 men. And then Harald, his younger brother, turns up. So Harald at this point is about 15 or 16 years old.
- [19:50]
Tom Holland
Please, brother, may I fight with you?
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Dominic Sandbrook
I think his voice broke when he was about 8.
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Tom Holland
Oh, maybe when he was 3 and playing with his Viking ships.
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Dominic Sandbrook
I imagine he's pretty formidable.
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Tom Holland
Massively hairy.
- [20:01]
Dominic Sandbrook
I think it's more. He sort of. He's got a mane of blonde hair, so they toss us in the wind.
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Tom Holland
I hope one day, brother, to have a moustache like yours. And he will.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Well, he will. Well, hold on, hold on. Actually, I can't believe I didn't read this out. Snorri Sturluson says at this point he was very stout and manly, as though full grown.
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Tom Holland
As though full grown, Dominic.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, but very stout and manly.
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Tom Holland
What, so he's fat?
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Dominic Sandbrook
No, because stout in these days. So Olaf the stout is not that he's fat, it's actually that it's sort of sturdy, like me. So.
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Tom Holland
Right.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Harald has raised a couple of hundred men from the uplands of central Norway. He's crossed the mountain spine of Scandinavia and he's gone down to Sweden to meet his brother. So they all assemble and then they decide they'll set off back to Norway and they're hoping to get more recruits as they go. And they cross the spine again through the passes into the Norwegian uplands. Now, there are some accounts, because this is the age of Christianization, that say that Olaf forced recruits to be baptized and he made them paint white crosses on their shields. We must depend on God. Only with his power and mercy shall we gain victory. And I cannot have pagan men in my army. But actually most of the historians accounts that I've read of this say this is probably nonsense, that actually this is a back projection by later Christian chroniclers and that actually almost certainly it's a mixture of all kinds of random people in this army. At this point I would be less.
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Tom Holland
Skeptical about it because he has seen London, he's seen Kiev, he's seen Christian kings and the power that they command. And I think that everything about would be Viking kings in this period suggests that they want a part of it.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Oh, they do. I'm not saying that he doesn't shout about Christ and have a cross. What I'm saying is his very ragtag army, I don't think it has the quality of a crusade.
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Tom Holland
No, it doesn't have a quality of the crusade, but the possibility that he makes them put white crosses on their shields or whatever. I mean, it's certainly possible.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. Anyway, they come down into the height of summer, 10, 30, and they come down into the most fertile bit of Norway, which is called the Tronderlag, and surround the city that we now know as Trondheim, which at the time was called Nidaros. And they're going through this valley and at the end of the valley is the village of Stiklastad, Stickler's farm. And this is the setting for this great battle, probably the most famous battle in Norwegian history. I don't know how many Norwegian listeners we have, but they'll be very excited by this. And as they advance to down this valley, they see at the end a huge army waiting for them. So this army, their enemies, these are A, Knute loyalists and B, basically local farmers and local peasants who hate Olaf. And they are horrified that all these Slav mercenaries have turned up and they're about to pillage their lands and sort of, you know, attack their families and stuff.
- [22:56]
Tom Holland
Do we know if Harold's brothers, who are the farmers?
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Dominic Sandbrook
Oh, my words, you know.
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Tom Holland
Do you think they've turned out?
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Dominic Sandbrook
I think they've disappeared from the story completely. Gotham and Half Dan. I don't think they've turned out. No, no, no.
- [23:07]
Tom Holland
Because they wouldn't welcome Slavic mercenaries descending on that.
- [23:10]
Dominic Sandbrook
They wouldn't. But that's actually too busy tending their crops, Tom. They've got no time for this kind of nonsense. Now, in the sagas, there are some absolutely splendid people involved in the enemy army. So the head of it, the head of this kind of loyalist army is a local strongman called Kalf Arneson, who's a sort of Knute loyalist. Then there's a bloke called Thorstein the shipwright, and he has a grudge against Olaf because Olaf confiscated a ship from him as punishment for murdering somebody. Snorri Sturluson says that Thorstein the shipwright was, quote, very ardent and a skilled killer of men.
- [23:42]
Tom Holland
That's nice.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Which is nice. But by far the most terrifying person who you mentioned in that wonderful reading at the beginning of the show is this guy who's called Thorir the Hound. And Thoria, I'm sure he existed. He's a warlord from the northern coast of Norway, so he's been in touch with the Sami people and he's wreathed in mystery and magic. He's a sorcerer as well as a hound.
- [24:09]
Tom Holland
Well, this is the kind of figure that Neil Price talks about. Yeah, his great book, the Viking Way, and. And he came and talked about Viking sorcery and his great thesis is that so much of Viking culture is influenced by shamanistic traditions from the far north.
- [24:24]
Dominic Sandbrook
That's a very fashionable view, though, isn't it, Tom?
- [24:26]
Tom Holland
I like it.
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Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, I really, really like it. This bloke bears it out. He's wearing a sami cloak of 12 reindeer skins with, and I quote, so much magic that no weapon could pierce them. And if people doubt that, we will have evidence for it later on in this story.
- [24:44]
Tom Holland
He's got good medicine.
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Dominic Sandbrook
He's also got a magic spear. He's got a magic spear. And he said, you know, I will use this magic spear to kill Olaf. Now, they outnumber Olaf's men four to one and they are absolutely pumped. They are gagging for battle. Calf Arneson, he raises his banner and he addresses his men and he says, he who does not fight bravely today shall be held a worthless coward. Spare none, for they will not spare you. Now, Olaf is massively outnumbered. He raises his banner. You mention it in the reading, the sea serpent. He unsheathes his sword, which is called knight ear striker. And he gives his own speech, of course he does. And he says, they may have more men, but it is fate that decides victory, not numbers. I swear that I will not flee from this fight. I will triumph or I will die. And all his men assemble. It's got his great lieutenant standing at his side, who obviously is called Bjorn the Bear. He's there.
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Tom Holland
Doesn't Bjorn mean bear?
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Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, yeah. It's just a tautology, but I mean, you know, it's there to. If this. Don't forget the Slav mercenaries there, they might not know that, Tom. So it needs to be explained. It's also got a kind of Lancelot character who's called Roggenvald Brucerson, who's the son of the Earl of Orkney. You're a big fan of Orkney, aren't you?
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Tom Holland
Yeah, well, because the elves of Orkney carry on being Vikings, you know.
- [26:01]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
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Tom Holland
Deep into the Middle Ages.
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Dominic Sandbrook
So he's there, Roggenvald, and everyone should remember him because he'll be important in this story. But Harold, what about Harald? Olaf says, I do not think my brother Harold should be in the battle, for he is still a child.
- [26:15]
Tom Holland
Certainly I should be in the battle, for I am not too weak to handle a sword and if necessary, you can tie my hand to the hilt. That's what he says.
- [26:22]
Dominic Sandbrook
He's stout and manly. He did not speak like that. So anyway, this is the first time that he comes out with one of his poems in the face of death. He says, my arm is wing, while I shall stand, I will hold good with heart and hand My mother's eyes shall joy to see a battered, blood stained shield from me. That's great. There's no doubt, I think, in any listener's mind that this absolutely happened. So at about 1:00, according to the sagas, these two lines advance on each other. Thorir the hound is shouting, Olaf is shouting. They kind of. The tension mounts. It's very Bernard Cornwell. And then the two lines crash together. And sort of trying to work out from the sagas, which are, as we said, written much later with masses of kind of fictionalization and back projection. Olaf's men are almost certainly more skilled, more experienced than all these farmers and peasants. So when the sagas say they made initial headway, that's very plausible. But over time, the sheer weight of numbers four to one tells against them. So in King Harold's saga, which is part of a big cycle called Heimskringla, says the peasant army pushed on from all quarters. Those in front hewed down with their swords, those behind thrust with their spears, and those in the rear shot arrows, cast spears and threw stones, hand axes or sharp stakes. Soon many men began to fall. So in other words, Olaf is very embattled. And Harold. And then, remember you said Tom. The heavens proclaimed their verdict, as is oddly so often the way in decisive battles in history. Guess what happens. There is a total eclipse. So we're told. The saga say the sky and sun became red and then as black as night. And to read from a thrilling version of this story for younger readers, blood curdling roars rose from the peasant army. The gods had spoken. The king must die now. They surged forward, emboldened, triumphant, closing in on their former master, their faces twisted with demonic rage. They also definitely happened. So a very prosaic version of what happens next is basically the peasant armies, whether the initial surge. Olaf is outnumbered, his men are cut down. The standard bearers cut down, drops the sea serpent banner. The morale breaks, people start running, and at some point, Olaf himself is slaughtered among the piles of bodies. But the sagas tell a very exciting story. So basically all boils down to this duel between Olaf and Thorir the hound. He lands this fantastic blow on Thorir. He slashes at him.
- [28:59]
Tom Holland
But Thor is wearing that Sami reindeer, reindeer skin coat.
- [29:05]
Dominic Sandbrook
It was as dust flew from this coat. And Olaf's sword just glances off it. And then Thorstein the shipwright hacks at Olaf's leg with his axe. Olaf falls over a boulder, which apparently you can still see on the field called Olaf's stone.
- [29:20]
Tom Holland
And you were driving very near the site. You opted not to go and look at it.
- [29:23]
Dominic Sandbrook
I just don't like stones. I find them very dull. I find them disappointing. And also, I had a brilliant image in my mind of this battle.
- [29:29]
Tom Holland
Yeah, you didn't want to be disappointed.
- [29:31]
Dominic Sandbrook
I didn't want to be disappointed by some prosaic stone. Anyway, Thorir the Hound, remember he's got a magic spear. He plunges it up through Olaf's mail shirt into his chest and then Kalf Arneson hits him in the neck and.
- [29:45]
Tom Holland
It'S all over for Olaf. That's all right, because do you know who had appeared to Olaf while he was in Novgorod in a dream? It was Olaf Tryggvason.
- [29:56]
Dominic Sandbrook
Oh no. Eh? Another Olaf.
- [29:57]
Tom Holland
So it was Olaf Tryggvason, who'd been Olaf the Stout's godfather.
- [30:01]
Dominic Sandbrook
Right.
- [30:01]
Tom Holland
He appeared to him and he said, look, don't worry, it's a glorious thing to die in battle. And then he vanished.
- [30:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, a Viking would know that, though. They wouldn't need to be told.
- [30:09]
Tom Holland
Yeah, but it would be a reassurance, wouldn't it?
- [30:10]
Dominic Sandbrook
If your godfather tells you it would be a reassurance. You're right. That's true, that's true. Oh, that's nice. Anyway, he probably dies with a smile on his lips. I like that grim smile. Now, almost everybody else, we're told in the sagas is killed too, but not Harald. Harold has somehow been wounded and put out of action. So he's kind of lying among the piles of bodies. And this guy, the Earl of Orkney's son, Roggenvald Brucesson, he helps him up and he drags him off the battlefield into the woods. Now Thorir the Hound is leading a kind of mopping up party to kill all the survivors, but they manage to evade him and they reach a woodsman's hut. And there the woodsman, a kindly forester, he takes them in and he says, listen, I will look after young Harold until he's well enough to travel. So I think it's probably fair to say at this point this probably didn't happen. This feels a little bit fairy. It feels a bit fairy tale to me, Tom.
- [31:04]
Tom Holland
I mean, just to say, also, there must have been enough survivors of the battle.
- [31:08]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
- [31:08]
Tom Holland
The next day to go and find Olaf's body.
- [31:11]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes.
- [31:12]
Tom Holland
And spirit away. And they bury it in a sandy bank upriver from Trondheim. And this is very important for the Christianization of Norway, because his death in that battle will come to be seen as a martyrdom and his relics will become a great object of pilgrimage.
- [31:28]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, spoiler alert. He becomes a saint.
- [31:30]
Tom Holland
Yeah. This patron saint of Norway, we've had.
- [31:32]
Dominic Sandbrook
A few implausible saints on the podcast. He's definitely one of them.
- [31:35]
Tom Holland
He's got a church in London.
- [31:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. So Rognvald goes off and he leaves Harald with this woodsman and Days or weeks, we don't know, go by. Harald's wounds heal and eventually the woodsman's son says, I will guide you through the forests and over the mountains to Sweden. We're told that they stayed off the roads. They made their way through the woods. And Harrold wore a hooded cloak to hide his face. So he's very much kind of the ranger of the North. I like to think he travels under the name Strider. Yeah, or some such.
- [32:05]
Tom Holland
Trotter.
- [32:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, Trotter. That's Tolkien's original name. And he devises one of his lovely poems during the journey. Now, from wood to wood I slink. Rated little. Who knows, but I may win better fame later. I mean, it's not really, as poems go, it's probably not the best. But anyway, yeah, he's really tired.
- [32:23]
Tom Holland
Yeah, he's just lost his.
- [32:24]
Dominic Sandbrook
It's also a teenager. He's also a teenager.
- [32:27]
Tom Holland
Come on, don't be hard.
- [32:28]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, I'm being too hard on him now. I feel ashamed of myself now. Anyway, they go through all this wild country. He goes down into Sweden, the Baltic Sea lies beyond. He meets up with Roggenfeld, and that winter they hunker down, brooding on their defeat, and then, says the saga. The spring came and Harald and Roggenvald hired a ship, and that summer they sailed east to the lands of the Rus.
- [32:53]
Tom Holland
Goodness, what a cliffhanger. So go east, young man. And that is what we will be doing after the break.
- [33:07]
Dominic Sandbrook
Hello, I'm William Dalrymple. And I'm Anita Arnand. And we are the hosts of Empyre, also from Goal Hanger. And we're here to tell you about our recent miniseries that we've just done on the Troubles. In it, we try to get to the very heart of the violent conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted from the 1960s all the way up to 1998. It's something that we both lived through and remember from our childhoods, but younger listeners may not know anything about it. And it's a time when there was division along religious and political lines. Neighbours turned against each other. Residential city streets became battlegrounds. Thousands were killed, and the IRA bombed London. It seemed as if an end was out of reach. But in 1998, a peace process finally brought those 30 years of violence to an end. But the memory of the Troubles is still present, not only within Northern Irish communities who experienced it, but in international relations and political approaches to peace. And new audiences are starting to understand this national trauma through films like Belfast and Kneecap and TV shows like Derry Girls. In fact, our guest on the miniseries is Patrick Radden Keefe. Now he's the author of the non fiction book that inspired the hit TV drama say Nothing. It's one of my favourite books. It's I think the kind of Inko blood for our generation. Extraordinary work of non fiction. To hear the full series, just search Empire wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is brought to you by the Swedish clothing brand Asket.
- [34:45]
Tom Holland
Now Dominic, in our episode on tailoring and the history of the suit, one of the most salient things you get a real sense of while stood in a tailor's on Saville Row is that historically clothes were made with love and care so that they would last for a very long time indeed. And I think it's a shame in today's age of fast fashion that it is hard to come by clothes that stand the test of time.
- [35:08]
Dominic Sandbrook
But Tom, honestly, you don't have to go to the lengths of getting a bespoke suit tailor made to own clothes that are made with that same sense of love and pride. There are very few companies left that have that real focus on quality and longevity, but one of them is asct. They work almost exclusively with organic and natural materials milled in Italy and Portugal and made in factories built on generations of craftsmanship. Every product is worn for months by the two founders, stress testing every stitch and seam before it's approved for production.
- [35:42]
Tom Holland
And as a result they have just one single permanent collection. It's around 50 garments offered in three lengths for every regular size that are meant to be around forever.
- [35:52]
Dominic Sandbrook
And there are no discounts ever. If you don't need anything, don't buy. Have a look at the collection yourself. Visit asette.com hello.
- [36:05]
Tom Holland
Welcome back to the Rest Is History. We are in the midst, literally of a saga. The 16 year old Harald Hardrada is on the run. His brother Olaf the Stout has been killed. He's being hunted. He and his friend Rognvald have taken ship from the Swedish coast into the freezing waters of the Baltic. They have their rangers hoods over their heads. Dominic, where are they going?
- [36:30]
Dominic Sandbrook
So for the last 200 odd years, the Vikings have been going east as much as they've been going west. They've been sailing across the Baltic and the Gulf of Finland to what's now Russia, Estonia and Latvia. We did a couple of episodes about this in the early days. The rest is history. But just to remind people, the Vikings would head up the rivers, they'd carry furs and slaves, they'd go deep into Eastern Europe, and then they would make their way through the river network to the Black Sea and then south to Constantinople. And over these 200 years, they have built a chain of trading stations and forts and settlements stretching for 1, 300 miles. And this becomes known as the Kingdom of Cities, Gardarike, but it's better known today as the Land of the Rus. That word probably, there's lots of academic arguments about it, which we talked about before, but it probably comes from an old Norse term that means rowers because they often rode down these or up these rivers. And obviously it's from that that we get Ruthenia, Russia, Belarus and so on and so forth. Now we can pretty much guess which way Harold went because there's a set route, there's kind of a highway. So he and Roggenvald would have crossed the Gulf of Finland to roughly near modern St. Petersburg. And then they'd have taken the River Neva upstream to Lake Ladoga, Europe's largest freshwater lake. And here on the southern side is basically the gateway to the Wild east, which is a place called Staraya Ladoga, which is this sort of. It is like a Wild west town. And you mentioned Neil Price, Tom, the great historian of the Vikings. He calls it a muddy riverine deadwood with greater ethnic variety plus swords and a multitude of gods.
- [38:13]
Tom Holland
It's such a great description. And I mean the context, the rivers and the network of forts, there is a sense beyond it of a kind of fantasy world, isn't there, completely, where, you know, there are dragons and I think men who have mouths between their nipples and all that kind of stuff.
- [38:29]
Dominic Sandbrook
Absolutely.
- [38:30]
Tom Holland
It is a kind of Dungeons and Dragons.
- [38:33]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
- [38:34]
Tom Holland
Terrifying dimension.
- [38:35]
Dominic Sandbrook
Everything about this reminds me of, you feel so Tolkien esque. And the journey that Harold is going on is so Fellowship of the Ring. And actually it's not a silly parallel because obviously Tolkien is basing his stories on this and that does capture, as you say, how they viewed the world, because at the end of it are these shining cities of the Eastern Roman Empire and the Caliphate and whatnot, with so much wealth and so much to them, so much mystery and splendor beyond anything they would see in Norway, but.
- [39:04]
Tom Holland
Also on the way, kind of strange cities. Harold goes to Novgorod, which we've already mentioned, literally Newcastle. And this is a town made so completely out of wood that even the documents that have survived consist of birch bark.
- [39:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
That's right.
- [39:19]
Tom Holland
And again, that must have seemed an extraordinary place to anyone visiting it.
- [39:23]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, they've moved 150 miles down through the rivers to Novgorod again. It's a tough place. It's kind of Wild west type place.
- [39:33]
Tom Holland
But as you say, welcome back to the streets.
- [39:35]
Dominic Sandbrook
We are in ways on the marshes and whatnot. Then they cross again with their canoes, probably Lake Ilman. They would have had to drag the canoes or the barges through the woods for hundreds of miles. When they're crossing from river to river or crossing around rapids and whatnot. It's risky. If you think about the Fellowship of the Ring, when they're going through the woods and stuff, being chased by orcs, it's got that feel to it, because there are bandits in the woods, there are Slav tribes.
- [40:05]
Tom Holland
I wouldn't have enjoyed it.
- [40:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
It wouldn't have been a restless history tour vibe, would it? And then at last, you know, they must have gone round a bend in the river and they see the walls of Kyiv, which is built on bluffs above the river. Dnieper and Kiev, or Kiev, depending on what you call it. According to legend, it had been founded centuries earlier by three Slavic brothers and then taken over by Vikings called Askold and Deer in the eight hundred sixties. And it ends up effectively becoming the capital of this very loose state called Kievan Rus. This is the state from which, as Vladimir Putin would be the first to tell you, both Ukraine and Russia trace their kind of national lineage. The grand princes of Kiev had been Christians since 988, and that was when a guy called Vladimir or Vladimir the Great converted to Christianity. And the fact that he's doing that tells you something about their strategic position, because for them, the great superpower is what would have called itself at the time the Roman Empire, the empire based in Constantinople. And Volodymyr had married the emperor's daughter Anna, a massive figure in the history of the Christianization of the Rus. And it's probably their son. We can't be entirely certain about his parentage, but it's their son Yaroslav, who is now the Grand Prince and rules in Kiev as a Christian. So in that sense, you could say they're not so different from the warlords in Scandinavia who are also becoming Christian.
- [41:40]
Tom Holland
Well, you know who they remind me much more of is actually the Norman dukes.
- [41:45]
Dominic Sandbrook
Right. Yeah.
- [41:46]
Tom Holland
Because similarly, there's that issue of a Viking polity that is becoming so influenced by the Christian power on its doorstep.
- [41:56]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
- [41:57]
Tom Holland
Historians at this point are debating, are they still Scandinavian? Yeah, they're adopting the language. So Yaroslav, he is of Viking descent.
- [42:05]
Dominic Sandbrook
Right. But his name is Slavic name. Yeah.
- [42:07]
Tom Holland
So it's very similar to debates that we've been having about the Norman dukes. Are they Scandinavian, are they French, what are they?
- [42:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
I think it's a really nice comparison. I think the difference is that Normandy is more obviously much smaller and more focused, more coherent and more militarily progressive, as it were, than Kyivan Rus. It's such an interesting and strange place, I think. So when Harold arrived, Kyiv at that point must have been by far the biggest and most awe inspiring place you'd ever seen. Maybe 50,000 people lived there. So a lot bigger than say London at the same time.
- [42:40]
Tom Holland
And also very closely modeled on Constantinople. Right. So it's a kind of pre figuring of the great city, the golden city of Caesar that he will be reaching in due course.
- [42:48]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. So we know to give people a sense of what Kyiv was like. All kinds of barges, people trading everything from silk to slaves to grain to amber and honey and furs, all the products of the north. There was a lower town at the bottom of the hill called Podil. And they would go up through the kind of past the cottages and then you've got this huge ramparts. You have this topped with kind of white painted oak palisades, three massive gates. One called the Polish Gate, the Jewish Gate and the Golden Gate. I mean, as you said, Tom, modeled on the gates in Constantinople. The Golden Gate has its own chapel on the top of it and a kind of gilded dome. And this is the great entrance point.
- [43:31]
Tom Holland
To Kiev and this great kind of fortress. Again, I guess a point of comparison with the Normans is the use of a fortified stronghold to intimidate the locals, to prey on them. Yeah, and it's a very predatory state, isn't it?
- [43:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. And the citadel does have something in common with the kind of Norman castle. So the citadel was called the Detonates and it's a little bit like a Kremlin. Huge walls, impregnable to attack. Inside you've got churches, you've got the kind of palace quarter, all of that kind of stuff. And it's there that you would, you know, if you wanted an audience with the Grand Prince Yaroslav, it's there that he would receive you. So according to the sagas, Harold and Rognvald go in to see Yaroslav. He's now in his 50s. He's probably, as I said, the son of Grand Prince Vladimir and his wife Anna. He is a man absolutely drenched in blood. He's fought this massive war against all his brothers.
- [44:30]
Tom Holland
He's got about 500 brothers, hasn't he?
- [44:32]
Dominic Sandbrook
40 brothers. He's killed most of them.
- [44:34]
Tom Holland
Well, there's one who gets chased into, like, Poland, is it? And he. He dies a lunatic there, stabbing with a sword at. At empty air.
- [44:45]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
- [44:46]
Tom Holland
And a kind of terrifying sense that Yaroslav, even when he's not there, is haunting this poor brother's imaginings.
- [44:53]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, Yaroslav is a very impressive man, so later chroniclers called him Yaroslav the Wise. Though at the time, people called him Yaroslav the Lame because he'd got a limp from battle. And Tom, in 2008, a TV poll of 2 and a half million Ukrainians crowned him the greatest Ukrainian in history.
- [45:10]
Tom Holland
Yeah, well, he is. I think he's amazing. So there's also the amazing story that his enemies, his brothers and everything are on the far side of, I guess, the Dnieper or one of the great rivers, and they're screaming abuse at him and they're the first to call him the lame. And Yaroslav is furious about this. And then the river ices over. Yaroslav crosses, even with his limp, slaughters the lot of them.
- [45:33]
Dominic Sandbrook
Of course he does. He's the man that I would take shelter with in Harold's predicament, and it obviously works out very well for him. So Yaroslav, he's this blend, as you said, of Viking, Roman and Slav Slavic name. His wife is the daughter of the Swedish king, Ingigerd. And I think it's very unclear, but I think she's a distant relative in some way of Harald's brother, his late brother Olaf.
- [46:00]
Tom Holland
So he can kind of claim kin.
- [46:01]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. And as we said, he's also within what they would have called the Roman orbit. So his mother, probably Roman. And he's just started work on St. Sophia, so.
- [46:11]
Tom Holland
Hagia Sophia, Exactly.
- [46:12]
Dominic Sandbrook
Its first cathedral, modeled on the original in Constantinople. And we are told by King Harold Saga, he gave Harald and Rognvald a very friendly reception. He loves a Scandinavian mercenary who doesn't? And so for the next two years, Harald will serve in the Grand Prince's army. So this is really his military apprenticeship. So what is he.
- [46:32]
Tom Holland
This is between the ages of, let's say, 17, 18.
- [46:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, 17, 18, 19. This is what he's doing. And we get some sense, very vague, of what kind of things he's doing. So we know that around this time, Kyivan Rus is fighting against the Poles. So the Poles are a Slav kingdom that have expanded from around Poznan and they've been pushing east into what's now Belarus and Western Ukraine. And now Yaroslav is pushing back through the woods. So we get these little hints, very fragmentary from what Snorri Sturluson says, Harald's scalds, his kind of poets, his praise singers. So this guy called Theodolf Arneson, who's quoted by Snorri Sturluson, he says the leaders fought side by side, their troops in a fighting wedge. They drove the Slavs to defeat and showed the Poles little mercy. So we can only kind of glimpse.
- [47:24]
Tom Holland
These very murkily, but staining the snow's red.
- [47:29]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. And then the other one is they were definitely fought a people called the Pechenegs.
- [47:33]
Tom Holland
Oh, they're terrifying.
- [47:34]
Dominic Sandbrook
They're like step nomads, aren't they, from Central Asia.
- [47:37]
Tom Holland
They are always turning skulls into cups, aren't they?
- [47:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
They are. So Yaroslav's grandfather that beheaded him, that lined his skull with gold and used it as a wine goblet. And the. What the Rus will do is they will transport their troops along the rivers and then go and fight these guys and try to avoid fighting them in an open step ground because they're. The Pechenegs are unbeatable with their cavalry. So they try to draw them into the woods and fight them there. There's all kinds of stuff in the saga saying Harold loves this and he's absolutely brilliant at it. Another one of his skulls is a guy called Bolver wrote these lines about Harold kind of looking back later on. He said, our brave king is to the roost lands gone braver than he on earth there's none. His sharp sword will carve many a feast for wolf and raven in the east.
- [48:23]
Tom Holland
Do you know, I think the rhyme scheme makes it slightly less impressive.
- [48:26]
Dominic Sandbrook
Do you think so?
- [48:27]
Tom Holland
Yeah, I do.
- [48:28]
Dominic Sandbrook
So by the time he's about 18 or 19, Harold is promoted to captain of the guard. The guard were called the Druzhina. And we know from the Arab traveler Eden Fadlan that if you became one of the king's companions, you would sort of feast with him in his hall and you would be given your own slave girl to wait on you, quote, to wash his head and to prepare food and drink and another slave girl to serve as your concubine. So Harold doesn't want for female company at this point, though, unfortunately, these are slave girls. But he's after more. So he clearly sees himself as somebody who will return one day to claim the throne of Norway and succeed his brother and avenge his brother Olaf.
- [49:13]
Tom Holland
And it is such a theme, isn't it, of this period People being exiled and coming back over and over again.
- [49:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
But to do that, he would obviously need Yaroslav's support. He would need to persuade the Grand Prince of Kiev to allow him to recruit troops, to give him troops. And he would really want to strengthen his connection with the Eraslav, I think, as much as possible. And as luck would have it, Yaroslav has an eligible daughter. There's no way of dressing this up. When Harold arrived in Kiev, she was probably about 6 years old. So by the time he's made captain of the guard, she's probably about nine. And that's a point at which you would become betrothed. You wouldn't marry until your mid teens, but you would might have been betrothed for several years. Her name is Elisif, or in the Slavic Elizaveta. We have absolutely no knowledge of her inner life at all. There is an image of her, there's an 11th century fresco of her family in the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Kiev. But it's quite. I mean, some of the accounts I've read, people say, oh, she's obviously very serious person, pale skinned and all this kind of thing. I'm like, this is obviously generic, orthodox image. You can't really interpret anything from this. But we know from the sagas, Harold goes to Yaroslav and he says, listen, you'll recall my distinguished lineage and, you know, first hand of my prowess. Can I ask for your daughter's hand in marriage? Yaroslav's, you know, I think he responds quite nicely. He says, it's fair, it's a good match, but you have no means to support a royal wife since you have no lands of your own. So although I do not say yes, I do not say no either. One day I believe you will be a great man. And when that day comes, you may ask me again. So the sagas say, Harold walks away from Yaroslav's hall and his mind, he already knows what he's going to do. He needs a reputation to marry this girl and he needs money. And there is one place you go to get both of those things. And this is the city that is really the dream, I think, of every Viking who goes east, which is this great city of Miklag, actually literally the great city.
- [51:20]
Tom Holland
The great city, yeah.
- [51:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
So Miklagard, some historians think the inspiration for Asgard, you know, for the city of the gods.
- [51:27]
Tom Holland
The descriptions are Asgard is, is golden, it's roofed with precious metals, isn't it? It gleams with splendid palaces. It's encircled by a great Wall. I mean, that is a description of one of Caesar's golden city.
- [51:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. So this city, Miklag, the great city, is Constantinople, the new Rome. By far the biggest city in Europe. So in the summer of 1034, Harold and some companions, we're told the suspiciously round number of 500 companions go south down the Dnieper, very well traveled path, past the rapids of Zaporizhzhia to the Black Sea, down the Bosphorus and then up the Golden Horn into the city of Constantine. Not an unfamiliar place for Norsemen to go. They've launched attacks, haven't they, in 860, 941, 944.
- [52:21]
Tom Holland
They kind of initially introduced themselves by capturing monks and shooting arrows into their heads.
- [52:26]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. The Romans had seen them off with a combination of Greek fire and icon intervention. Yes. They'd paraded with icons with. With magic powers. Not magic powers, I should say divine powers.
- [52:37]
Tom Holland
Indeed. Supernatural.
- [52:38]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. And. And seen them off. So the historian Cat Jarman has a book called River Kings.
- [52:43]
Tom Holland
Read that book, Tom, about following beads, the amber. Yeah.
- [52:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
And she has loads of stuff in there about what we know about customs. They're all kind of customs arrangements and special regulations for Norse travelers arriving Constantinople. So he's not, you know, an incredibly unfamiliar figure.
- [52:59]
Tom Holland
Well, there are two kinds, aren't that there are people who are going to fight, but there are also merchants there.
- [53:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
So.
- [53:04]
Tom Holland
Yes, skins, I think they're called exactly that. He is not going to be doing that.
- [53:08]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, he's going to fight. So for Harold, what is he, 19 years old? This must have been an absolutely jaw dropping experience. The Golden Horn, the huge walls, the markets, the bath houses, the Forum, the Hippodrome, the massive palace complex of the Caesars. I mean, we know there's the famous story about when emissaries from the Rus went into Hakia Sophia, which was then 500 years old, and they said, we didn't know if we were in Earth or in heaven. For surely there is no such magnificence or opulence anywhere in the world.
- [53:45]
Tom Holland
Yeah, we cannot forget that beauty.
- [53:48]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. And actually that reflects a deeper picture or a wider picture, which is that actually the Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, for once it's actually doing pretty well. It's at a kind of medieval peak under the Macedonian dynasty who are ruling it. They've crushed the Bulgars, they've recaptured a bit of territory in Syria, they've recaptured a bit of territory in Sicily and in Georgia, they're going through a kind of literary and artistic renaissance. So actually things are looking quite good for them and they're quite self confident and quite buoyant. Now Harold will get very, very involved in kind of Constantinople politics and we'll get on to that in the next episode. But just to give listeners a sense of the picture, there has just been a change of emperor at the top. So the emperor in the early 1030s had been a guy called Romanus III who was basically a bureaucrat. He was in his mid-60s and he was married to the Empress Zoe, born in the purple, so from the imperial family. She's younger, she's in her mid-50s. And Zoe, I think it's fair to say she's a character, isn't she, Tom?
- [54:55]
Tom Holland
Yeah, she is.
- [54:55]
Dominic Sandbrook
She's a memorable character. We'll discuss her in more detail on Thursday. She's blonde, she's very voluptuous, she's very clever, she's incredibly vain. She's always sort of taking strange potions and.
- [55:09]
Tom Holland
Yeah.
- [55:10]
Dominic Sandbrook
And sort of smearing creams on herself.
- [55:12]
Tom Holland
Unguents.
- [55:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
Unguent. She loves an unguent. Now, she's been having an affair with a younger palace official called Michael, who's in his 20s, very good looking. And in April 1034, so just before Harold arrives in Constantinople, the Emperor's officials, Romanus's officials, came into his bathroom and found him dead in his bath, strangled, probably. And almost all the sources say it was Michael who did it. He had murdered this bloke and he has now become Emperor because he's married Zoe and become emperor himself. Michael Ivan. And actually the empire is being run by his brother, who's a tremendous figure, inevitably a eunuch.
- [55:54]
Tom Holland
Well, you say inevitably.
- [55:55]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
- [55:56]
Tom Holland
I mean, it's quite odd that the brother of the Emperor would be a eunuch, but actually it's the eunuch who had originally got Michael in.
- [56:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
Eunuch comes first. Exactly.
- [56:04]
Tom Holland
We will come to him because he's a great character.
- [56:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
John the Orphanatrophus, I think is his name. Anyway, he's running the show. Michael, this kind of handsome toy boy is now the Emperor and Zoe is still on the scene as Empress and it's fair to say, I think, a nest of vipers. Tom and I choose the serpentine analogy for good reason.
- [56:24]
Tom Holland
Yeah, because the serpents go all the way down into the bowels of the palace.
- [56:28]
Dominic Sandbrook
They do indeed. But for the time being, you know, Harald, there's no reason he should really worry about all this. He's just an obscure Scandinavian mercenary. His name will mean something to Scandinavians, but it won't really mean anything to the Romans. And he is heading not for the palace, well, not for the center of the palace, but for a building that may well adjoin it, which is the barracks of the most glamorous warriors in Christendom. And these are the Varangian Guard. So the Varangian Guard, I mean, they're the sort of sexiest of all medieval elite warriors, aren't they? Yeah, they are a bodyguard established in 988 at the point when Vladimir the Great of Kyiv had decided to embrace Christianity and to do this marriage deal with the emperors. And Vladimir had sent, we're told, 6,000 Norse and Slavic mercenaries who became known as Varangians, after the Norse word var, which means oath. So they are literally called the oath keepers.
- [57:26]
Tom Holland
And I think that when bands of Norse went southwards to begin with. Yeah, it would be a kind of consortium.
- [57:33]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly.
- [57:33]
Tom Holland
So it's a band of Varangians who found Novgorod, for instance.
- [57:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. So the sort of. The idea that you would swear an oath and you would become a kind of team, a blood brother. Exactly. These, over time we've now moved on sort of 40, 50 years from this, but they're still going. And they've become a kind of special forces unit. So they will be sent across the empire to Syria, to Sicily, wherever, you know, to take part in sieges and stuff like that.
- [57:57]
Tom Holland
Parachuting in.
- [57:58]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. Most of them are Scandinavian, not all. So there are Anglo Saxons and certainly later on.
- [58:04]
Tom Holland
Well, there will be quite a few more in due course.
- [58:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
And Slavs, they become famous. There are sort of hints of them in, in Roman sources. They are famous for drinking, for having double headed axes and general sort of berserker ferocity, I think it's fair to say.
- [58:21]
Tom Holland
And for scrolling graffiti in churches.
- [58:23]
Dominic Sandbrook
The most famous relics of them are in Hakia Sophia. And they are. There's a bit of graffiti that says half Dan. In other words, a guardsman guarding the imperial family would have written, basically half Dan was here. And there are scrawled longboats, aren't there, in the upper galleries. I mean, an amazing thing to see. We have a sense of them from picture stones on the island of Gotland and also things that have been found in graves in Scandinavia that they might have worn sort of baggy silk trousers and had kind of armor in rectangular little plates, rather like step nomad kind of armor.
- [58:56]
Tom Holland
And do you think when they go back to Scandinavia they're baggy silk trousers? They're like teenagers from a gap year.
- [59:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
In India, like you, Tom, after you went To India and you returned an Indian garb. Yeah, I guess, maybe, Yeah. I think there's an element of that. Plus the French Foreign Legion. Yeah, they've seen things, all of that. And I mean, you don't come back from a gap year with your pockets loaded with gold. No, but these blokes absolutely do. So to be a Varangian Guard, you were paid 40 gold solidi for a regular guardsman. And if you get to guard the imperial family, you get 44 solidi. That's as much money, if not more than you would get from a really, really good Dane Geld payout in the West. And of course it's much more reliable. You basically signed a contract. As long as you don't get killed.
- [59:41]
Tom Holland
And gold is better than silver.
- [59:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, of course. Remember we had Eleanor Barraclough. Yeah. On talking about the sagas. So in one of her books, I think it's beyond the Northlands, she describes these people as strong, silent types, dripping with gold, swayed in expensive fabrics and weighed down by top of the range weaponry. And she compares them with the Rangers of the north in the Lord of the Rings. So you know the Rangers, when they turn up in the Fellowship of the Ring, Aragorn and whatnot, they're kind of these strong, silent, battle hardened, mysterious figures behind their hoods with suspiciously fine swords.
- [60:18]
Tom Holland
But not prone to berserk.
- [60:20]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, I guess not. But we just don't see that. I like to think it's happening off stage in Tolkien's world, don't you?
- [60:26]
Tom Holland
Yeah, I suppose.
- [60:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
The massacres of orcs or something.
- [60:28]
Tom Holland
Yeah, I guess. All those little orc babies.
- [60:31]
Dominic Sandbrook
Right? Exactly. So, Harold, it makes complete sense that he will do this. If he is able to not get killed and to save his money, he'll be able to go back to Kyiv a rich man. He'll be able to marry Elisif, he'll have the blessing of the Grand Prince of Kiev, and then he can think about going back to Norway to reclaim his throne. So he goes to their barracks and we're told brilliantly, that he signs on under an assumed name, very Strider like. And his name is Nordbricht Northbright. That's what he chooses. And so Tom, he's joined the Varangian Guard and the stage is set for adventure. Hooray ahead. Like Sicily, Armenia, Jerusalem, the murder of an emperor, eye gouging and a terrifying encounter with a giant snake. But will Harold ever make it back to avenge his brother and reclaim his throne? Tom, will he put aside the Ranger and become who he was born to be. We'll find out next time.
- [61:37]
Tom Holland
So exciting. So next time on the Rest is History. We continue the saga of Harald Hardrada with the return of the king and members of the Rest Is History club. Those who belong to our own Varangian Guard can hear that story right now. And if you are not a Varangian, if you're just a skin, a merchant, then you can change that. You can sign up@therestishistory.com Alternatively, you can wait to hear it later in the week. But either way, we will be back with Varangian fun and games. Bye bye Bye.