Harald Hardrada by John Marsden Read Free Book Online Page B

with him a loyal warrior retinue, of whom the most prominent members identified by the saga included Arne, Finn and Thorberg Arnason, brothers of the Kalv who had defected to Jarl Hakon and was even now being promised great prospects under Cnut. One other of Olaf’s loyal companions in adversity mentioned by the saga will be of further significance here, namely Rognvald Brusason who had been brought to the Norwegian court as a boy with his father, the Orkney jarl Brusi, some ten years before and stayed on, probably at first as a hostage for his father’s good behaviour, but in time becoming a trusted friend to the king. Such, then, was the company that made its way through the Eida forest into Vermaland and over the border to take refuge in Sweden, where Olaf stayed until the following summer when he entrusted his daughter and his queen to the care of her brother Onund at the Swedish court before taking ship across the Baltic to Russia and the court of the Grand Prince Jaroslav at Novgorod. There he was assured of generous hospitality, not only by reason of Jaroslav’s being his kinsman by marriage when both had taken daughters of the Swedish king Olaf as their brides, but because of the wider and more ancient relationship between the ruling houses of Scandinavia and Russia. Jaroslav and his background will be more fully considered later in the context of Harald Hardrada’s east-faring, but it might still be useful at this point to indicate something of Russia’s place within the orbit of medieval Scandinavian expansion.
    The term Rus derives from a Finnish name applied to the Swedes who were the first of the northmen to penetrate the mainland of what later became Russia, and was taken up by the Slavonic settlers to identify Scandinavian traders who had established their bases along the northern Russian waterways long before the arrival of Rurik. The traditional forebear of medieval Russia’s ruling dynasty (and thus the great-great-grandfather of Jaroslav), Rurik is said to have founded his power base at Novgorod in the year 862. As in Normandy and elsewhere throughout the Scandinavian expansion, the early settlements steadily absorbed the host culture and within less than two centuries their ruling warrior aristocracy had become thoroughly Slavonic in character, yet the traffic of Scandinavian traders and warriors along the Russian rivers still sustained close relations between the Rus and their northern cousins.
    Thus Russia, or Gar ð ar as it was called in Old Norse, 3 offered a convenient realm of refuge for Scandinavian kings and princes in exile, and a remarkably generous welcome to Olaf when Jaroslav offered him lordship over the Bulgars on the Volga. In the event, that proposal proved unpopular with the warriors of Olaf’s retinue, who were disinclined to settle in Russia and urged him instead to return to Norway. Olaf himself, however, is said to have been considering a pilgrimage to the Holy Land when tidings came from Norway of the unexpected death of Jarl Hakon, who had been in England with Cnut that summer and was drowned on the voyage home when his ship was lost off the coast of Caithness. The news that Norway was suddenly bereft of a ruler prompted Olaf to consider attempting to reclaim his lost kingdom. While Jaroslav warned of the might of opposition he would be facing with only slender forces of his own and offered him an even more generous lordship were he to stay in Russia, the saga tells of a vision of Olaf Tryggvason in full regalia urging his return to Norway, and this supposedly divine intervention is presented as the decisive factor prompting Olaf to set out on what was to become his death-journey into martyrdom.
    â€˜Immediately after Yule’, according to the saga and so presumably in the first weeks of 1030, Olaf was making ready for departure. His son Magnus was left in Jaroslav’s care and stayed behind in Russia when Olaf assembled his retinue of some two