Harald Hardrada: the last great Viking

We’ve written before about Stamford Bridge, the 1066 battle that has a fair claim to ending the Viking age in England. But the man who led that doomed invasion deserves a closer look. Because if you were going to invent a character with the most dramatic life of the entire Viking age, you would struggle to outdo the real Harald Sigurdsson — the man history remembers as Harald Hardrada.

A boy on a battlefield

Harald’s story begins with a defeat. In 1030, at around fifteen years old, he fought at the Battle of Stiklestad alongside his half-brother, King Olaf — the king later remembered as Saint Olaf. Olaf was killed. Harald was wounded, and fled the country.

Most careers would end there. His was just getting started.

The emperor’s Viking

Harald made his way east, first to the court of Yaroslav the Wise in Kyiv, and then on to the greatest city any Norseman had ever seen: Constantinople, which the Norse called Miklagard — “the great city”.

There he joined the Varangian Guard, the Byzantine emperor’s elite unit of Norse warriors, and rose to command it. The sagas have him campaigning across the Mediterranean and the Middle East — Sicily, the Holy Land, and beyond. How much of the saga account is embellished is fair to ask; skalds were not paid to make their patrons look modest. But Harald’s service in the Varangian Guard is well attested, and he came home from it very, very rich.

The hard ruler

That wealth bought him half of Norway. Returning north around 1046, he struck a deal to share the throne with his nephew, Magnus the Good. When Magnus died soon after, Harald ruled alone — and he ruled hard, for twenty years.

His byname, Hardrada, is usually translated as “hard ruler”, and he earned it. He crushed opposition, burned the great trading town of Hedeby during his long war with Denmark, and centralised power in a way few Norwegian kings had managed before him.

By 1066 he was in his fifties: a veteran of wars across half the known world, and probably the most feared warrior of his age. He had one ambition left — the English throne.

One throne too many

You can read about how that ended in our post on Stamford Bridge. A shaky claim, an exiled ally, 300 ships — and an English army that appeared out of nowhere after one of the great forced marches of medieval history. Harald died in a Yorkshire field, reportedly with an arrow through the throat, and the age of Viking invasions of England died with him.

There’s a reason so many historians reach for the same phrase about Harald Hardrada: the last great Viking. His life spans the whole arc of the late Viking world, from Norway to Kyiv to Constantinople and back — and its end marks the end of the era itself.

Back to the books

Harald Hardrada belongs to the very end of the Viking age. Our own books are set in the generations before him, when the kingdom he would one day rule was still being forged — starting with his ancestor Harald Fairhair, the first man to unite Norway under one crown. If you want to understand the world Hardrada inherited, that’s where it begins.

And later this year, our Stamford Bridge 1066 anthology brings together some of the finest Viking fiction authors writing today, each telling the story of Hardrada’s last battle through different eyes. More on that soon.