Harald Fairhair

Harald Fairhair was a Norwegian king. According to traditions current in Norway and Iceland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, he reigned from 872 to 930 and was the first King of Norway. Supposedly, two of his sons, Eric Bloodaxe and Haakon the Good, succeeded Harald to become kings after his death.
Much of Harald's biography is uncertain. A couple of praise poems by his court poet Þorbjörn Hornklofi survive in fragments, but the extant accounts of his life come from sagas set down in writing around three centuries after his lifetime. His life is described in several of the Kings' sagas, none of them older than the twelfth century. Their accounts of Harald and his life differ on many points, but it is clear that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Harald was regarded as having unified Norway into one kingdom.
Since the nineteenth century, when Norway was in a personal union with Sweden, Harald has become a national icon of Norway and a symbol of independence. Though the king's sagas and medieval accounts have been critically scrutinised during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Harald maintains a reputation as the father of the Norwegian nation. At the turn of the 21st century, a few historians have tried to argue that Harald Fairhair did not exist as a historical figure.

Meaning of epithet

Old Norse hár translates straightforwardly into English as 'hair', but fagr, the adjective of which fagri is a form, is trickier to render, since it means 'fair, fine, beautiful'. Although it is convenient and conventional to render hárfagri in English as 'fair-hair', in English 'fair-haired' means 'blond', whereas the Old Norse fairly clearly means 'beautiful-haired'. Accordingly, some translators prefer to render hárfagri as 'the fine-haired' or 'fine-hair' or even 'handsome-hair'.

Historicity

Through the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, historians broadly accepted the account of Harald Fairhair given by later Icelandic sagas. However, Peter Sawyer began to cast doubt on this in 1976, and the decades around 2000 saw a wave of revisionist research that suggested that Harald Fairhair did not exist, or at least not in a way resembling his appearance in sagas. The key arguments for this are as follows:

There is no contemporary support for the claims of later sagas about Harald Fairhair. The first king of Norway recorded in near-contemporary sources is Harald Bluetooth, who is claimed to be the king not only of Denmark but also Norway on the Jelling stones. The late ninth-century account of Norway provided by Ohthere to the court of Alfred the Great and the history by Adam of Bremen written in 1075 record no King of Norway for the relevant period. Although sagas have Erik Bloodaxe, who does seem partly to correspond to a historical figure, as the son of Harald Fairhair, no independent evidence supports this genealogical connection. The twelfth-century William of Malmesbury does describe a Norwegian king called Haraldus visiting King Æthelstan of England, which is consistent with later saga-traditions in which Harald Fairhair fostered a son, Hákon Aðalsteinsfóstri, on Æthelstan. But William is a late source and Harald a far from uncommon name for a Scandinavian character, and William does not give this Harald the epithet fairhair, whereas he does give that epithet to the later Norwegian king Haraldr Sigurðarson.
Although Harald Fairhair appears in diverse Icelandic sagas, few if any of these are independent sources. It is plausible that all these were participating in a shared textual tradition begun by the earliest Icelandic prose account of Harald, Ari Þorgilsson's Íslendingabók. Dating from the early twelfth century, this was written over 250 years after Harald's supposed death.
The saga evidence is potentially pre-dated by two skaldic poems, Haraldskvæði and Glymdrápa, which have been attributed to Þorbjörn hornklofi or alternatively to Þjóðólfr of Hvinir, and are according to the sagas about Harald Fairhair. Although only preserved in thirteenth-century Kings' sagas, they might have been transmitted orally from the tenth century. The first describes life at the court of a king called Harald, mentions that he took a Danish wife, and that he won a battle at Hafrsfjord. The second poem relates a series of battles won by a king called Harald. However, the information supplied in these poems is inconsistent with the tales in the sagas in which they are transmitted, and the sagas themselves often disagree on the details of his background and biography. Meanwhile, the most reliable manuscripts of Haraldskvæði call the poem's honorand Haraldr Hálfdanarson rather than Haraldr hárfagri, and Glymdrápa offers no epithet at all. All the poems suggest is that there was once a king called Haraldr.
Sources from the British Isles which are independent of the Icelandic saga-tradition, and are mostly earlier than the sagas, do attest to a king whose name corresponds to the Old Norse name Haraldr inn hárfagri—but they use this name of the well attested Haraldr Sigurðarson. These sources include manuscript D of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the related histories by Orderic Vitalis, John of Worcester, and William of Malmesbury ; Marianus Scotus of Mainz ; and the Life of Gruffydd ap Cynan.

Scholarly consensus on Harald's historicity now falls into two camps. One suggests that the medieval Icelandic and Norwegian historiography of Harald Fairhair is part of an origin myth created to explain the settlement of Iceland, perhaps in which a cognomen of Haraldr Sigurðarson was transferred to a fictitious early king of all Norway. Sverrir Jakobsson has suggested that the idea of Iceland being settled by people fleeing an overbearing Norwegian monarch actually reflects the anxieties of Iceland in the early thirteenth century, when the island was indeed coming under Norwegian dominance. He has also suggested that the legend of Harald Fairhair developed in the twelfth century to enable Norwegian kings, who were then promoting the idea of primogeniture over the older custom of agnatic succession, to claim that their ancestors had had a right to Norway by lineal descent from the country's supposed first king.
One possibility advanced is that Harald Fairhair was based on a historical king called Harald, perhaps also known as "hárfagri", who ruled Vestlandet. The legend of this Harald later grew into the figure of medieval tradition. Historians who accept the early dating of skaldic poetry such as Claus Krag and Hans Jacob Orning tend to accept Harald's existence, while remaining skeptical regarding the saga accounts. In 2015, Hans Jacob Orning, building on then-recent archaeology and Krag's work, argued that Harald was based in Sogn, an area which the medieval Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson associated with Harald, and which was a centre of power in the ninth century. In the skaldic poetry the estates mentioned match a convenient network of estates with about a day's traveling distance between them, which would be ideal for a king ruling in Vestlandet, but not all of Norway. This reading could be consistent with the Historia Norwegiæ's account. While it is possible that Harald could have controlled other areas through jarls and client kings, this is difficult to prove with available archeology. Krag has noted that Snorri's account of Harald's origin in Vestfold might have been propaganda as the area of Viken was disputed between the Norwegian and Danish crown in the thirteenth century. Krag points of that Othere describes Viken as Danish territory and Hrafnsmál's description of the battle of Hafrsfjord suggest that Harald was attacked by "eastern" enemies that were routed and fled back east. He proposes that the battle was not part of a war of conquest but Harald defending his own territory from invaders. This idea offers a very different reading of the poem where its references to the dróttin Norðmanna might have originally meant referred to the leader of the Norwegians in the battle, but later recontextualised as the lord of all Norwegians.

Attestations

Harald is mentioned in several sagas, some which quotes supposedly older skaldic poetry. If the linguistic dating of the poems are correct, they represent the earliest accounts of Harald Fairhair.

''Hrafnsmál''

Hrafnsmál, also known as Haraldskvæði, is a fragmentary skaldic poem generally accepted as being written by the 9th-century skald Þorbjörn Hornklofi. There does not exist a complete copy of the poem, and modern editions of the poem are based on the compilation of the segments. Through dating of the parts as well as the meter is consistent, they may be separate compositions but scholarly consensus is indecisive. Part of the poem is cited by Snorri in Heimskringla as a source for his narrative of the Battle of Hafrsfjord, while another is cited in Fagrskinna as information about Harald. Both credits Hornklofi as the composer.
Hrafnsmál largely consists of a conversation between an unnamed valkyrie and a raven; the two discuss the life and martial deeds of Harald Fairhair. The bulk of the poem seems to describe the Battle of Hafrsfjord, were Harald faced off against Kjotve the Rich and Hakláng. The poem includes elements ubiquitous to later tellings of the king: Harald is described as the son of a Halfdan and an Yngling, but does not use his famous nickname hárfagri, but uses his widely cited previous nickname Lufa. The poem mentions Ragnhild, who in Heimskringla is presented as Harald's queen and mother of Eirik Bloodaxe, as well as the following of ulfheðnar warriors that the saga tradition ascribes to Harald.

''Glymdrápa''

Like Hrafnsmál, Glymdrápa is a praise poem attributed to Þorbjörn Hornklofi about various battles won by Harald. It is dated to the late 9th century, but an exact dating is difficult and due to its fragmentary presentation it may be a compilation of unrelated stanzas. Unlike Hrafnsmál its relation to Harald and the events it supposedly relates to in Heimskringla is ambiguous.