Hafrsfjord — Harald Fairhair and the Unification of Norway
The battle of Hafrsfjord, traditionally dated to 872, is treated as the founding of the kingdom of Norway. Harald Fairhair, king of Vestfold in the south-east, fought a coalition of petty kings from the western and south-western districts in a fjord near modern Stavanger. The fighting was conducted from ships lashed together in the harbour, which is how sea battles of the period worked — a land battle fought on decks. Harald won, and the sagas say that his defeated opponents left for Iceland, the Faroes, Orkney and Shetland rather than submit, which is the traditional explanation for the settlement of Iceland. The saga tradition also supplies a motive. Snorri Sturluson, writing three centuries later, has Harald refuse to cut or comb his hair until he ruled all Norway, having been rejected by a woman named Gyda who would not marry a king of a single district. He was called Shaggy Harald until the vow was fulfilled and Fairhair afterwards. The oldest source is not Snorri but a skaldic poem, Haraldskvæði, probably composed in Harald's lifetime, which describes the battle and the ships. What was actually unified is disputed. Harald probably controlled the western coastal districts rather than the whole country, and later kings had to reconquer much of it; the picture of a single founding act owes a good deal to thirteenth-century kings who wanted the pedigree. The date is also uncertain and may be twenty years later. Three bronze swords stand in the rock at the site. Norway celebrated its eleven-hundredth anniversary in 1872 on this date, and had to move the reckoning later when historians revised it.
- Year: 872 CE
- Category: Military
