The true story of Harald Harðráði: poet, adventurer, Captain of the Varangian Guard, King of Norway, Earl of Northumbria, and last of the Vikings.
Harald Hardrada was a real person who led an extremely adventurous life. He appears in the historical tradition (and language) of several different places: he gets his own book in the Icelandic Heimskringla; he’s in the East Slavic Russian Primary Chronicle; he’s in the Byzantine Greek histories of Psellos; he’s in the Old English Anglo Saxon Chronicle; he’s in the Latin Deeds of the Bishops of Hamburg. Where is the ur-text that all these historians consulted?
The goal of this work is to present the primary source history behind contemporary/popular culture presentations of Viking lore and trope. Juxtaposition and contrast are key stylistic goals for the piece. Readers should consider themselves warned to not be shocked by profanity, violence, gore, or sex. In general we shy away from alt-history, however, if the history is both relevant, juicy, and reasonably plausible (Ibn-Fadlan was a hundred years earlier and hundreds of miles away at a similar river system, Villehardouin and Choniates were a hundred and seventy years later under the same walls), we may take small dramatic liberties and alter the timeline.
This is Harald’s story, as told by the people who knew him, interspersed with live tweets and reaction videos from the protagonist himself. A medieval oral history and a rollicking good tale.