Was Harald Greycloak a good king? Well, I am not impressed with him burning Sigurd Jarl and his followers to death.
Did Norway need kings?
"None ruled over enough land to support his households, guards, and the showing a king must make, the more so in these bad years."
-Poul Anderson, Mother Of Kings (New York, 2003), Book Five, Chapter VIII, p. 433.
So they went in viking to loot other countries. (Vi)kings indeed!
Each region of Norway needed internal justice, external defense and (I suggest) a common store so that the poorest would neither steal nor starve. A Thing could have elected officials to administer public affairs with no such official needing to make a royal "...showing..." Instead, five brothers divided the country and two burned a jarl, thus provoking civil war. The kings needed to see that they themselves were a large part of the problem.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Good points! I was going by what i VAGUELY recalled of Harald Greycloak. But the kind of political system you outlined simply was not in the cards then. What Norway needed was a stable, orderly, and reasonably just gov't, whatever form it took. King Haakon had made a good start in that direction, but it needed to take firm root and be institutionalized.
I have read that one reason for the Viking wars and invasions of roughly AD 800 to 1066 was that population growth had outstripped the technology then available for supporting people. Another, related cause being how defeated kings and chieftains would try recovering their losses by Viking raids. Hence the invasions of England and France and the settlement of Iceland, Greenland, Orkneys, etc.
Btw, the current King of Norway is Harald V (an evocative name!) and his crown prince is named Haakon (another well known name).
Sean
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