Gripla - 2020, Page 221

GRIPLA220
of Icelandic national mythology.60 Hence it may well be that the “veterans”
from Hafrsfjord and their descendants enjoyed a special status in Iceland,
or at least regarded themselves as distinct from the rest of the settlers, and
that the characteristics of this exceptional branch of people were later, in
the Icelandic historical tradition, generalized to apply to all Icelanders; they
had apparently all resisted the consolidating efforts of Haraldr hárfagri, if
not necessarily at the battle of Hafrsfjord.
There is some evidence to suggest that those who fought against Har-
aldr at Hafrsfjord represented one or perhaps even two petty kingdoms
to the south and south-east of Haraldr’s original kingdom, which most
likely was limited to Hordaland, though it possibly also included Sogn.61
In Þorbjǫrn hornklofi’s Haraldskvæði, which describes the battle in most
lively terms and which was probably composed shortly thereafter, the
skald speaks of ships that came from the east (“knerrir kvǫ́mu austan”, st.
7) and that the “austkylfur”, ‘the east-cudgels’, “of Jaðar hljópu / heim ór
Hafrsfirði” ‘ran across Jæren, homewards from Hafrsfjord’ (st. 11).62 The
last sentence in particular makes the most sense geographically if the home
of Haraldr’s adversaries was somewhere in Agder. We dimly perceive the
contours of a lost kingdom of Agder, possibly also a smaller, conjoined
kingdom in Rogaland, since Haraldr, judging from Haraldskvæði, had
two opponents in Hafrsfjord, Kjǫtvi and Haklangr (both nicknames). In
Heimskringla, there is a whole coalition of kingdoms opposing Haraldr at
Hafrsfjord, among them “Kjǫtvi inn auðgi, konungr af Ǫgðum, ok Þórir
haklangr, sonr hans”.63 This identification is probably only an interpreta-
tion of the poem on the part of the saga author, but in the case of at least
these opponents the connection to Agder seems to be correct. Before the
battle, a kingdom of Agder might have existed side by side with Haraldr’s
Hǫrða-kingdom and the Vestfold-kingdom of the kings of Ynglingatal.
60 See, e.g., Jón Jóhannesson, Islands historie i mellomalderen, 22–25, who admittedly is well
on the way to accepting the “official” version of these events.
61 The reconstruction of Haraldr’s original kingdom is based in part on Haraldskvæði, in part
on the royal estates that the kings’ sagas say that Haraldr possessed. The southernmost of
these, at least Utstein and perhaps also Avaldsnes, he might have won at Hafrsfjord. See
also Krag, vikingtid og rikssamling 800–1130, 84–86.
62 skP I, 100, 106.
63 Snorri Sturluson. Heimskringla I, ed. by Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, íslenzk fornrit XXVI
(Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1941), 114.