look closer

The king’s head snaps back, one hand going to his throat. Snorri says the arrow took Harald in the windpipe as he fought ahead of his banner, two-handed, wearing no mail.

The Norwegians saw the dust before they saw the army: a cloud on the York road that grew as it came, and under it, glittering, Snorri says, like a field of broken ice, the weapons of men who were supposed to be beaten. It was 25 September 1066 and unseasonably hot, and the army at Stamford Bridge on the Derwent had come to collect hostages, not to fight; the mail shirts had been left with the ships at Riccall, a hard march away. Harald Sigurdsson of Norway had beaten the northern earls at Fulford five days earlier and taken York’s surrender. What came up the road instead of hostages was the king of England, who had marched the length of the country in a week with an army nobody knew was near. Harald had been at war since he was fifteen: wounded at Stiklestad where his half-brother the saint-king died, then east to Kyiv, then south to Constantinople and the Varangian guard, through campaigns in Sicily and Bulgaria. A Byzantine general’s handbook remembers an Araltes, a king’s son from the north who took a middling court rank for all his service and did not complain. He came home by way of Kyiv with a wife, Elisiv, daughter of Yaroslav the Wise, and with shiploads of Greek gold; he traded half the treasure to his nephew Magnus for half of Norway and inherited the rest of the kingdom within the year. Fifteen years of war with Denmark won him nothing but his name, harðráði, hard counsel. England, by an inherited claim, was to be the last throw. He sailed with 300 ships and Tostig Godwinson, the English king’s own exiled brother. Before the battle, twenty riders came out from the English line, and one of them did the talking. Tostig was offered his earldom back. And what, Tostig asked, would his brother give the king of Norway? Seven feet of English ground, the rider said, or as much more as he is taller than other men. Tostig declined to desert his ally, the riders turned away, and Hardrada asked who the man with the fine words had been. The king himself, said Tostig. Harald’s verdict went into the saga: a little man, but he stood proudly in his stirrups. The bridge bought the Norwegians time to form a ring. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in a passage a later scribe could not resist adding, says one Norwegian held the planks alone with an axe and put down 40 men, until an Englishman floated under the bridge in a tub and speared him from below through the boards; the chronicle spends its admiration and never the man’s name. Beyond the river the shield ring held until the king could not stand still inside it. Harald went forward ahead of his banner Land-waster, swinging two-handed, wearing no mail, and the arrow took him in the windpipe. He had composed a verse minutes earlier, called it bad poetry, and made a better one; the saga preserves both. Eystein Orre arrived at a run from the ships with the mail coats, and the last fighting is remembered as Orre’s storm; it changed the count of the dead and nothing else. Harold Godwinson let the survivors sail home on a promise of peace. They had come in 300 ships. Twenty-four were enough for what was left. Peter Nicolai Arbo painted the arrow’s moment in 1870, with the blue tunic Snorri describes and one liberty the sources refuse: his English charge on horseback, though every account has them riding to the field and fighting on foot. Arbo had painted the death of Harald’s half-brother at Stiklestad a decade earlier; with this canvas the brothers matched. Harald’s body crossed to Norway the next year and was buried at Nidaros; the church became a priory, the priory was pulled down, and the best modern guess puts his grave under a paved street in Trondheim. The books like to close the Viking Age at this bridge: Lindisfarne to Stamford, 273 years.