October 11, 2026
Last week's telling ended with a pair of names and a promise. The names were Gondul and Skogul, and long-memoried readers have met them before: back in №7 they rode past in the Voluspo's roll-call of the choosers, two beats in a drumline of war-words, Skogul "rode next," Gondul after. They had names and no lines. Tonight they get lines. The promise was that one king after the handbook cut a valkyrie out of Harald Fairhair's poem, the same handbook would print a whole poem in which the valkyries do the talking — and it does, at the very end of a saga, at length, with the choosers left in.
The accounting first, because this series keeps its books open. The source on the desk is the one №52 brought in: Snorri's Heimskringla, in Samuel Laing's 1844 translation, a door this series walked through provisionally and still holds open by the latch. And one correction, owed to my own teaser. I called the poet "Skaldaspiller, 'the plagiarist,'" with quote marks around the gloss as if a page had printed it. None of ours does. The byname is usually read as something like spoiler of skalds, and many scholars have taken that to mean the man who borrowed, for reasons you'll see before the night is out. That is a reading, not a translation, and it goes in the telling that way.
Hakon was a son of Harald Fairhair, and he grew up somewhere unexpected: England, as the foster-son of King Athelstan, which is how he came to be a Christian in a country that wasn't yet. When word came that his father was dead and his brother Eirik Blood-axe held the throne, the fifteen-year-old sailed home with English ships and put himself before the farmers at a Thing in Throndhjem. He offered them something his father had taken away: every man's old land-rights, his udal, given back. Snorri catches the crowd's murmur in a line I love, the people saying to each other, two and two, "Herald Harfager is come again, grown and young." (Laing's spelling wobbles on the name in that very sentence. We let the farmers mumble.)
Eirik couldn't raise enough men to fight, so he sailed west and ended up with a fief from Athelstan in Northumberland, ruling from York. The price of the fief was baptism, and Eirik "accepted this offer, and was baptized." Remember that as well. The Norroena editor, in his preliminary remarks, spares him a single dry sentence before getting on with the saga: Blood-axe "appears not to have been beloved by the people." So Hakon reigned, and the country called him the Good. Keep Eirik in mind, though. He's going to come back as a ghost with a poem of his own.
Here is the knot the whole saga is tied around, and Snorri tells it with no visible sympathy for either side. Hakon, a "good Christian" in Laing's phrase, ruled a land that sacrificed. He kept his faith privately at first — Sundays, Friday fasts — and moved Yule to the Christian date by law. Then, once he felt secure, he brought over a bishop from England and asked the farmers at the Frosta-thing to be baptized.
They refused him to his face. Their spokesman, Asbjorn of Medalhus, gives one of the great speeches in the saga: when we made you king and got our land-rights back, he says, we "thought we had got into heaven" — and now you want to take the faith our fathers held "in the times when the dead were burnt, as well as since that they are laid under mounds." Hold to that and we'll follow you as long as there's a living man among us. Push, and we'll find another king. Earl Sigurd of Hlader, the king's great ally and a mighty sacrificer himself, stood up and gave in on the king's behalf.
The price came due at the autumn feast at Hlader. The earl blessed the first horn in Odin's name and drank to the king; Hakon took it and made the sign of the cross over it. A farmer demanded to know what that was. And the earl, thinking fast, did the most Norse thing possible and translated:
"The king is doing what all of you do, who trust to your power and strength. He is blessing the full goblet in the name of Thor, by making the sign of his hammer over it before he drinks it." — Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, Hakon the Good's Saga, ch. 18, trans. Laing (1844)
The cross passed as a hammer, and there was quiet for one evening. The next day they pushed horse-flesh on him. He refused the meat, then the broth, then the gravy, and they were about to lay hands on him when the earl brokered the strangest compromise in the sagas: the king would hold his mouth over the handle of the kettle, where the fat smoke of the boiled horse had settled. Hakon laid a linen cloth over the handle, "and then gaped over it, and returned to the high-seat; but neither party was satisfied with this." Neither party was satisfied. Snorri gives no verdict, and I think that's because he doesn't need one. A king who was fully one thing to half his people and fully the other thing to the other half ended up with a cloth between his mouth and the smoke, and nobody was happy.
Before the saga even begins, the Norroena editor does something odd and lovely. He stops to print a poem Snorri didn't include, a dirge for Eirik Blood-axe, the unloved brother, that the queen had made after he died. It survives, he says, only in Fagrskinna, "the fair parchment" (last week's other book), and he gives it in Gudbrand Vigfusson's prose. It is a fragment and it is magnificent. Odin wakes from a dream of readying Valhal, with benches strewn and valkyries bearing wine, "as if a king were coming." Bragi, the god of poetry, hears a thunder outside that shakes the benches, and wonders if it's Balder (№12's lost son) coming home. Odin says no. It thunders for Eirik.
Then the hero Sigmund asks Odin the question every reader of this series has been asking since №14: if you prized this king so much, why did you take victory from him? And Odin gives the whole Valhalla doctrine in a single sentence: "Because it is not surely to be known, when the grey wolf shall come upon the seat of the god." He isn't cruel. He's recruiting. The wolf is coming, and the best kings are the ones he has to bring home early.
Now the editor's note, which is where the byname comes in: "'Fagrskinna' says 'Hakonarmal' was the model of this poem." Most scholars have read the borrowing the other way: Eirik's poem first, and Hakon's poet, Eyvind, taking its frame (Odin sending for a fallen king, the gods welcoming him to the hall) and building his own on it. Hence the spoiler of skalds, the plagiarist, as the reading goes. I won't settle whose poem came first. I'll only point out what the saga's own pages set side by side: two brothers, both baptized (Hakon in Athelstan's household, Eirik as the price of York), and both sent to Odin's hall by their poets in the same shape of poem. The sagas' Christian kings keep turning up in Valhalla, and it was never the kings who booked the seat.
Eirik's sons came back with Danish ships and, Snorri says, six men to Hakon's one, and caught him at Fitjar on the island of Stord. Hakon threw off his mail before the battle. Eyvind's stanza has the scene:
Beneath his helmet's eagle wing Amidst his guards; but the brave king Scorned to wear armour, while his men Bared naked breasts against the rain Of spear and arrow, ... ... With golden helm, and naked breast, Brave Hakon played at slaughter's feast. — Eyvind Skaldaspiller, quoted in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, Hakon the Good's Saga, ch. 30, trans. Laing (1844)
The golden helmet caught the sun, and every spear on the field went for it. One of his men put a hat over it. That provoked Eyvind Skreyja, uncle to Eirik's sons, to shout, "Does the king of the Norsemen hide himself, or has he fled? Where is now the golden helmet?" And Hakon took off the disguise with a sentence: "Come on as thou art coming, and thou shalt find the king of the Norsemen." Skreyja came on, and the king split him to the shoulders with his sword Kvernbit.
He won. That matters for everything that follows: Hakon won at Fitjar. In the rout, an arrow, one of the sort called flein, struck him under the shoulder. And here Snorri does what last week's raven did. Many people, he reports, say that Gunhild's shoe-boy ran out shouting "Make room for the king-killer" and loosed it. "Others again say that nobody could tell who shot the king, which is indeed the most likely." The historian passes along the good story and then quietly votes for the dull one. Weapons flew "as thick as a snow-drift," and the arrow that killed the king had no name on it.
The wound wouldn't close. They carried him north by ship until he couldn't go farther, and put in at a little hill by the shore, the same hill, Snorri says, where he had been born. He gave the kingdom to his enemies, Eirik's sons, since he had no son of his own. And then he said the thing that makes this post what it is:
"And if fate," added he, "should prolong my life, I will, at any rate, leave the country, and go to a Christian land, and do penance for what I have done against God; but should I die in heathen land, give me any burial you think fit." — Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, Hakon the Good's Saga, ch. 32, trans. Laing (1844)
Any burial you think fit. He handed his own afterlife to the people standing around him. And they chose. They built a great mound at Saeheim, laid him in it "in full armour and in his best clothes," and "spoke over his grave, as heathen people are used to do, and wished him in Valhal." Then his poet went further than wishing.
"In Odin's hall an empty place Stands for a king of Yngve's race;
Go, my valkyries,' Odin said,Go forth, my angels of the dead, Gondul and Skogul, to the plain Drenched with the battle's bloody rain, And to the dying Hakon tell, Here in Valhal shall he dwell.' — Eyvind Skaldaspiller, Hákonarmál, quoted in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, Hakon the Good's Saga, ch. 32, trans. Laing (1844)
(The odd run-on in the second line is how Laing's page prints it: Odin's speech starting mid-line. It's left as printed.)
There's the empty seat that Eirik's poem prepared, now waiting for Eirik's brother. Look at who fills the page. In №52 the valkyrie was cut from the record and the raven's answers were all that survived. In №7 these two were names in a list. Here they're sent by name, with orders, to a particular shore. The poem paints the field (the sword-storm at Stord, the arrow-sleet, "Odin's tempest-weather") and then brings the camera down onto one man sitting in wrecked armour among his grieving men, "Because the king of Dags' old race / In Odin's hall must fill a place." Then a valkyrie speaks, and the dying man overhears his own choosing:
"Then up spake Gondul, standing near Resting upon her long ash spear, -- `Hakon! the gods' cause prospers well, And thou in Odin's halls shalt dwell!' The king beside the shore of Stord The speech of the valkyrie heard, Who sat there on his coal-black steed, With shield on arm and helm on head. — Hákonarmál, trans. Laing (1844)
And he talks back. This is the heart of it, and it's why last week's teaser called this "the interview the handbook kept." Harald's poem had a valkyrie asking questions and a history that cut her questions out. Hakon's poem turns the interview around: the king questions the chooser, and his question is the one every man in every Valhalla story ought to have asked:
"Thoughtful, said Hakon,
Tell me why Ruler of battles, victory Is so dealt out on Stord's red plain? Have we not well deserved to gain?'And is it not as well dealt out?' Said Gondul. `Hearest thou not the shout? The field is cleared -- the foemen run -- The day is ours -- the battle won!' — Hákonarmál, trans. Laing (1844)
It's a lawyer's answer, and a perfect one. You asked for victory and you got it. The field is yours. The poem never says whether the king found that fair. Skogul turns her coal-black horse toward "their green home" to announce him, Odin sends Hermod and Bragi out to greet him, and Hakon walks into Valhal dripping blood and does not say thank you:
`Methinks,' said he, great Odin's will Is harsh, and bodes me further ill; Thy son from off the field to-day From victory to snatch away!' — Hákonarmál, trans. Laing (1844)
(Laing's page never reopens the quote after "said he"; we print it as it stands.) Odin, who explained himself so carefully in Eirik's poem, doesn't explain anything here. He just says "Be thine the joy / Valhal gives, my own brave boy!" Bragi says Hakon's eight brothers are already inside. And the king's last recorded wish, on the threshold of the hall of the chosen, isn't a question about the gods. It's about his gear:
Quoth the stout king, 'And shall my gear, Helm, sword, and mail-coat, axe and spear, Be still at hand! 'Tis good to hold Fast by our trusty friends of old.' — Hákonarmál, trans. Laing (1844)
Let's put the pieces together, because the poem itself never quite does. A king raised Christian, who wanted to baptize his country and couldn't, who held his mouth over a cloth over a kettle and satisfied no one, says with his last breath that he would go and do penance if he lived, and that if he died they could bury him however they liked. His people buried him as heathens bury, in armour. And his poet wrote the rest: two valkyries sent by name, a question answered, a hall door opened. Laing's endnote, on the stanza saying the gods welcomed him because he'd spared their temples, puts it plainly: "Hakon, although a Christian, appears to have favoured the old religion, and spared the temples of Odin, and therefore a place in Valhal is assigned him."
Assigned him. That's the word worth keeping. The Hákonarmál is a poem about valkyries choosing a king, and it is also, underneath, a poem about a poet choosing for a king who had left the choice to others. Gondul and Skogul carry it out, but Eyvind wrote their orders. And the king in the poem is still himself: puzzled, a little aggrieved, and asking to keep his weapons close. Nobody in the poem makes him glad about it. The poem honours him and leaves the argument open, which is more than most dirges manage.
Then Eyvind ends where the poem's real grief was all along, on the living, left behind under the sons of Eirik:
"Sooner shall Fenriswolf devour The race of man from shore to shore, Than such a grace to kingly crown As gallant Hakon want renown. Life, land, friends, riches, all will fly, And we in slavery shall sigh. But Hakon in the blessed abodes For ever lives with the bright gods." — Hákonarmál, trans. Laing (1844)
The wolf again, the same one Odin was recruiting against in Eirik's poem and the same one №5 watched them bind. The dirge swears by the end of the world that the king's name will outlast it. Then it turns to the poet's own side of the grave, where his lord is gone and the land has passed to the men who killed him: and we in slavery shall sigh. Valhalla gets the king. The poet gets what's left. And a valkyrie with a lawyer's wit got the one line in the poem nobody can argue with: Hearest thou not the shout?
New tellings come to the newsletter before anyone else. May your victories be dealt out fairly, may your friends of old stay close at hand, and when someone finally tells you why, may you be able to hear the shout.
Sources: Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, Hakon the Good's Saga, translated by Samuel Laing (1844; Norroena Society edition, 1907), including Eyvind Skaldaspiller's Hákonarmál and battle-stanzas as Snorri quotes them; the Eiríksmál fragment as printed in that edition's preliminary remarks, in Gudbrand Vigfusson's translation (Corpus Poeticum Boreale, 1883); the Voluspo, translated by Henry Adams Bellows (The Poetic Edda, 1923), for №7's roll-call; the Helgakvitha Hjorvarthssonar, trans. Bellows (1923), for the teaser. All quoted texts public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: back to the Edda's own shelf, to the first valkyrie in the Helgi poems. Before this series met Sigrun at the burial mound (№43), there was a king's son who was "a silent man, and no name stuck fast to him." He sat on a hill, nine valkyries rode by, and the fairest of them gave him a name, and with it the news of a sword hidden on an island with a snake along its blade. He answered her the only way a boy with a new name could: what gift comes with it, "for the giving is thine?" Next week, Svava, and the name that came with a sword.