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were despatched into exile with their families and their lands seized for the crown, a fourth had his tongue severed, while the most frightful retribution was that inflicted upon the fifth. Rorek of Hedemark had his eyes put out and, still being considered dangerously untrustworthy even thus impaired, was compelled thereafter to remain under surveillance in the king’s retinue. Peremptory brutality would also appear to have characterised Olaf’s foreign policy when, having seen off the jarls of Lade and knowing Cnut to be otherwise engaged in England, he still had to contend with the Swedish king Olaf Eriksson’s intervention in disputed borderlands. Armed bands of Swedish officers sent to extract tribute from Norwegian bonders ( bóndi , or yeoman farmers) provoked a stern response, and a verse set down by Olaf’s skald Sigvat Thordsson tells of a full dozen Swedes hanged as a feast for the ravens when they ventured into Gaulardal and Orkadal south and east of the Trondelag.
    The various saga accounts of Olaf’s reign are so heavily burdened by legend as to be profoundly suspect as historical record, even though Snorri Sturluson clearly took greater pains to produce a rounded portrait of the man than did those others whose work merely offers a sanitised eulogy of the martyred saint. In so doing, he was able to place great reliance upon Sigvat Thordsson’s court-poetry as a uniquely informed source of immediately contemporary evidence. Sigvat’s Vikingarvísur (or ‘viking verses’), for example, provides a catalogue of Olaf’s earlier warfaring around the Baltic, in England and in Normandy which was presumably informed by the king’s own reminiscences, while Nesjavísur (‘Nesjar verses’) is the poet’s record of his first attendance upon his lord in battle on the occasion of the famous victory over Jarl Svein in 1016.
    Indeed, and quite apart from the value of his poetry as historical record, Sigvat’s relationship with his royal patron is of particular interest in that it clearly illustrates some of the paradoxes of Olaf Haraldsson’s nature. Sigvat Thordsson had arrived in Norway from Iceland shortly after Olaf’s return to claim the kingdom and, in the way of his trade, sought out the new king at Nidaros to offer verses composed in his honour. As a recently baptised Christian, Olaf strongly disapproved of the pagan associations of skaldic art, so his initial response to Sigvat was less than welcoming, yet the skald was able to win him over and eventually to become his most trusted friend, counsellor and emissary.
    Despite that professed distaste for poetry, Olaf is known to have written verse of his own, and in the form of love-poems, a use of poetry considered beneath contempt by the high standards of the skaldic art but one which bears out his notorious susceptibility to female charms, which he himself described as his ‘besetting sin’ in one of the verses ascribed to him. Olaf’s love-poems were addressed to the Swedish princess Ingigerd, on whom they made so favourable an impression that a betrothal was arranged through the intermediary of Rognvald Ulfsson, jarl of Gautland and himself a Swede, but closely linked to Norway by reason of his marriage to a sister of Olaf Tryggvason. In the event, however, the arrangement was to be thwarted when Ingigerd’s father King Olaf of Sweden – who so despised the Norwegian Olaf that he refused even to use his name, referring to him only as ‘that fat man’ – insisted instead on Ingigerd’s betrothal to the Russian Grand Prince Jaroslav.
    Almost immediately, Olaf arranged to take another Swedish princess, Ingigerd’s sister Astrid, as his bride, but only with the assistance of Sigvat who somehow circumvented her father’s disapproval by travelling to Gautland and there negotiating the marriage (‘among other things spoken of . . .’, according to the