Norway's history is usually told as the history of its kings. Harald Fairhair, Olaf Tryggvason, Saint Olaf. But around the Trondheimsfjord, for more than a hundred years, sat a family that often had more say than the kings, without ever holding the title: the earls of Hlaðir, today Lade, a district of Trondheim. They were the kings' allies, their fathers-in-law, their governors – and in the end their fiercest opponents. Behind them stood the people of Trøndelag, farmers with their own assembly, their own law and their own gods.
Go to Lade today and you find a district in the east of Trondheim and an old farm, Lade gård, on a peninsula above the fjord. In Old Norse the place was Hlaðir. From here the earls ruled the land around the Trondheimsfjord, Trøndelag, and at times Hålogaland to the north as well.
In the Middle Ages Trøndelag was divided into eight fylki, districts with their own assemblies, four in the inner and four in the outer part. Together they met at the Frostathing. That is the frame in which the earls ruled: not over subjects, but with a farming population used to gathering and to answering back.
The title jarl means a great man below the king who nevertheless holds power in his own right, not merely as an official. How much power depended on the king. With the earls of Hlaðir it often worked the other way round: how much power the king had depended on the earl.
By their own tradition the family came from Hålogaland, the home of Ohthere. Their pedigree survives in a poem, Háleygjatal, composed in the late tenth century for Earl Hákon by the skald Eyvindr skáldaspillir. It traces the earls through many generations back to Odin himself and his son Sæmingr.
The poem is deliberately built as a counterpart to Ynglingatal, which traces the kings of Vestfold back to the Swedish Ynglings. Two dynasties, two divine pedigrees, one form. That says a great deal about the earls' claims: they saw themselves not as servants of a royal house but as its equals. Háleygjatal survives only in fragments that Snorri Sturluson took into his works in the thirteenth century.
The first earl we can grasp is Hákon Grjótgarðsson, who lived around 900. According to the kings' sagas he joined Harald Fairhair when Harald reached north, helped him bring Trøndelag under control, and gave him his daughter Ása as wife. In return Harald made him earl.
That is the sagas' version, written some three hundred years later from the viewpoint of a monarchy that looked for its origins in Harald. It can be read differently: Harald could not hold Trøndelag without its most powerful family. The alliance was a deal between strong men, not the enfeoffment of a follower.
Hákon's son Sigurd was the most important man at the side of King Hákon the Good, a son of Harald who, according to tradition, had been brought up a Christian at the English court of King Æthelstan. Snorri gives Sigurd a part in the ordering of the law:
Hann setti Gulaþingslög með ráði Þorleifs spaka og hann setti Frostaþingslög með ráði Sigurðar jarls.
"He set the Gulathing law with the counsel of Thorleif the Wise, and he set the Frostathing law with the counsel of Earl Sigurd."Snorri Sturluson, Hákonar saga góða, ch. 11, Heimskringla (c. 1230), in modern Icelandic normalised spelling; English rendering our own
And shortly after, where faith is concerned:
Sigurður Hlaðajarl var hinn mesti blótmaður og svo var Hákon faðir hans.
"Sigurd, earl of Hlaðir, was a mighty man for sacrifice, and so was Hákon his father."Snorri Sturluson, Hákonar saga góða, ch. 14; English rendering our own
Snorri tells how Sigurd held the great sacrificial feasts at Hlaðir, and how the farmers forced the Christian king to take part. At the midwinter sacrifice at Mære, Hákon is finally said to have eaten a few bites of horse liver and drunk the memorial cups without making the sign of the cross over them. That is a thirteenth-century scene. But it shows what people in Iceland told about Trøndelag: here no king ruled against the farmers and their gods.
Sigurd died in 962. According to the saga, the sons of Eric and Gunnhild, who were fighting for power in Norway, burned him in a house at Ǫgló in Stjørdal. More on their father in our piece on Eric Bloodaxe.
Sigurd's son Hákon, born around 935, is the greatest of the earls. Backed by the Danish king Harald Bluetooth, he drove out Gunnhild's sons around 970 and then ruled most of Norway until 995 – as earl, formally under Danish overlordship, in practice largely on his own account.
For Hákon we have something most figures of this age lack: contemporary poetry. His court poet Einarr skálaglamm composed Vellekla, and Eyvindr Háleygjatal. Vellekla praises Hákon, among other things, for restoring the sanctuaries and sacrifices of the old gods that had fallen into neglect under Gunnhild's sons, and for coming to Harald Bluetooth's aid against the emperor at the Danevirke – probably in 974. We have given the poem a piece of its own. Here it is enough to say: Vellekla is praise poetry, partisan, but from Hákon's own lifetime.
Later Hákon broke with the Danish king. At the battle of Hjørungavágr, usually placed around 986, he defeated a fleet which later tradition says was made up of Jomsvikings. Of the course of events we know almost only from sagas and the skaldic verses quoted in them.
His end, in the sagas, is a gallows ballad: fleeing rebellious farmers and the newly landed Olaf Tryggvason in 995, he hides with his thrall Kark in a pigsty at the farm of Rimul in Gauldal, and Kark cuts his throat as he sleeps. How much of that is true nobody knows. Norwegian scholarship regards the stories of his last years as unreliable, but accepts that the people of Trøndelag really did rise against his increasingly harsh rule.
After their father's death Hákon's sons Eiríkr and Sveinn left the country. They came back in the year 1000 on the winning side at Svolder, where Olaf Tryggvason fell. Norway was then shared between the Danish king Svein Forkbeard, the Swedish king Olof and the two earls. Eiríkr and Sveinn governed large parts of the land, once more as earls under foreign overlords.
Eiríkr later followed his brother-in-law Cnut the Great to England and became earl of Northumbria there; English sources call him Yric. Sveinn stayed in Norway and lost to Olaf Haraldsson, the future saint, at Nesjar in 1016. Eiríkr's son Hákon ruled briefly once more as Cnut's governor in Norway, until he was lost at sea in 1029 or 1030. With him the line ends.
The Frostathing met on the Frosta peninsula in the Trondheimsfjord, at a place now called Tinghaugen. Here the delegates of the eight Trøndelag districts gathered, later joined by Nordmøre and Hålogaland. The assembly gave judgment and made law – and it was where kings had to be acknowledged by the people of Trøndelag.
About the law itself one has to be honest. The Frostathing Law as we read it is not a record from the earls' time. The only complete manuscript, the Codex Resenianus, was written around 1260–1269 and burned in Copenhagen in 1728; the text survives only in copies. Its introduction is by King Hákon Hákonarson, and its Christian law shows the influence of Archbishop Eystein in the late twelfth century. Older layers are in there, but they cannot be cleanly peeled out. Snorri's sentence that Hákon the Good set the Frostathing law with Earl Sigurd is an origin story, not a record. In 1274 Magnus the Lawmender's national law replaced the old regional laws.
Trøndelag was the heartland of Norwegian paganism, and the missionary kings knew it. According to the saga, Olaf Tryggvason had the sanctuary at Hlaðir destroyed, and at Mære it came to a trial of strength with the farmers. Olaf Haraldsson is said to have broken up a sacrificial feast at Mære around 1020 and had farmers' leaders killed. That too is Snorri, more than two hundred years after the events.
But Mære itself is more than saga. In 1966 Hans Emil Lidén excavated beneath the floor of the medieval stone church of Mære in Sparbu. He found traces of one or two earlier buildings and several gold-foil figures, gullgubber: small plaques with stamped figures of the kind known from pre-Christian cult sites across Scandinavia. The buildings are interpreted as pre-Christian cult houses; other readings exist. That the church was put on exactly this spot fits a pattern known from all over Scandinavia.
In 1030 the people of Trøndelag took the field against Olaf Haraldsson. The farmers' army that defeated him at Stiklestad came in good part from Trøndelag. It no longer fought for the old gods, but against a king who wanted too much. The earls of Lade were already history by then. The attitude that had made them great was not.
Contemporary evidence is above all the skaldic poetry: Vellekla and Háleygjatal from Earl Hákon's own time, plus English sources on Eiríkr as earl in Northumbria. The poems are praise poetry and survive only in later manuscripts.
Archaeologically proven are the remains beneath Mære church with their gold-foil figures. Hlaðir itself has so far left little archaeological trace as a centre of power.
Later tradition are the kings' sagas, above all Snorri's Heimskringla of around 1230: Ása's marriage, the horse liver, Sigurd's death at Ǫgló, Hákon in the pigsty. The Frostathing Law in its surviving thirteenth-century form belongs here too.
Modern interpretation is the picture of the earls as Norway's second dynasty alongside the kings – well founded, but an interpretation all the same. For courage. For memory. For legends that live on.
Vellekla – the Praise-Poem for Hákon jarl · Olaf Tryggvason – missionary king and the fall at Svolder · Stiklestad – the fall of Saint Olav · Harald Fairhair – the first king of all Norway · Danes, Swedes, Norwegians · The Jämtlanders.
