The first news of Vestfold comes not from Norway but from the Frankish Empire. In 813 the Frankish royal annals note that two Danish kings had gone with an army to "Westarfolda" because the chiefs and people there refused to obey. That is the key to this landscape on the western shore of the Oslofjord: magnificent ship burials, the oldest trading place in Norway, a royal genealogy with a god at its head – and over everything the long shadow of Denmark. We go through the sources in turn and separate what has been dug up, what has been written and what is merely supposed.
Vestfold is the landscape west of the mouth of the Oslofjord, from Horten in the north to Larvik in the south. Flat, fertile land, sheltered bays, short sea roads to the south. From here Jutland was a few days away; Trøndelag took weeks. The name says as much: it means the land west of the Fold, as the Oslofjord was called in Old Norse.
That position explains almost everything that follows. In the ninth century Vestfold was one of the richest districts in Scandinavia, and it looked south. No other Norwegian county has left so many traces of the Viking Age. The most famous finds of Viking Age Norway come from here: the Oseberg ship, laid in a burial mound in 834, and the Gokstad ship from a grave around 900. Each has its own article. This one is about the people who left them, and the question of whom they obeyed.
Vestfold is a good example of a landscape whose history consists of three layers that do not mesh. The first layer is the ground: graves, halls, trading places, ships. It is hard but anonymous. No find carries a king's name. The second layer is testimony from outside, brief and contemporary: the Frankish annals of 813 and Ohthere's report from the late ninth century. The third is native storytelling, which supplies names but was written down late: the Ynglingatal, whose age is disputed, and Snorri's kings' sagas, composed around 1230.
The history of research mirrors this. In the nineteenth century Nicolay Nicolaysen, head of the Norwegian society for the preservation of ancient monuments, dug at Borre, Gokstad and Kaupang. In the twentieth, archaeologists such as Anton Wilhelm Brøgger tried to link graves to kings of the sagas; Brøgger saw Olaf Geirstad-Alf in the man of Gokstad and Queen Åsa in the woman of Oseberg. Since the 1990s dating methods such as dendrochronology have curbed such equations, and the Kaupang project of the University of Oslo under Dagfinn Skre has redrawn the town. In textual scholarship Claus Krag questioned the Ynglingatal as a work of the twelfth century; the debate continues.
The Frankish royal annals report for the year 813 that the Danish kings Harald and Reginfrid were not at home when Frankish envoys arrived. They had gone with an army to Westarfolda, roughly the outermost region of their realm, between north and west, whose chiefs and people refused to submit to them. The kings subdued them and returned – and were promptly driven out of the country by the sons of King Godfred.
That is the oldest written mention of Vestfold, and it says two things. First: from the point of view of the Frankish court, Vestfold belonged to the realm of the Danish kings. Second: the people there did not necessarily see it the same way. Both will accompany us through the whole century.
Eighty years later a man from the far north sat at the court of King Alfred of Wessex and described his travels: Ohthere of Hålogaland. His report, set down in Old English, names a port in the south of Norway:
Þonne is ān port on sūðeweardum þǣm lande, þone man hǣt Sciringeshēal.
"Then there is a trading place in the southern part of the land, which is called Sciringes heal."Ohthere's report, inserted into the Old English Orosius, late ninth century (our own translation)
From there, says Ohthere, he sailed to Hedeby in five days, with Denmark on his port side. More about that port in the article on Hedeby. The name Sciringes heal corresponds to Old Norse Skíringssalr, "Skiring's hall". At Tjølling near Larvik the name is attested into the late Middle Ages. That the trading place is Kaupang is today considered very probable. It is not entirely undisputed, since no find carries the name; but position, date and importance fit, and no other candidate presents itself.
A few kilometres from the hall, on the Viksfjord, lies Kaupang, Old Norse "market harbour" (from kaup, "trade", and angr, "inlet"). As early as 1867 Nicolay Nicolaysen examined burial mounds there; he mapped a cemetery, opened 79 mounds and found a cremation cemetery mostly of the tenth century. From 1947 Charlotte Blindheim excavated graves and parts of the settlement over decades, publishing her last work in 1999. The present picture, however, comes from the Kaupang project of the University of Oslo under Dagfinn Skre, which began in 1997, dug on site from 2000 to 2003 and published its results between 2007 and 2011 in three volumes.
According to Skre, Kaupang was founded around 800, with staked-out plots along the shore on which houses and workshops stood. Around a hundred thousand individual finds came to light. Smiths, bead-makers and amber carvers worked here, and trade was carried on with weights and hacksilver. Among the finds are Arabic silver coins, a gold coin from Dorestad (an old piece from the mid-7th century), hundreds of glass beads, Frankish glass, pottery from the Continent, soapstone from Norway's mountains and iron from the interior. Estimates of the population go up to about a thousand people, which should be read as an upper figure for the busy season. The place lived by exchanging goods from the north for goods from the south. It was permanently settled until about 930, with limited activity probably lasting to 960/980; Skre links that with a change in the religious and political order of the region.
The trading place had a centre of power in its hinterland. At Huseby, not far from the shore, a large hall more than thirty metres long was excavated in 2000 and 2001; it stood from about the middle of the eighth century until about 900. With it go an assembly site and, according to later tradition, a sacrificial feast to which people came from the whole Viken region. We discuss assembly places of this kind in the pieces on the thing and on thing sites.
Who ruled here we do not know. A ruler who controlled a harbour, a hall and an assembly place at once combined economic, legal and religious power in one spot. That the place recurs in two separate witnesses – in the name Sciringes heal and in the Skíringssalr of the saga – is something of an anchor for Vestfold.
In the north of Vestfold, near Horten, lies the cemetery of Borre: seven large and more than twenty smaller burial mounds, plus cairns. The oldest mounds go back to about 600, to the Merovingian period and well before the Viking Age; excavations by Bjørn Myhre in 1989–1991 showed this. Here power was displayed over centuries.
In 1852 road builders used one of the large mounds as a gravel pit and destroyed a ship burial in the process. Nicolaysen rescued what could be saved: weapons, riding gear, fittings. Among them were gilded bronze fittings from a horse harness with an ornament of interlocking ring-chains and animals that grasp with their paws at everything around them. Art history names a whole style after these pieces: the Borre style, in use roughly from the middle of the ninth to the second half of the tenth century and spread from Iceland to Russia. More in our overview of Viking Age art styles.
Since 2007 ground-penetrating radar has revealed the plans of large halls at Borre, first by the Swedish National Heritage Board, in 2013 by a large-scale survey of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute with the Vestfold county heritage service. A study published in Antiquity in 2020 describes three buildings, the largest about 63 metres long. Two of them date before the Viking Age; the third is undated. In March 2019 archaeologists also reported radar results pointing to a further, not yet excavated ship burial. The mounds therefore did not stand alone in the landscape but beside halls in which people feasted, took counsel and ruled.
Anyone who wants to name the kings of Vestfold ends up with the Ynglingatal. The poem is ascribed to the skald Þjóðólfr of Hvinir and lists in 27 stanzas the ancestors of a King Rǫgnvaldr back to the Ynglings in Uppsala and the god Freyr. For each king it gives death and grave, and two of the graves lie in Vestfold:
Ok Skereið í Skíringssal of brynjalfs beinum drúpir.
"And Skereið in Skiringssal bows over the bones of the mail-elf."Ynglingatal, stanza on Hálfdan hvítbeinn, quoted in Snorri Sturluson, Ynglinga saga, ch. 44 (our own translation)
Ok buðlung á Borrói sigrhafendr síðan fǫlu.
"And the prince the victorious then laid to rest at Borre."Ynglingatal, stanza on Hálfdan inn mildi, quoted in Ynglinga saga, ch. 47 (our own translation)
That looks like a find: royal graves at Borre and Skiringssal, attested in a ninth-century poem. The problem is "ninth-century". Gustav Neckel had already suggested a late origin in 1908; the Norwegian historian Claus Krag argued in 1990 and 1991 that the poem arose in the twelfth century, when the Norwegian royal house needed a dignified pedigree. Others, among them Dagfinn Skre and Olof Sundqvist, hold to a Viking Age origin: Skre among other reasons because the place-names in the poem had weight only in that period, Sundqvist because he assumes an older tradition composed in the tenth century. Svante Norr and Bjørn Myhre mediate: the poem was sung for centuries and changed in the process. The debate is undecided.
Even if the poem is old, it does not say which king lies in which mound in a way that could be dug up. Matching the Borre mounds to individual Yngling kings is described even in the specialist literature as "at best educated guessing". And the line from these kings to Harald Fairhair that Snorri draws is exactly the point where genealogy turns into politics.
Between the mounds of Borre and the trading place of Kaupang lies the Oseberg mound near Tønsberg. Gabriel Gustafson and Haakon Shetelig excavated it in 1904 and 1905. The dendrochronological study by Niels Bonde and Arne Emil Christensen (1993) dates the timbers of the burial chamber to the autumn of 834. The ship was about 22 metres long, and the chamber held the skeletons of two women. The elder was about eighty and suffered from severe arthritis; the younger was first estimated at 25 to 30, but tooth-root analysis points to 50 to 55. Her broken collarbone had been healing for weeks before death, so it is no evidence of sacrifice. Both ate mainly meat. Whether the women were related could not be settled by DNA.
The grave goods are legendary: four richly decorated sledges, a four-wheeled cart – the only complete one of the Viking Age –, bedposts, chests, textiles of wool and imported silk, the so-called "Buddha bucket". Add the remains of fourteen horses, an ox and three dogs. The grave had been robbed in antiquity; nothing of precious metal was found. Art history names a style of the ninth century after the ship, the Oseberg style. The ship stands today in the Viking Ship Museum on Bygdøy in Oslo.
In 1880 the sons of the Gokstad farm near Sandefjord, digging in frozen ground, struck the bow of a boat. Nicolay Nicolaysen led the excavation. The ship is 23.80 metres long and 5.10 metres wide, has sixteen rowing positions and carried a square sail of an estimated 110 square metres; it counts as the best-preserved longship of the Viking Age. The trees for it were felled around 890, the grave was made around 900. The skeleton belonged to a powerfully built man of 40 to 50 years and about 181 to 183 centimetres in height.
Around him lay the bones of twelve horses, six dogs and a peacock, plus a tent, a sledge, riding gear and three small boats. Gold and silver were missing; the grave had been plundered in antiquity. In 1893 the shipbuilder Magnus Andersen built a replica, the Viking, and sailed it from Bergen to Chicago for the World's Fair; he reported that the hull flexed by up to 18 millimetres in heavy seas and that the ship made about 10 to 11 knots. More on construction and seaworthiness in our overviews of Viking shipbuilding and longships.
Snorri tells in the Heimskringla how Halfdan the Black, father of Harald Fairhair, met his end. In spring he was driving from a feast in Hadeland across Lake Rand when the ice broke. Halfdan and many of his men drowned. He was forty years old.
… the ice broke, and King Halfdan and many with him perished.Snorri Sturluson, Halfdan the Black's Saga, in: Heimskringla, trans. Samuel Laing, 1844 (public domain)
The body was brought to Ringerike, and the leading men of several districts came to claim it: it was divided into four parts. The head was buried in a mound at Stein in Ringerike; the other three parts were taken by the men of Raumarike, Vestfold and Hedemark and buried in their own districts, and the mounds have been called "Halfdan's Mounds" ever since. Why? Snorri's explanation is that people hoped for good harvests from the king's grave. The text does not say which part went to Vestfold.
What is historical here? A king whose body is divided among several districts belongs more to the sphere of narrative that explains why a ruler was revered in more than one place. All that is certain is that around 1230 Snorri reproduced a tradition that firmly fixes Vestfold in the picture of the royal family. With Vestfold as the starting point begins for him the rise of Harald Fairhair to lordship over Norway, with the victory at Hafrsfjord as turning point. How that battle is dated is also treated in the article on berserkers, which quotes the oldest poetry about Harald's army.
Tønsberg in the north of Vestfold claims the title of Norway's oldest town. Snorri mentions the place in the saga of Harald Fairhair and puts it before the battle of Hafrsfjord, which he dates to 871. The town's jubilees were long reckoned from 871 (a thousand years in 1871, eleven hundred in 1971), but most historians now place the battle rather towards the end of the ninth century. The first mention by a contemporary writer comes only in 1130. Excavations in 1987–88 beneath the monastery ruins found Viking Age graves and suggest a farm as early as the late eighth century, which became a town in the early ninth.
On the farm of Haugar the Haugating met, the assembly of Vestfold and one of the most important sites in Norway for proclaiming kings. The name is traced to two Viking Age mounds that tradition connects with sons of Harald I. The royal seat was called Sæheimr, today the Jarlsberg estate. All of that is late in the sources and weak in findings – but the combination of mounds, assembly and royal proclamation is a pattern also seen in other royal landscapes of the North.
Back to the Franks. The news of 813 does not stand alone. Ohthere sails from Sciringes heal to Hedeby with Denmark on his port side and says Hedeby belonged to the Danes. Kaupang's finds point strongly south, into the Danish sphere. From this Skre developed the thesis that Kaupang was founded at the instigation of the Danish king, who was then the dominant power in south-western Scandinavia, and that Vestfold belonged to the Danish sphere from about 800 to 950. His reading of the Ynglingatal plays a part in this, which does not make the thesis any safer. Others see Danish rule in Vestfold from the middle of the ninth to the middle of the tenth century as rather weak and consolidated only at the end of the tenth.
Around 965 Harald Bluetooth had it carved in stone at Jelling that he had won "all Denmark and Norway". For the Danish kings rule over Viken, the land around the Oslofjord, was not a conquest far away but a claim to a neighbouring region that their predecessors had already laid claim to. Whether the people of Vestfold saw themselves as subjects of Danish kings, as allies or as independent men who now and then paid tribute, we do not know. The annals of 813 at least show that they occasionally said no. Even the Heimskringla still knows the tension: when Hákon the Good arrives in Viken, the Danes withdraw.
The border zone between the two realms was not a fixed line anyway. The great fortifications in the south, among them the Danevirke, show how Denmark secured its southern frontier with the Frankish Empire; in the north, allegiance stayed open and depended on persons, oaths and alliances.
Archaeologically documented are the trading place Kaupang from about 800 to about 930 (weaker traces to 960/980), the hall of Huseby in Skiringssal, the cemetery of Borre with its halls, the ship burials of Oseberg and Gokstad, and the finds after which the Borre style is named.
Documented in writing by contemporaries are the news of the Frankish royal annals of 813 about Westarfolda and Ohthere's report on Sciringes heal from the late ninth century.
Disputed is the Ynglingatal: a poem of the ninth century or a construction of the twelfth. Later tradition is Snorri's Ynglinga saga and Heimskringla, with their assignments of kings to mounds and the story of Halfdan's divided body.
Modern interpretation includes the identification of Kaupang with Sciringes heal, the Danish foundation of Kaupang and the question of which king lies buried where.
Vestfold does not need invented kings. It has enough real mounds.
Where is Vestfold? Vestfold lies west of the Oslofjord in south-eastern Norway and extends roughly from Horten in the north to Larvik in the south. The name means "land west of the Fold", the old name of the Oslofjord.
What is Kaupang? Kaupang near Larvik was a Viking Age trading place, founded around 800 and permanently used until about 930, with weaker traces to 960/980. It counts as one of the earliest urban settlements in Norway; it was excavated by Nicolaysen, Blindheim and the project under Dagfinn Skre, among others.
What does Westarfolda mean? It is how the Frankish royal annals for 813 name the region around the Oslofjord, to which Danish kings marched to subdue chiefs and people. It is the oldest written mention of Vestfold.
Who lay in the Oseberg ship? Two women, the elder probably about eighty, the younger about 50 to 55 years old. The equation with Queen Åsa is unproven. The grave was made in the autumn of 834.
Is Olaf Geirstad-Alf buried in the Gokstad ship? That has been proposed but not proved. What is certain is that a powerfully built man of about 40 to 50 was buried in the ship around 900.
Was Vestfold Danish? Frankish sources counted it in 813 as part of the Danish kings' realm, and Kaupang's finds point south. Whether the people there saw it that way is unknown. Scholars answer the question controversially.
For courage. For remembrance. For legends that live on.
The Oseberg ship & the two women · The Gokstad Ship · Ohthere of Hålogaland · Hedeby · Danes, Swedes, Norwegians · Harald Fairhair – the first king of all Norway.
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