Debate continues over what caused so many men to leave Scandinavia at around the same time, but is not helped much by the available evidence. Our chief source, for example, for this period of Norwegian history is Snorri’s Heimskringla, written some three hundred years after the events it describes, and Heimskringla’s chief message about this period is the now contested claim that the rise of king Harald Fairhair irritated enough independent-minded people to make them seek somewhere else to live.1 Halfdan the Black’s son Harald Fairhair may have been only ten years old when he inherited the lands of southern Norway around 870. The true power rested initially with his regent, his maternal uncle Guthorm, who led the war-band against several incursions. The most threatening was from a nearby war leader called Gandalf, whose forces were eventually routed at Haka Dale, north of modern Oslo. Heimskringla graciously implies that the young Fairhair fought in some of these battles, but while he took the credit, much of the hard work must have been uncle Guthorm’s.
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