Dr. Wayne Bartlett

I think he is very much underestimated in the UK in particular because our knowledge of Harold is mainly from 1066 from our perspective.

The thing about Harold is he was a colossus of his time, and he traveled pretty much all over his known world, his known world being perhaps mainly Europe, Scandinavia, obviously, Britain, but also much further east as well, heavily involved in what we now call Russia, right down to Constantinople, as it was then, and Byzantium, even into the Middle East and Sicily.

So he was involved in so much.

He's born in Norway in around 1015 or 1016.

Dates tend to be a little bit vague back then.

But he was born in Rignarik, which is a kind of mountainous part of Norway.

At that time, Norway and indeed all the Scandinavian countries, which we now know Denmark and Sweden as well,

had not quite reached the form they eventually took, but they were fairly well developed into nation states, something which had happened over the past 150 years or so.

So yeah, born into a royal family effectively, and connected very much to some of the great names of Norwegian history, particularly Harald Finehair, the first Norwegian king.

who lived about 100 years or so before him.

So very much connected to important people from day one, but really no one could have predicted quite how extraordinary his life would be.

No, it's certainly still quite volatile.

Although there were the outlines of what we think of as nation states there, because of the culture, the martial culture of the Viking epoch, it was really very unpredictable how long a king would be king, who would take his place when he died, all of this kind of thing.

So it's very much a survivor of the fittest kind of environment.

So I think we should think of the basic outlines of a nation state being there, but very, very unpredictable.

Every time a king died or every time a king was killed even, which was far from unknown, everything tended to go into the melting pot again.

So there was absolutely no guarantee of anything when Harold was born, certainly not he'd be king of anything.

And in fact, the life story which we explore shows that he wasn't actually a king of anything until much later on in his life.

And he had some fairly extraordinary adventures in getting there, but really, really no certainty about any kind of succession on his part whatsoever.

Yeah, and I think that brings us on to a very interesting point, Dan, in that the greatest medieval Viking king, although Harold is perhaps the best remembered and has the most remarkable storyline, Olaf, his half-brother, was certainly the standout figure of the time at that particular period because Olaf...