Dr. Wayne Bartlett

He goes away to lick his wounds, again, quite often in Sweden, which has this nice kind of neutral position, recovers his strength, goes back, attacks Denmark again.

Magnus, in the meantime, is quite often being successful in Denmark.

But again, he's not knocking Sven out of the fight.

So Harold sees his role, I think, as being someone who holds the balance of power, but he also sees that as a means to an end.

By deploying that balance of power in a particular way, he can strengthen his own position and gain his own personal advantage from that.

And he does that really quite astutely by, as I say, occasionally changing sides when he thinks the moment is right.

So someone you'd certainly respect for his power, his wealth, the number of men he brings with him, but someone I'm sure that you would never actually trust.

Yeah, it's a very interesting story here because Magnus, as I said, is his nephew.

So they're kind of blood relatives.

And Magnus,

Even then, there was a little bit of a kind of mark of shame, if you like, by trying to get one over on your own family.

Didn't stop it happening quite a lot, but at least superficially, you're supposed to be supportive of your own family.

So the compromise which is reached is that Magnus and Harold will be joint kings and

That kind of sounds a pretty strange idea, I guess, to modern ears, but it wasn't unheard of in Viking society for two brothers or cousins or whatever to actually agree to share out power to some extent.

And Magnus and Harold are bringing two quite different things to this equation.

Magnus is bringing legitimacy.

He seems to have been a fairly popular king.

His father, Olaf, as I said, was made a saint.

So he's a hugely symbolically important figure.

So Magnus brings this air of legitimacy to the arrangement, but he's not particularly rich.