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From: Stewart L Baldwin < >
Subject: Re: Weis : Ancestral Roots, 7th Edition - Corrections
Date: Sun, 6 Aug 1995 21:44:50 GMT
Todd A. Farmerie ( ) wrote:
: In order to spur conversation, I am posting the following corrections/
: additions/ amplifications to The 7th edition of Weis.
[numerous items snipped]
: (243A-15) Regarding the parentage of Halfdan the Black (243A-16),
: Moriarty quotes Howarth, who took the sagas to be generally accurate.
: However, these sagas date from the 12th (Ari the Historian) and 13th
: (Snorri Sturleson) centuries. Since Howarth's work, many internal
: inconsistencies have been pointed out, and the degree to which the accounts
: can be believed has been called into question. The surviving
: near-contemporary works mentioning Gudrod the Magnificent only name one
: son, Olaf Gersted-Alf, while those mentioning Halfdan fail to name his
: father. Finally, these sources appear to place the two rulers in different
: kingdoms of what was later to become a united Norway under Harald Fairhair
: (243A-17). Thus it has been suggested (Steffensen, A Fragment of Viking
: History, Saga Book 18:59-78; Turville-Petre, The Genealogist and History:
: Ari to Snorri, Saga Book 20:7-23) that the sagas written three hundred
: years later invented the clumsy second marriage of Gudrod (with its long
: chronology) in order to unite a new dynasty with the previous one. (This
: would be the same as the process which invented a marriage of Robert the
: Strong to a daughter of Louis the Pious, or made Henry the Fowler a
: maternal grandson of Emperor Arnulf. An example from the sagas is the
: double marriage invented to unite the parentage of Harold Hildetand and
: Sigurd Ring, the later himself a composite of two historical enemies, the
: Sigfred and Anulo of the Frankish Annals. Also notable is the crude
: insertion of a possibly mythical Ragnar Lothbrok and his descendants into
: the Danish, Swedish, and Norse royal pedigrees.)
: The suggestion that Gudrod was identical with the Godefred of
: Frankish Annals (hence died 810-827), made by Howarth, is in conflict with
: the plausible identification of his son Olaf Gersted-Alf with Olaf the
: White of Dublin, son of a Godfrey (fl.870), King of Norway (Steffensen).
: With these questions in mind, the line can not be considered sound prior to
: Halfdan the Black.
: Regarding the mother of Harald Fairhair, the Sagas tell a tale of
: two half-brothers each named Harald, sons of Halfdan by two mothers each
: named Ragnhild (the name of the second later drifted to Thora). As has
: been pointed out by Turville-Petre, this is not likely, but was probably
: invented to provide a connection through Sigurd Hjort to both Ragnar
: Lothbrok and Harald Klak, necessary ancestry for all Saga kings. In
: reality, there was probably only one wife, the daughter of Harald of Sogn,
: who was mother of Harald Fairhair.
[Note: I would like to emphasize that I agree with nearly everthing
that was stated in the above comments. I don't want my nitpicking on
a couple of details to be misinterpreted as disagreement with the main
point.]
The above statement regarding Olaf of Dublin is a bit misleading. The
situation is much more complicated, and involves the identification
(or misidentification) of what could conceivably be three (not two)
different individuals, whose identification as one individual (or even
two) involves some problems and inconsistencies. The sources give the
following:
1. Olaf (Irish "Amlaibh" and other variant spellings), Norse king of
Dublin, son of the (unnamed) king of Lochlann (Norway), who appears in
the contemporary Irish annals. He came to Ireland in 853, and appears
frequently in the annals for the next 18 years. His last appearance
in the Irish annals is in the year 871, when he and Ivar (Imhar)
returned from Scotland with many captives, after which Olaf disappears
without explanation from the contemporary records. (The explanation
given in Three Fragments is not contemporary.) Ivar died in 873, and
Olaf's son Oistin ruled Dublin briefly until he was killed in 875.
The statement that Olaf's father was named Godfrey (Goffraidh) does
not come from any of the contemporary sources, but from a source
variously called "Three Fragments" or "Fragmentary Annals of Ireland".
The statement of Olaf of Dublin's parentage comes from the least
reliable part of the Fragments, and was shown long ago to be of
questionable validity (see sources below). There was a later (tenth
century) king of Dublin named Olaf whose father was named Godfrey, and
there is a good chance that this parentage has been reflected back to
the earlier Olaf of Dublin.
2. A Norwegian king named Olaf, mentioned in a stanza of the poem
Ynglingatal, arguably written in the late ninth or early tenth
century. The immediately preceding stanza gives a king named Gudrod,
and the following stanza names Rognvald. No genealogical links are
given in Ynglingatal, which is primarily a list of names. The
statement that each king mentioned was the son of the king in the
previous stanza comes from later sources, and may be an unwarranted
assumption made by later authors.
3. Olaf the White, whom several Icelandic sources of the 12th century
and later state to have been a king of Dublin who was killed in
Ireland, and son of a certain Ingjald, and a more remote descendant of
the kings mentioned in Ynglingatal. His son Thorsteinn was ancestor
to some prominent Icelandic families. (No source mentioning him is
even close to being contemporary.)
There are several problems with identifying these individuals. If the
Olaf who was king in Dublin during the period 853-871 is referred to
as "Olaf the White", as above (thereby identifying numbers 1 and 3),
then Olaf the White's parentage and death in Ireland make it difficult
to identify him with number 2. Similarly, one of the main arguments
for identifying 1 and 2, has been that their father's names coincide,
but the documentation for both father's names is questionable
(especially number 1). There seems to be no adequate way to identify
all three men without considerable effort to explain away the
inconsistencies.
Sources: 1. Olaf the White and the Three Fragments of Irish Annals,
by Peter Hunter Blair, in Viking III (Oslo, 1939), pp. 1ff., reprinted
in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, by Peter Hunter Blair (London, 1984).
2. (highly recommended) High-kings, Vikings, and other kings, by
Donnchadh O Corrain, in Irish Historical Studies, vol. 21 (1979), pp.
283ff.
Stewart Baldwin
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