ABSTRACT
Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld ‘Troublesome Poet’ grew up in Vatnsdalr near Bllnduóss on the mid-north coast of Iceland. In his late twenties he was in Norway, nursing his feelings for Kolfi nna, a woman who had married another man in Iceland, while composing poems for the arch-heathen Earl Hákon of Trøndelag. His is a curious case in that he was faithful to two rulers of Norway, the second being the arch-Christian King Óláfr Tryggvason of Norway. He became close to Óláfr and converted to Christianity, but the Saga of Hallfreðr which works up his adulterous troubadour story (he saw Kolfi nna when he could) attributes verses to Hallfreðr in which he expresses doubt over leaving his old gods behind. Whether or not these verses are genuine (they are probably not), they preserve an idea of a moody Skaldic lyricist who was unstable in religion as much as in love. King Óláfr is said to have given Hallfreðr his nickname over the mortal scrapes he got into at court. The longer extant poems said to be Hallfreðr’s are more likely to be his, including his Hákonardrápa ‘Eulogy on Earl Hákon’, datable to 994, in the earl’s last boisterous year. Hákon had just defeated an alliance of Danes and other Vikings in the sea-battle of Hjlrungavágr. From what the later histories say about him, in conjunction with Hallfreðr’s words here, the earl celebrated his triumph by enacting the role of Freyr in Skírnismál ‘The Lay of Skírnir’ with the wives and daughters of his subjects. Sacral kingship, the old ideology of a king marrying his land, was one he apparently revived in this practical way, but within a year of this poem the deep resentment of Hákon’s subjects would lead to his ousting, his pursuit through Gaular and his death in a pig-sty, his throat cut by a slave.
