252 Norivay and the Norwegians 



the king fell off. He got up at once and said, ' A fall 

 is lucky for a traveller.' But the English Harold asked 

 ' who the stout man was who fell, with the blue cloak 

 and beautiful helmet.' ' That is the king himself,' they 

 said. Then the English king said : ' A great man, and 

 of a stately mien is he; but I think his luck has 

 deserted him.' 



Of the battle of Stamford Bridge, we only know that 

 it was a hard-fought one on either side ; but that at the 

 last Harald Hardradi and Tostig fell, and the English 

 gained the victory. But only, alas ! to find that Duke 

 William of Normandy had taken advantage of the 

 diversion, and that, his preparations now being com- 

 plete, he had set sail for England. 



We have one other thing to record of this Harald 

 Hardradi beside his career of warlike adventure. 

 This is, that he built the town of Opslo or Oslo, practi- 

 cally the forerunner of the modern Christiania. (Chris- 

 tiania lies almost entirely to the west of the Akers 

 Stream, and Oslo lay to the east of it ; that is the only 

 difference between the two sites.) By this act, Harald, 

 the last of the kings of the old order, took one more 

 step towards the bringing on of the new order of things, 

 the more peaceful age which succeeded in Norway. 



We may count the death of Harald Hardradi as the 

 end of the heroic period in the history of Norway — 

 the true Saga Age, when the deeds that were done and 

 the skalds that sang or the story-tellers who related 

 them were all alike worthy. Heathenism had now 

 disappeared. But it would seem as if the character 

 of the Scandinavian people were formed upon a 



