The Men of Møre: Founders of Normandy, Orkney and Iceland
The Norwegian house of Rognvald the Wise, who named Harald Fairhair king. His six sons carried its blood to the duchy of Normandy (the outlawed Ganger-Hrólf, become Rollo), the earldom of Orkney, and a founding line in Iceland — while the home seat passed, through a daughter, to the Earls of Lade. The record and the saga, kept apart.
1. The sea-coast and its name
Møre is the western fringe of Norway — the districts now called Nordmøre and Sunnmøre, a country of fjords and islands facing the open Atlantic. Before Harald Fairhair welded the land into one kingdom, Norway was a patchwork of small realms, each with its own king or earl. Møre was one of them, and its ruler bore a title that would outlast the kingdom itself: the Møre-jarl, the earl of Møre.
The name is the sea. It comes from Old Norse mǿrr, “coastland” or “marshland” — the same family as English moor, mere and marsh, and kin to marr, “sea.” A sea-named country for a sea-going people. Hold onto that, because the sons of this house took to the water and most of them never came back.
2. Rognvald the Wise, the king-maker
The earl who matters here is Rognvald Eysteinsson — Rognvald the Wise, the Mighty — son of the petty king Eystein Glumra, “the Noisy.” In the late ninth century Rognvald was the right hand of the man remaking the whole country.
That man was Harald. The saga tells it that Harald swore never to cut or comb his hair until he ruled all Norway, and held to the oath through years of war, won at last around 872 at the sea-battle of Hafrsfjord. When the work was done, it was Rognvald who cut and dressed the king’s matted hair — and gave him the name that stuck: Harald Fairhair. The man who named the first king of Norway was the earl of Møre.
This is Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, written in Iceland around 1200, three centuries after the events: the hair and the name are saga, not charter. The fact under it is the role — the earl of Møre stood beside the man who became king and helped make him one.
3. Six sons, and a king’s reckoning
The sagas give Rognvald six sons — three by his wife Ragnhild, daughter of Hrólf Nefja, and three by concubines. Two failed early; the other four founded things that lasted. Taken in turn:
4. Ivar and Hallad: the one who died and the one who failed
Ivar was a son by Ragnhild, and he went west with Harald on the great island expedition. He was killed in the fighting in the isles, and nothing else of him survives. But his death is the hinge of the whole tale: it was as compensation for Ivar that Harald granted Rognvald Orkney and Shetland in the first place.
Hallad was given that grant and could not hold it. Sent to Orkney as earl, he found the islands plagued by two Danish vikings, Thorir Treebeard and Kalf Scurvy, who raided and wintered there as they pleased and whom he could not drive off. Hallad gave up the earldom, stepped back down to the rank of an ordinary landholder, and sailed home to Norway — which the saga says the whole country thought a great joke. His failure shamed his father and forced the question of who would go next.
5. Torf-Einarr: Orkney, and the father avenged
With Hallad disgraced, Rognvald called his sons together and asked which of them would take Orkney. It was the youngest who spoke up — Einarr, the son of a slave-woman, the one the family rated least. He offered to go, saying he had little honour to lose at home and that the further from his kin he was, the better he would like it. Rognvald’s answer was a backhanded blessing: given his mother’s low birth he was unlikely to make much of an earl — but he fitted him out with a single ship and sent him west.
He proved the greatest of them. Einarr crossed to Orkney, hunted down the two Danish vikings Hallad could not, killed them, and took the islands for good — founding the line of earls that would hold Orkney for roughly three centuries, down to 1231. He was also a poet, and several of his verses survive.
Then came the reckoning for his father. Harald Fairhair’s sons were a violent brood, and one of them, Halfdan Long-Leg, had fallen on Rognvald and burned him alive in his hall — around 890, with some sixty men — to seize his lands. Halfdan then crossed to Orkney and drove Einarr out. Einarr came back, beat him, and ran him down on the island of North Ronaldsay. There he killed him: the saga says he cut the “blood-eagle” on his back and gave him to Odin, in payment for Rognvald. When King Harald sailed west to avenge his son, Einarr made his peace — he kept Orkney, and in the settlement took the islanders’ odal land-rights into the earls’ hands, paying their fine to the king.
His byname, Torf — turf — comes from teaching the treeless islanders to cut peat for fuel.
6. Hrollaug: Iceland, and a line to a saint
When the sons weighed their futures, Hrollaug was told there was no warrior in him — that his path lay not in conquest but across the sea, and that from him a great line would grow. He took it. He made no claim on Orkney and picked no fight with the king; he stayed Harald’s friend, and the Landnámabók records the king sending him gifts as he left — a sword, an alehorn, and a gold ring.
He sailed into the settlement of Iceland, then filling up between about 874 and 930 as Harald welded the petty kingdoms into one crown. It was the safety valve of that consolidation, the place men who would not bow built a commonwealth with no king. Hrollaug took a wide stretch of the far southeast — the district of Síða — and built his hall at Breiðabólstaðr; the saga has him guided to his ground by a prophecy and his guardian-spirits. From him descend the Síðumenn, the people of Síða.
And because Iceland kept the best genealogical records in medieval Europe, his line can be read straight off the page, in Ari the Wise’s own Íslendingabók: Hrollaug, father of Özur, father of Þórdís, who was mother of Síðu-Hallr — Hall of Síða, one of the great chieftains of the Saga Age and a leading voice in Iceland’s peaceful turn to Christianity around the year 1000 — father of Egill, father of Þorgerður, mother of Jón Ögmundarson, the first Bishop of Hólar, later venerated as Saint Jón of Hólar.
So the saint in this house descends from Hrollaug, not from the dukes or the earls. His is the only one of the six lines that can be followed, name by name, in writing.
7. Thorir the Silent: the home seat, and a line through a daughter
One son stayed. Thorir the Silent — the quiet heir of a line whose grandfather was Eystein the Noisy — took Møre itself. After Halfdan Long-Leg burned Rognvald, King Harald had a blood-debt to settle, and he settled it on Thorir: he let Torf-Einarr’s vengeance stand, gave Thorir his father’s earldom back, and bound him to the throne by marrying him to his own daughter, Ålof Árbót.
The home line did not run on through a son — the sagas give Thorir a daughter, Bergljót, and no male heir. Bergljót married into the Earls of Lade, the great power beside the Norwegian throne, and her son was Hákon Sigurdsson, Hákon the Mighty, who ruled Norway in all but name through the late 900s.
8. Ganger-Hrólf: the Walker, and Normandy
The most famous son is the one Norway cast out. Hrólf was so large, the saga says, that no horse could bear him and he went everywhere on foot — Ganger-Hrólf, Hrólf the Walker. The raid that exiled him was a strandhögg, a cattle-raid on the shore of the Vík in southeastern Norway — inside Harald’s own realm, against the king’s sworn peace. Harald called a thing and outlawed him for life.
His mother, Rognvald’s wife Ragnhild, pleaded for him, and the saga has her speak a verse warning the king that he was driving out a wolf among wolves — a nobleman who would not be safely crossed. Harald would not relent. Hrólf took his ships west and never came home.
What he did next is told by the Normans themselves. He raided the Hebrides, then Frankia, and fought his way up the Seine until the Frankish king Charles the Simple bought peace by granting him the land that became Normandy. Dudo of Saint-Quentin, writing around the year 1000 in praise of the dukes, dates the grant to a ceremony at Saint-Clair-sur-Epte in 911, and tells the famous scene: required to kiss the king’s foot in homage, Rollo — too proud to stoop — had one of his men do it, and the warrior lifted the royal foot to his mouth without bending, tipping Charles flat on his back. The harder proof is a charter of Charles the Simple of 918, surviving in the original, which refers to land already granted to the Seine Norsemen, “Rollo and his companions.” Rollo was baptised, took the name Robert, and ruled as the first of the line.
From him it ran on — William Longsword, Richard I, Richard II — down to William the Conqueror, his five-times great-grandson, who took England in 1066. That the outlawed son of Møre and the duke of Rouen are one man is the saga’s claim, asserted by the Norse and denied by the Danes, who said Rollo was theirs. The man Rollo and the Seine grant are documented; the rest is the saga’s word.
9. The steward and the throne
At Hafrsfjord, about 872, Rognvald combed the matted hair of a petty king and named him Fairhair. Within twenty years — about 890 — that king’s son Halfdan Long-Leg burned Rognvald alive in his hall with some sixty men, and the earldom of Møre passed out of the male line within a generation. What the family built, it built elsewhere. Torf-Einarr’s earldom of Orkney ran from the 890s to 1231, over three centuries. Hrollaug, settling in the Iceland landnám of about 874–930, founded the only line traceable in writing — down to Jón Ögmundarson, first Bishop of Hólar from 1106 and declared Saint Jón in 1200. Through Thorir’s daughter Bergljót the blood reached the Earls of Lade and Hákon the Mighty, who ruled Norway in all but name from about 975 to 995. And Ganger-Hrólf, by the Norse account, became Rollo of Normandy — granted the Seine lands by 911 and named in a charter of 918 — whose line ran down to William the Conqueror, his five-times great-grandson, and the conquest of England in 1066. Six brothers from one fjord in Møre — and their lines shaped Orkney, Iceland, Norway, Normandy and England. Few families have left so wide a mark on the world from so small a place.
The same structure runs through two related memos: the High Stewards of Scotland, who served the king and became the royal Stewarts (The Stewart Line), and the Shakya line of the Buddha, destroyed at home but rising again as the Maurya (The Two Wheels).