All through this time and afterwards, till the time of the Tartar deluge, the intercourse of Swedes, Danes, and Northmen with Gardariki was constant and close, and not least in the time of the Vinland voyages, when Vladimir and Jaroslav reigned at Novgorod, and the two Olafs, the son of Trygve and the Saint, found refuge at their court before and after their hard rule in Norway.
Olaf Trygveson's uncle had grown old in exile at Novgorod when young Olaf and his mother fled from Norway to join him there and were captured by Vikings in the Baltic and kept six years in the Gulf of Riga before they got to Holmgard (972).
In 1019 Ingigerd of Sweden was married to Jaroslav; ten years later St. Olaf was driven from Norway by revolt, and flying into Russia, was offered a Kingdom called Volgaria—the modern Casan, whose old metropolis of Vulghar was known to the Arab travellers of the ninth century, and whose ruins can still be seen. Olaf hesitated between this and a pilgrim's death in Jerusalem and at last preferred to fight his way back to Norway.
The next King of the Norsemen, Magnus the Good, came from Novgorod by Ladoga to Trondhjem, when Olaf's son Harold Hardrada fled back to his father's refuge, to the court of Jaroslav; while Magnus had been in exile, men had asked news of him from all the merchants that traded to Novgorod.
Last of these earlier kings, Harold Hardrada, during all the time of his wild romance in East and South, before he went to Miklagard, and after his flight, and all the time of his service in the Varangian Guard of the Empress Zoe, made Novgorod his home. His pilgrim relics from Holy Land and his war spoils from Serkland—Africa and Sicily—were all sent back to Jaroslav's care till their master could come and claim them, and when he came at last, flying from Byzantine vengeance across the Black Sea into the Sea of Azov and "all round the Eastern Realm" of Kiev, he found his wealth untouched and Princess Elizabeth ready to be his wife and to help him with Russian men and money to win back Norway and to die at Stamford Bridge for the Crown of England (1066).
Harold is the type of all Vikings, of the Norse race in its greatest, most restless energy. William the Conqueror, or Cnut the Great, or Robert Guiscard, or Roger of Sicily, are all greater and stronger men, but there is no "ganger," no rover, like the man who in fifty years, after fighting in well-nigh every land of Christians or of the neighbours and enemies of Christendom, yet hoped for time to sail off to the new-found countries and so fulfil his oath and promise to perfect a life of unmatched adventure by unmatched discovery. He had fought with wild beasts in the Arena of Constantinople; he had bathed in the Jordan and cleared the Syrian roads of robbers; he had stormed eighty castles in Africa; he had succoured the Icelanders in famine and lived as a prince in Russia and Northumberland; by his own songs he boasts that he had sailed all round Europe; but he fell, the prototype of sea-kings like Drake or Magellan, without one discovery. Men of his own nation and time had been before him everywhere, but he united in himself the work and adventures, the conquests and discoveries of many. He was the incarnation of Northern spirit, and it was through the lives and records of such as he that Europe became filled with that new energy of thought and action, that new life and knowledge, which was the ground and impulse of the movement led by Henry the Navigator, by Columbus, and the Cabots.
Harold's wars kept him from becoming a great explorer, but Norse captains who took service under peaceful kings did something of what he aimed at doing.
We must retrace our steps to the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan under King Alfred about the year 890, about the time when a Norse King, Harold Fair-hair, was first seen in the Scotch and Irish seas. Their discovery of the White Sea, the North Cape, and the gulfs of Bothnia and Finland was followed up by many Norsemen, such as Thorer Hund under St. Olaf, in the next one hundred and fifty years,[21] but Ohthere's voyage was the first and chief of these adventures both in motive and result.
"He told his lord King Alfred that he dwelt northmost of all Northmen on the land by the Western Sea and he wished to find how far the land lay right north, or whether any man dwelt north of the waste. So he went right north near the land;—for three days he left the waste land on the right and the wide sea on the left, as far as the whale hunters ever go"; and still he kept north three days more (to the North Cape of Europe).
"Then the land bent right east, and with a west wind he sailed four days till the land bent south, and he sailed by it five days more to a great river—the Dwina—that lay up into the land, and where beyond the river it was all inhabited"—the modern country of Perm and Archangel.