Pirates – Alv Erlingsson

Alv Erlingsson plays an important role in the early parts of Sigrid Undset’s The Master of Hestviken series, based on the writer’s meticulous research in historical sources. The tetralogy’s protagonist Olav Audunsson, as a violent young man outlawed and forced into exile, takes service with Alv Erlingsson whom he met in Denmark, and comes back with him to Norway at the time of Erlingsson’s prominence in the Kingdom’s affairs. Audunsson is depicted as speaking of him with boundless admiration:

I was a happy man the day I met with Earl Alf – when I took the oath to him on the hilt, I almost thought I had come home. We would follow him – if he bade us sail across the smoking lake of hell – every man he looks at when he laughs. These yellow eyes of his shine like gems. Small he is, and low – I am a head taller, I wis – and broad as the door of a house, shaggy and brown and curly haired; ay, the Tornberg race comes of a King’s daughter and a bear, they say. And Earl Alf has the strength of ten men and the wits of twelve. And there are not many men, I ween, who are not glad and thankful to obey him – nor many women either-“.

In later parts, Olav Audunsson keeps steadfast to the Earl also after his downfall, and loyally follows him into exile in Sweden, to the great detriment of Audunsson’s own personal affairs – until Alv Erlingsson himself releases him from his oath, to return to Norway and reclaim his ancestral manor of Hestviken and his long-suffering bride.

Also many years later, the protagonist cherishes the Earl’s memory:

You must know, sir, that I was Alf Erlingsson’s liegeman in my youth, and I swore by God and by my patron saint, when I heard the earl had died in banishment, that never would I swear any other allegiance on the hilt of my sword, and least of all to the man who made him an outlaw” [i.e. King Haakon V].