The mighty earls of Lade in Trøndelag, counterweights to the kings of Norway and, under Håkon Sigurdsson, rulers of the country in their own right.
The jarls of Lade rose as the great regional dynasty of Trøndelag, the rich farming country around the Trondheimsfjord, with their seat at Lade (Hlaðir). As Harald Fairhair’s descendants tried to build a single Norwegian kingship, the Lade jarls held the north as semi-independent lords whose support could make or break a king. Sigurd Håkonsson was the mainstay of Haakon the Good’s reign, and his family kept the old sacrificial cult at the great temple-feasts.
Their power rested on control of Trøndelag’s wealth and warriors and on the sea-lanes of the northern coast, giving them a durable base independent of the southern kings.
After the sons of Eirik Bloodaxe killed his father, Håkon Sigurdsson allied with the Danish king Harald Bluetooth, drove out his enemies, and by the 970s ruled most of Norway as jarl — at first under nominal Danish overlordship, then in open defiance of it. A committed pagan, he restored the old temples and sacrifices that the Christian kings had attacked.
His authority survived a great sea-battle at Hjörungavágr, where he shattered a fleet of the Jomsvikings sent against him. But his high-handed rule and, in the sagas, his womanising turned the Trøndelag farmers against him, and when Olaf Tryggvason arrived to claim the throne in 995 Håkon was hunted down and killed, hidden in a pigsty, by his own slave.
The house did not end with Håkon: his sons Eiríkr and Sveinn returned after Olaf Tryggvason’s death to govern Norway again as jarls, this time under the Danish king Cnut the Great, keeping Lade at the centre of Norwegian power into the eleventh century.
The Lade jarls represent the great regional lordship that the unifying kings of Norway had to absorb or destroy; their fall marked a decisive stage in the Christianisation and centralisation of the kingdom.