A royal farm on the island of Stord where Haakon the Good was attacked by the sons of Eric Bloodaxe about 961 and took the arrow wound that killed him.
Fitjar lies on the northern end of Stord, a large island in Sunnhordland on the western Norwegian coast. The name comes from Old Norse fit, a meadow by the water, in the plural — a practical description of the low, green ground that made the site worth farming.
It was one of the royal farms, a kongsgard, and Haakon the Good kept his residence there. About the year 961 the sons of Eric Bloodaxe came against him at Fitjar with a force from Denmark; Haakon won the fight and was wounded in it, and died of the wound.
Early Norwegian kingship had no capital and very little in the way of taxation. The king lived off a circuit of royal estates, moving between them with his household and consuming the produce on the spot, and the kongsgard at Fitjar was one of those estates — the reason a king was there at all, and the reason an enemy fleet knew where to find him.
Remains of the royal manor have been identified in the area. The parish church that stands today was built in 1867, but stone from the older medieval stone church was reused in its foundations and in the churchyard walls, which is the most tangible medieval survival the place has.
The saga account is circumstantial: three of Eric Bloodaxe’s surviving sons landed undetected on the Hordaland coast and surprised the king at his residence at Fitjar, having made the crossing with Danish support. Haakon’s men had time to arm but not to gather in strength, and the battle was fought at close quarters against heavier numbers.
Haakon won it. In the course of the fighting an arrow pierced his arm, and the wound proved mortal — an unglamorous end for a victorious king, and one the sources treat as the whole point of the story.
None of this is contemporary evidence. Haakon appears in no narrative source earlier than the late twelfth century, and the account comes from the saga tradition — Snorri’s Heimskringla and its relatives — written more than two hundred years after the event. Even the year is approximate: 960 and 961 are both given.
That he was wounded at Fitjar is the consistent tradition. Where he actually died is not. The sagas say he was carried from the battle and died at Håkonshella, near Bergen and some distance up the coast — a place that takes its name from him — and Norwegian reference works follow them. Other accounts place the death at Fitjar itself, which is why the archive records his death place there.
Both cannot be right, and the honest position is that the fighting happened on Stord and that the king died either on the spot or shortly afterwards a day’s sail north. He was buried in a mound at Seim in Nordhordland, another royal estate; the mound identified as his was excavated and produced nothing.
His court poet Eyvindr skáldaspillir composed Hákonarmál on the king’s death, and it is one of the finest surviving skaldic poems. Its subject is startling: it shows valkyries coming for Haakon and his reception into Valhalla — a pagan afterlife granted to a king who had been raised a Christian in England and had tried, without success, to convert his own nobility.
The poem is therefore evidence for something more interesting than the battle. It shows a Christian king being commemorated in wholly pagan terms by his own household poet, in a Norway where the new religion was a matter of royal policy and the old one was still the language of honour and death.
A statue of Haakon by the sculptor Anne Grimdalen was raised at Fitjar in 1961, in Håkonarparken, for the thousand-year commemoration of the battle — one of the rare cases where a millennial anniversary can be marked on the ground where the event is believed to have happened.