King of Denmark (1076–1080), eldest surviving son of Sweyn II, a mild and popular king who confirmed the rights of the common people and reformed the coinage.
Harald III, known as Harald Hen — "the Soft" or "the Whetstone" — was king of Denmark from 1076 to 1080, the first of the five sons of Sweyn II Estridsson to reign in turn. Chosen at the assembly over his more warlike brother Canute, he proved a mild and conciliatory ruler.
His short reign was remembered kindly by the common people, whose rights and lands he confirmed and whose burdens he eased; he reformed the coinage and upheld the popular laws. To the ambitious, however, his gentleness looked like weakness, and on his death the crown passed to the very brother the magnates had earlier passed over.
Harald was born about 1041, the eldest of the many sons of Sweyn II Estridsson, the king who had restored the native Danish royal line after the fall of Cnut the Great's North Sea empire. Sweyn left numerous sons, and it was among these brothers that the crown would pass for the next half-century.
On Sweyn's death in 1076 the succession was contested between Harald and his forceful younger brother Canute; the assembly chose the milder Harald.
Harald's byname "Hen" — a soft whetstone — captured how contemporaries saw him: gentle, mild, and accommodating where his brother Canute was hard and driving. The sources, several written under that same brother's cult, tend to damn Harald with faint praise, casting his mildness as weakness and irresolution.
A fairer reading finds in him a genuinely popular king who preferred concord to coercion. He confirmed the freemen in their rights and commons, refused to press the crown's claims harshly, and reformed the coinage in the people's favour. If he lacked the grandeur and menace of Canute, he governed a peaceful and contented realm — a style of kingship the ordinary Dane had reason to prefer.
Harald's four years on the throne were quiet and, by the standards of the age, benign. He is credited with confirming and protecting the rights of the common freemen — their access to the commons, forests, and shores — against encroachment, and with a reform of the coinage that steadied its value. Later Danes looked back on "Harald's laws" as a golden standard of good, popular government.
He made no great wars and pursued no grand ambitions abroad, a restraint that stood in sharp contrast to the plans his successor would soon pursue against England.
Harald III died on 17 April 1080 after a reign of four years, and was buried at Dalby in Scania. The crown passed to his brother Canute, whose very different temperament would carry Denmark toward crisis.
Harald Hen is remembered as the mild king of the sons of Sweyn — the ruler whose confirmation of popular rights left a fond memory of good governance, and whose gentleness the chroniclers of his sainted brother used as a foil. His brief, peaceful reign opened the era of the Estridsen brothers that would run, through saint and famine and civil strife, down to the founding of the Valdemar dynasty.