Harald in Byzantium

Harald Hardrada was the greatest warrior of his age. Wounded, aged 15, at Stiklestad (1030), the most savage battle ever fought on Norwegian soil, he went on to fight in Russia, Byzantium, Sicily, the Balkans, Asia Minor and Jerusalem. He returned to Norway in 1045 to contest and win the crown and was killed in the battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066.A man of ferocious energy, burning ambition, cunning, cruelty and vengefulness, and a man enormously attractive to women, Harald is a larger-than-life figure and one that has fascinated the poet Kevin Crossley-Holland. In this sequence of short poems, he assumes the persona of Harald during his formative years in Byzantium and writes about his engagement with warfare, leadership and love. Passionate, terse and often witty, these poems - revelations rather than narratives - contrast the glittering hard-edged northern world, still half in thrall to the old Norse gods, with the softer, more seductive south.

Kevin Crossley-Holland is a prize-winning poet, children’s author, translator, librettist, and editor. He won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children’s Fiction prize, and his Arthur trilogy was translated into twenty-six languages. He is the author of The Penguin Book of Norse Myths, Arthur the Always King, and celebrated retellings of British folktales, and has translated Beowulf and many of the shorter Old English poems. His memoir of childhood, The Hidden Roads, revolving around the sanctity and splintering of family, is steeped in the landscape and layers of England, and was highly praised by Rowan Williams, while Philip Pullman has written of his work, “Kevin Crossley-Holland is a master, a magician and commander of the language, the roots of whose work are deeply entwined with ancient patterns of truth and knowledge. I salute and venerate him.”He has collaborated with many leading composers and artists, including Sir Arthur Bliss, Nicola LeFanu, Bob Chilcott, Bernard Hughes and Charles Keeping, John Lawrence, Norman Ackroyd, Chris Riddell and Andrew Rafferty. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Society of Authors, and an Honorary Fellow of Saint Edmund Hall, Oxford. His archive is housed in the Brotherton Collection at Leeds University. He has a Minnesotan wife, four children and nine grandchildren, and lives in North Norfolk.

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