Harald Fairhair

Harald Fairhair reigned, according to medieval tradition, from around 872 to 930, pulling together a fractured landscape into a single Norwegian kingdom. What survives of his actual life amounts to fragments: a couple of praise poems by his court poet Þorbjörn Hornklofi, and sagas written three centuries after his death that disagree on basic facts. His sons Eric Bloodaxe and Haakon the Good supposedly took the throne after him, extending a dynasty built on uncertain ground. By the nineteenth century, as Norway chafed under union with Sweden, Harald became a national icon - the symbol of an independent past. But the twentieth century brought scrutiny, and by the early 2000s a few historians began to argue that Harald Fairhair never walked the earth at all.