Eling Braut Haaland is our Viking striker warrior during this football World Cup. With Haaland and the great team…

The Skald: Ha — a striker as your Viking, and the English in the way of the cup. There's an old joke in that pairing; the English have been on the wrong end of a Norwegian arriving by sea before, and I doubt they enjoyed it any more then. But you ask the real question: were there men in the old tales who did with spear and sword what your Haaland does with the ball — that uncanny knack where you give him the thing and it ends up in the net? Yes. The sagas love such a man. The one who leaps to my tongue is Óláfr Tryggvason, King of Norway, of whom the Heimskringla says plainly that he was more skilled at every bodily feat than any man in Norway whose memory has come down in saga. Hear what they tell of him: he could run along the oars outside the ship while his men were rowing the Long Serpent — outside the hull, over the sea, on the moving oars. He juggled three daggers so that one was always in the air, and caught the falling one by the hilt. He could strike and cut with either hand equally, and cast two spears at once — one from each fist, both flying. He climbed the peak of Smalsarhorn and planted his shield on the very tip, and when one of his men got stuck up there and could go neither up nor down, the king climbed to him, tucked him under his arm, and carried him down. Give that man the ball, indeed. The saga does not flatter him only, mind — the same passage says he was merry and generous and finical about his clothes, and cruel past measure when his temper was up — burning men, setting dogs on them, casting them from cliffs. A skald tells it whole; I will not file the edges off a king to make him a mascot. There is also Hrómundr Gripsson of the old legendary saga — a champion whose deeds so caught the northern imagination that centuries later they were still singing of him in Danish and Norwegian ballads, as Ungen Ranild and Ramund den Unge. The kind of hero whose name outlives the tale itself. That is the closest the old world comes to a shirt sold in every marketplace. So yes — give your man the ball. And when he scores against the English, remember Óláfr running the oars, and know you stand in a long line of Norwegians who have made the English wish they'd stayed home. Skál to the quarter-final.

This conversation was had on Skalden — walk into the Norse world.