Tonight, Erling Haaland and Harry Kane should be playing together, not against each other. Partially because Haaland is a Yorkshireman, born in Leeds, and this Nordic stuff is just an affectation, but also because England and Norway should not be different countries.
With our combined control over the North Sea, we’d have fish and oil beyond our wildest dreams
Back in 1066, as one is reminded by the big French cloth now sojourning at the British Museum, history took a wrong turning. Harald Hardrada should have bested Harold Godwinson at Stamford Bridge. Had he then stuffed Billie the Conqueror down in Hastings, a millennium of Anglo-Norwegian unity could and should have beckoned. Bye-bye tedious feudalism and the grumpy, ungrateful, self-satisfied Frogs; hello social democracy with liberal markets and blonde bombshells.
Gone would have been all this silly French loan words that clog up their dictionaries. Gone would have been our national neuroses about work, hustle and class, replaced with a comforting, if slightly chilly, bath of mandatory long holidays, shorter working hours, and sunny out-door living. With our combined control over the North Sea, we’d have fish and oil beyond our wildest dreams, living standards so high as to compensate for the pints and tabs sin-taxed into unaffordability. Rather than waste centuries in interminable wars with the French, we could have enjoyed a comfortable history of pottering around Scandinavia, occasionally pillaging the Danes and the Scots.
I came to this realisation in my brief few months working as a History teacher. With the Year 7s, studying the Norman Conquest, I did a task about who had the best claim to the throne in 1066: Harold Godwinson (a Jonny-come-lately Anglo-Saxon social climber), William of Normandy (a bastard in all senses but a cousin of Edward the Confessor), Harald Hardrada (a Norwegian warrior king and son of the former King Cnut) or Edgar Aethling, the last surviving male member of the House of Wessex.
For reasons of dynastic purity, I taught that the best answer was the latter. But the boys tended to prefer the three that they had heard of. Within those, they usually opted for Harold or William, as they were the best in battles, and battles are all that 11-year-olds really care about when considering the requirements of an effective monarch. This is one of many reasons why I swiftly ditched their company for the far less grown-up world of Tory MPs.
Their general disdain for Harald was based on the fact he sounds like a loser: turns in Yorkshire, gets beaten by Harold Godwinson, who then gets beaten by William. But as the superb Rest is History on his life details, Hardrada – ‘Hard Ruler’ – was a bit of a legend.
Before becoming king he spent 15 years in exile as a mercenary in what is now Ukraine; he subsequently headed up the Varangian Guard, the personal bodyguard of the Byzantine Emperor. He fought a civil war aged 15, amassed booty across the Mediterranean, and successfully seized back the Norwegian throne before uniting his county and setting out to rebuild Cnut’s ‘North Sea Empire’. He might never have captured Denmark, but he was no slouch.
This alone made me want to make the cases for Hardrada to my pupils. But I also nurtured a great love of Norway. Having visited as a boy on an unsuccessful attempt to see the Northern Lights, I’ve always thought the Norwegians a particularly civilised people. I like their alacrity in extracting oil from the North Sea. I like their beautiful fjords and interesting wildlife, even if they do have a tendency to hit it with a club or put a harpoon through it. I especially like their low crime rates and thriving market economy – the root of the wealth that allows them to pay for all that social protection. But they are missing something: us.
Having recently been to Shetland, I have seen the wonders that can emerge when Norwegian and British cultures overlap: Nordic heartiness combined with British drinking and humour. But the Shetlanders, for all that I adored them, had the misfortune of being conquered by the Scots. Had they been occupied by the English, you would have had all the advantages that those of us saff of the border possess – our greater ambition, our longer life expectancies, our ability to not take ourselves too seriously or cover everything in batter – grafted onto that bold and enterprising Nordic spirit once excellent at raiding Durham monasteries and now deployed scoring for Manchester City.
On the pitch, with Kane, Haaland and Bellingham in tandem, we would be unstoppable at this World Cup. But as a single nation we would be happier and more prosperous, more peaceful and more content – as good at seal-clubbing as tea-drinking. You let us down Harald. You really did.
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