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They were very anxious for an opportunity of distinguishing themselves, so they joined Thorir's forces, and declared that they would be in the thickest part of the battle. They met King Harald in a fjord in Rogaland called Hafrsfjord. The forces on each side were very large, and the battle was one of the greatest ever fought in Norway.
When the messengers returned to the king, they advised him to punish her for her haughty words, but Harald said she had spoken well, and he made the solemn vow not to cut or comb his hair until he had subdued the whole of Norway, which he did, and became sole king of Norway. The decisive battle was a naval one in the Hafrsfjord, near the present city of Stavanger.
Defeated, as we have seen, at the naval battle of Hafrsfjord in 872, the rebel remnant of the Vikings found their return to Norway barred; and those of them who became pirates in Orkney and Shetland and raided Norway as such, were, in their turn, assailed in these islands by King Harald, and destroyed.
After the great decisive battle of Hafrsfjord in Norway in 872, because Orkney and Shetland and the Hebrides had become refuges for the Norse Vikings, who had been expelled from their country or had left it on the introduction of feudalism with its payment of dues to the king, but were raiding its shores, Harald Harfagr, king of Norway, along with Jarl Ragnvald of Maeri attacked and extirpated the pirate Vikings in their island lairs; and, as compensation to the jarl for the loss of his son Ivar in battle, Harald transferred his conquests with the title of Jarl of Orkney and Shetland to Ragnvald, who, in his turn, with the king's consent, soon made over his new territories and title to his brother Sigurd.
They assembled a great fleet of warships and met the conqueror in the Hafrsfjord. In the sea fight that followed many of Harald's bravest men were slain; spears and stones fell about them on every side; the air was filled with the flying arrows as with winter hail. But the king's berserks at length took on their fury and won for their master the greatest battle that has ever been fought in Norway.
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