Ragnhildr

Ragnhild is Harald Fairhair's mother — and the dreamer whose vision foretold the dynasty he would found. Wise and far-seeing, she dreamt, before Harald's birth, that she stood in her herb-garden and drew a thorn from her shift; but as she held it the thorn grew into a vast tree, one end rooting itself deep in the earth, the other rising so high it seemed to overspread all Norway — its lower part blood-red, its stem green, its branches white as snow. The tree was read as her unborn son and his line: the roots the kingdom he would fix, the spreading crown the realm that would cover the whole land, the colours the generations of his descent. Ragnhild's dream opens the whole history of the Norwegian kings — and so, downstream, the settlement of Iceland and the entire saga world — not with a battle but with a prophecy. The mother whose dream is the seed of everything.