Sveinn tjúguskegg (Forkbeard)

Svend Forkbeard is the king of Denmark who marries Sigrid the Haughty and joins the coalition that destroys Olaf Tryggvason at Svolder. A powerful and ambitious Danish king (and, in history, the conqueror of England), he takes as wife the proud Sigrid, whom Olaf had slighted, and so inherits her enmity toward the Norwegian king. With the Swedish king and the Norwegian earl Eric, he lies in wait to ambush Olaf's fleet on its voyage home from Wendland, and shares in the victory that ends the dazzling king's reign. Svend is the saga's image of the rival Danish power — the king whose marriage to a scorned queen and whose own ambition draw him into the great alliance against Olaf, one of the three lords watching from the strait as the Long Serpent comes up the sound to its doom. The Danish king who helped bring down the king of Norway, and whose line would reach on to take all England.