The story
Late tenth century
Scandinavia
The cold north on the eve of conversion
Sigrid Storråda — Sigrid the Haughty, sometimes the Proud — was a Scandinavian queen at the turn of the eleventh century. Daughter of the chieftain Skoglar Toste, she was real, though glazed in legend by Snorri Sturluson’s sagas. She refused, with her life, to be possessed.
When two minor kings came courting her hall with gifts and demands, she got them drunk, locked the doors, and burned the building down around them. The historians call it apocrypha. The sagas call it instruction: to teach petty kings not to come wooing. Vol. VI takes the sagas at their word.
“This may well be your death.”
Olaf Tryggvason of Norway, newly Christian and famously certain, demanded she convert and marry him. When she refused, he slapped her with his glove. Her answer was four words long. She then spent the next decade making it true — marrying Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark, weaving a coalition with her son’s Sweden and a vengeful Norwegian jarl, and engineering the ambush at the Battle of Svolder in the year 1000 that put Olaf at the bottom of the sea.
She lived on as a matriarch of dynasties. Her line eventually produced Cnut the Great. Vol. VI follows her arc in three acts — The Refusal, The Curse, The Long Game — from young queen on the iron coast to the still centre of an empire she designed by waiting.
Album in active production. 11 of 11 tracks released.
