According to traditions current in Norway and Iceland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, he reigned from c. Much of Harald's biography is uncertain. His life is described in several of the Kings' sagas , none of them older than the twelfth century. Their accounts of Harald and his life differ on many points, but it is clear that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Harald was regarded as having unified Norway into one kingdom.
Since the nineteenth century, when Norway was in a personal union with Sweden , Harald has become a national icon of Norway and a symbol of independence. Though the king's sagas and medieval accounts have been critically scrutinised during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Harald maintains a reputation as the father of the Norwegian nation. At the turn of the 21st century, a few historians have tried to argue that Harald Fairhair did not exist as a historical figure.
Through the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, historians broadly accepted the account of Harald Fairhair given by later Icelandic sagas. However, Peter Sawyer began to cast doubt on this in , [ 12 ] and the decades around saw a wave of revisionist research that suggested that Harald Fairhair did not exist, or at least not in a way resembling his appearance in sagas.
Scholarly consensus on Harald's historicity now falls into two camps. He has also suggested that the legend of Harald Fairhair developed in the twelfth century to enable Norwegian kings, who were then promoting the idea of primogeniture over the older custom of agnatic succession , to claim that their ancestors had had a right to Norway by lineal descent from the country's supposed first king. The legend of this Harald later grew into the figure of medieval tradition.
Historians who accept the early dating of skaldic poetry such as Claus Krag and Hans Jacob Orning tend to accept Harald's existence, while remaining skeptical regarding the saga accounts. In , Hans Jacob Orning, building on then-recent archaeology and Krag's work, argued that Harald was based in Sogn , an area which the medieval Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson associated with Harald, and which was a centre of power in the ninth century.
