According to Snorri Sturluson, the unification of Norway began as a courtship gone wrong. The young Haraldr of Vestfold sent men to Gyða Eiríksdóttir with an offer of marriage; she sent back word that she would not throw herself away on a king of a few districts, and would have him only when he ruled all Norway the way Gorm ruled Denmark. Instead of taking the insult, Haraldr swore a great oath before witnesses: he would neither cut nor comb his hair until that day came. For roughly ten years he went unshorn and unwashed enough to earn the byname Lúfa, Tanglehair, and he spent those years making the boast true.
The war ground north and west through the small coastal kingdoms until the last of the resistance gathered into one fleet and met him at Hafrsfjord near Stavanger, a fight tradition dates to 872. The skald Þorbjörn Hornklofi, writing close to the event in Haraldskvæði, praised the howling berserkers and the wolf-skinned úlfheðnar crowded in the prows as the ships closed. When the line broke, the sea-kings who survived fled overseas and Haraldr held the coast without a rival. Only then did the earl Rögnvald of Møre cut and comb the matted hair, found it thick and fair beneath the tangle, and gave him the name that lasted: Hárfagri, Fairhair.
What Snorri frames as triumph, the Icelandic settlement records read as the reason to leave. Landnámabók and the family sagas trace household after household of chieftains who would not accept the king's new claim on their inherited land and its taxes, and who loaded ships for the empty island in the Atlantic, so that Norway's first king became Iceland's founding grievance. His own family he governed far worse. Among some twenty children by many women came Eiríkr Bloodaxe, who cut down brothers to keep the throne, and Hákon the Good, fostered at the English court, whose rival reigns turned the succession into a generation of feud. Historians now doubt the neat picture: what Haraldr actually left was probably a loose overlordship of the western coast rather than the finished kingdom on Snorri's map, and the vow of the uncut hair has the shape of a courtly romance stitched on three hundred years later.