Hometown glory? Norwegian library unveils £100k history book donated by Erling Haaland

Rare 16th-century edition of Viking royal sagas given to Bryne by Manchester City footballer and his father

At his local library in the southern Norwegian town of Bryne, the father of superstar striker Erling Haaland made a confession. “Sometimes my son and I are a little impulsive,” Alf Inge Haaland, known as Alfie, told the assembled crowd on Monday morning.

The spontaneous act in question was the purchase of the only surviving privately owned edition of a 1594 book, Snorre Sturlasons Kongesagaer (Snorre Sturlason’s Royal Sagas). The auction purchase for 1.3m Norwegian kroner (£103,000) was Norway’s most expensive ever book sale.

The Haalands then shocked and delighted their local librarian last December with the information that they planned to donate the exceptionally rare book to them so that it could go on permanent display in their home town.

The book was on Monday unveiled to an audience of excited schoolchildren at the Time library in Bryne. Many of the children are in the midst of a reading frenzy in the hope of winning a competition to see Haaland and his teammates play a match at the national stadium in Oslo.

“It’s a cool book with a lot of history,” the Manchester City and Norway striker’s father told the children. He also led a rendition of the Norwegian football team’s trademark Viking row with a drum.

His son, who could not be there in person, was shown in a video interview in which he talked about his interest in Vikings from a young age. Despite not being a big reader, he said that he did read a lot to his one-year-old son.

Snorri’s royal sagas chronicle the history of the Old Norse Viking and medieval kings of Norway, regarded by many Norwegians as a key document of national identity. The stories, about kings, queens, farmers and warriors, were first told orally and then written down by the Icelander Snorri Sturlason in the mid-13th century.

The book is the first printed edition of the sagas in Danish-Norwegian, Norway was under Danish rule between 1536 and 1814, translated from the original Old Norse. At the time, there were no printing presses in Norway, so the edition was printed in Copenhagen and based on the translation of Mattis Størssøn.

The national librarian of Norway, Åse Wetås, said there were no known copies of the book like it. “It is a very special book for everybody in Norway.”

While they have three other copies at the National Library of Norway, none of them are complete. “This is a complete and very beautiful copy of this book from 1594,” she said. “There are some other copies, a few, but we don’t know any of them to be in this good condition. So it is a gem really. A very special gem.”

The book will be on public view in a display case at the library in Bryne and a digitised version of the full text is also available with explanatory notes.

Wetås said the gift was unlike anything she had ever come across and was especially important at a time when reading, writing and democracy were in crisis. “I think that’s the most important and long-lasting part of this: promoting reading, knowing your own history, promoting reliable sources.”

Haaland mania hit fever pitch in Bryne over the summer, when the 26-year-old Norwegian, who was born in Leeds where his father played for Leeds United, led his team to the World Cup quarter-finals. Their record-breaking run inspired visitors from across Norway and the world to visit the town in which he grew up and trained. As well as providing Bryne with yet another Haaland tourist attraction, the gift of the Royal Sagas book has further deepened his relationship with his home town.

Andreas Vollsund, the town’s mayor and Haaland’s former schoolteacher, said Haaland had always been a star in Bryne, but this latest move with the book and reading competition was “next level”. “We now see how good a person Erling is, to do this for his home town. He doesn’t need to do this, he wants to do this.”

Anne Tjørhom Frick, the library director at Time, said she was elated to have the book in Bryne. “It is quite surreal really that someone from a municipality of 20,000 can make such an impact on people worldwide, but also that he remembers where he came from,” she said. “We have had people come here all summer saying: ‘Where is the book?’ But now it is finally here.”

The Haalands’ reading competition, which will measure time spent reading through November and January, had inspired avid participation by the local schoolchildren, she said. On Tuesdays, when school closes at 1pm, she said pupils arrived 15 minutes later to start reading and did not leave until closing time at 6pm. Many of them, she said, “read in almost complete silence, only getting up to go to the bathroom or pick a book”.