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Sverre was raised in the Faroe Islands and trained for the priesthood — and then declared himself the son of a Norwegian king and crossed the sea to claim a throne. In 1177 he took command of the Birkebeiner, the 'birch-legs,' the ragged remnant of a rising thought lost. With them, this priest-turned-warlord fought his way up from nothing.
Against every odd he won — until King Magnus Erlingsson fell in 1184 at the sea-battle whose full course the rock of Tønsberg recounts, leaving Sverre sole king of Norway. He ruled in defiance of the Church that excommunicated him, and he had his own saga — Sverris saga — set down partly in his own lifetime, under his own eye: one of the most extraordinary royal lives of the Middle Ages, told almost as it happened.
His end came at a hill. In 1201 he besieged a rebel stronghold on the heights of Tønsberg for five months, until cold and hunger forced its surrender. But the siege took its toll on the old king too — he fell ill in it, and died at Bergen in 1202. The civil war he had fought all his life would outlast him; it was his grandson, Håkon IV, who would finally end it — and build the great castle on the very hill where Sverre caught his death.