Björn at Haugi

[1]This account dates king Björn to the first half of the 9th century, as his nephew Eric Anundsson was the contemporary of Harald Fairhair.

[2] Landnámabók mentions a Swede named Þórðr knappr who was one of the first settlers in Iceland and whose father was called Björn at Haugi.

[4][5] The Icelandic scholar Jón Jóhannesson has argued that Björn at Haugi may in fact have been a petty ruler in Norway around the late 9th century, and is consequently not, as often hypothesized in older history writings, the same person as the Swedish king Bern (Björn) in the Vita Ansgarii who ruled around 829-830.

The more original version of the Landnámabók seems to have contained two passages which associate Björn with persons from Sogn and Halogaland.

Though evidence is not conclusive, Jóhannesson suggests that later tradition moved Björn from Norway (possibly Trondelag) to Svithiod due to certain legendary associations, or even since he had Swedish ancestry.

King Björn's barrow in Håga (the Old Norse word haugr meaning hill, knoll, or mound) near Uppsala . The Nordic Bronze Age barrow gave its name to the location Håga ("the barrow") and is probably the source of the cognomen of the king, at Haugi ("at the barrow"). As a result, the mound was in the 17th/18th centuries erroneously named after the king.