The narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita (1955), Humbert Humbert tracks down Clare Quilty (a playwright and pornographer who abducted Lolita from the Elphinstone hospital) in his house near Parkington and murders him on September 25, 1952. The Battle of Stamford Bridge took place at the village of Stamford Bridge, East Riding of Yorkshire, in England, on 25 September 1066, between an English army under King Harold Godwinson and an invading Norwegian force led by King Harald Hardrada and the English king's brother Tostig Godwinson. After a bloody battle, both Hardrada and Tostig, along with most of the Norwegians, were killed. Although Harold Godwinson repelled the Norwegian invaders, his army was defeated by the Normans at Hastings less than three weeks later. In September 1066, Norwegian King Harald Hardrada and his ally Tostig Godwinson sailed a fleet of 300+ ships into the Humber Estuary. They navigated up the River Ouse to establish a base at Riccall, 15 km south of York. They briefly captured York after winning the Battle of Fulford, but Hardrada was killed days later at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.
Hardrada is an Old Norse royal epithet (Harðráði) that translates to "hard ruler", "stern in counsel", or "resolute". In Russian, King Harald (a son-in-law of the Kievan Prince Yaroslav the Wise) is called Garald Surovyi or Garald Smelyi. In Lolita, Humbert frequently invents ironic, self-deprecating nicknames and epithets for himself (Humbert the Hound, Humbert the Hoarse, Humbert the Humble, etc.).
In VN's novel Dar ("The Gift," 1937) Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev (the narrator and main character) says that his father told him and his sister Tanya stories about Garald (Harold in the English version):
Нет, -- мне почему-то кажется, что я всё-таки помню всё это, может быть потому, что впоследствии о нем часто говорилось. Вообще весь наш быт был проникнут рассказами об отце, тревогой о нем, ожиданием его возвращения, скрытой грустью проводов и дикой радостью встреч. Отсвет его страсти лежал на всех нас, по разному окрашенный, по разному воспринимаемый, но постоянный и привычный. Его домовый музей, где стояли рядами узкие дубовые шкалы с выдвижными стеклянными ящиками, полными распятых бабочек (остальное -- растения, жуков, птиц, грызунов и змей -- он отдавал на изучение коллегам), где пахло так, как пахнет должно-быть в раю, и где у столов вдоль цельных окон работали препараторы, был как бы таинственным срединным очагом, освещавшим снутри весь наш петербургский дом, -- и только гул Петропавловской пушки мог вторгаться в его тишину. Наши родственники, не энтомологические друзья, прислуга, смиренно-обидчивая Ивонна Ивановна говорили о бабочках, не как о чем-то действительно существующем, а как о некоем аттрибуте моего отца, существующем только поскольку он сам существует, или как о недуге, с которым все давно привыкли считаться, так что энтомология у нас превращалась в какую-то обиходную галлюцинацию, вроде домашнего, безвредного привидения, которое, никого уже не удивляя, каждый вечер садится у камелька. И вместе с тем никто среди наших несметных дядьев и теток не только не интересовался его наукой, но вряд ли даже прочел тот его общедоступный труд, который десятки тысяч интеллигентных русских людей читали и перечитывали. Я-то сам и Таня с самого раннего детства оценили отца, и он нам казался еще волшебнее, чем, скажем, Гаральд, о котором он же рассказывал нам, Гаральд, который дрался со львами на Цареградской арене, преследовал разбойников в Сирии, купался в Иордане, брал штурмом восемьдесят крепостей в Африке, "Синей Стране", спасал исландцев от голода, -- и был славен от Норвегии до Сицилии, от Йоркшира до Новгорода. Затем, когда и я подпал под обаяние бабочек, в душе у меня что-то раскрылось, и я переживал все путешествия отца, точно их сам совершал, видел во сне вьющуюся дорогу, караван, разноцветные горы, завидовал отцу безумно, мучительно, до слез -- горячих и бурных, которые вдруг вырывались у меня за столом, при обсуждении писем от него с дороги или даже при простом упоминании далекой-далекой местности. Каждый год, с приближением весны, перед переездом в деревню я чувствовал в себе бедную частицу того, что испытал бы перед отбытием в Тибет. На Невском проспекте, в последних числах марта, когда разлив торцов синел от сырости и солнца, высоко пролетала над экипажами вдоль фасадов домов, мимо городской думы, липок сквера, статуи Екатерины, первая желтая бабочка. В классе было отворено большое окно, воробьи садились на подоконник, учителя пропускали уроки, оставляя вместо них как бы квадраты голубого неба, с футбольным мячом, падавшим из голубизны. Почему-то по географии у меня был всегда дурной балл, а ведь с каким выражением наш географ, случалось, упоминал имя моего отца, как при этом обращались ко мне любопытные глаза моих товарищей, как у меня самого от стесненного восторга и боязни восторг выказать приливала и отливала кровь, -- и ныне, когда я думаю о том, как мало знаю, как легко могу совершить где-нибудь дурацкий промах, описывая исследования отца, я вспоминаю себе на пользу и утешение его смешнейший смешок, когда, посмотрев мимоходом книжонку, рекомендованную нам в школе тем же географом, нашел очаровательный ляпсус, сделанный компиляторшей (некой госпожой Лялиной), которая, невинно обрабатывая Пржевальского для средне-учебных заведений, приняла, видимо, солдатскую прямоту слога в одном из его писем за орнитологическую деталь: "Жители Пекина льют все помои на улицу, и здесь постоянно можно видеть, идя по улице, сидящих орлов, то справа, то слева".
No—somehow it seems to me that I do remember all this, perhaps because it was subsequently often mentioned. In general our whole daily life was permeated with stories about Father, with worry about him, expectations of his return, the hidden sorrow of farewells and the wild joy of welcomings. His passion was reflected in all of us, colored in different ways, apprehended in different ways, but permanent and habitual. His home museum, in which stood rows of oak cabinets with glassed drawers, full of crucified butterflies (the rest—the plants, beetles, birds, rodents and reptiles—he gave to his colleagues to study), where it smelled as it probably smells in Paradise, and where the laboratory assistants worked at tables along the one-piece windows, was a kind of mysterious central hearth, illuminating from inside the whole of our St. Petersburg house—and only the noonday roar of the Petro-pavlovsk cannon could invade its quiet. Our relatives, non-entomological friends, the servants and the meekly touchy Yvonna Ivanovna talked of butterflies not as of something really existing but as of a certain attribute of my father, which existed only insofar as he existed, or as of an ailment with which everybody had long since got used to coping, so that with us entomology turned into some sort of routinary hallucination, like a harmless domestic ghost that sits down, no longer surprising anyone, every evening by the fireside. At the same time, none of our countless uncles and aunts took any interest in his science and had hardly even read his popular work, read and reread by dozens of thousands of cultured Russians. Of course Tanya and I had learned to appreciate Father from earliest childhood and he seemed even more enchanting to us than, say, that Harold about whom he told stories to us, Harold who fought with the lions in the Byzantine arena, who pursued brigands in Syria, bathed in the Jordan, took eighty fortresses by storm in Africa, “the Blue Land,” saved the Icelanders from starvation—and was famed from Norway to Sicily, from Yorkshire to Novgorod. Then, when I fell under the spell of butterflies, something unfolded in my soul and I relived all my father’s journeys, as if I myself had made them: in my dreams I saw the winding road, the caravan, the many-hued mountains, and envied my father madly, agonizingly, to the point of tears—hot and violent tears that would suddenly gush out of me at table as we discussed his letters from the road or even at the simple mention of a far, far place. Every year, with the approach of spring, before moving to the country, I would feel within me a pitiful fraction of what I would have felt before departing for Tibet. On the Nevski Avenue, during the last days of March, when the wooden blocks of the spacious street pavements gleamed dark blue from the damp and the sun, one might see, flying high over the carriages, along the façades of the houses, past the city hall, past the lindens in the square, past the statue of Catherine, the first yellow butterfly. In the classroom the large window was open, sparrows perched on the windowsill and teachers let lessons go by, leaving in their stead squares of blue sky, with footballs falling down out of the blueness. For some reason I always had bad marks in geography and what an expression our geography teacher would have when he used to mention my father’s name, how the inquisitive eyes of my comrades turned on me at this point and how within me the blood rose and fell from suppressed rapture and from fear of expressing that rapture—and now I think of how little I know, how easy it is for me to make some idiotic blunder in describing my father’s researches. (Chapter Two)
Sinyaya strana ("The Blue Land"), as Africa was once called, brings to mind Dr. Blue (the chief physician at the Elphinstone hospital). Dolores Haze (Lolita's full name) is the daughter of Harold Haze and Charlotte Becker (the maiden name of Lolita's mother). King Harald Hardrada (c. 1015-1066) makes one think of harvalda, as the butterfly Vanessa atalanta is called by Zemblans (in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962, the inhabitants of Zembla, a distant northern land):
Line 270: My dark Vanessa
It is so like the heart of a scholar in search of a fond name to pile a butterfly genus upon an Orphic divinity on top of the inevitable allusion to Vanhomrigh, Esther! In this connection a couple of lines from one of Swift's poems (which in these backwoods I cannot locate) have stuck in my memory:
When, lo! Vanessa in her bloom
Advanced like Atalanta's star
As to the Vanessa butterfly, it will reappear in lines 993-995 (to which see note). Shade used to say that its Old English name was The Red Admirable, later degraded to The Red Admiral. It is one of the few butterflies I happen to be familiar with. Zemblans call it harvalda (the heraldic one) possibly because a recognizable figure of it is borne in the escutcheon of the Dukes of Payn. In the autumn of certain years it used to occur rather commonly in the Palace Gardens and visit the Michaelmas daisies in company with a day-flying moth. I have seen The Red Admirable feasting on oozy plums and, once, on a dead rabbit. It is a most frolicsome fly. An almost tame specimen of it was the last natural object John Shade pointed out to me as he walked to his doom (see, see now, my note to lines 993-995).
I notice a whiff of Swift in some of my notes. I too am a desponder in my nature, an uneasy, peevish, and suspicious man, although I have my moments of volatility and fou rire.