There is exactly one copy left.

Somewhere in the world there were others, once. Printed in Copenhagen in 1594, because Norway did not yet have a printing press of its own — a country reading its own history in a book it could not print. Four hundred and thirty years later, one copy remains in private hands. Just one.

In 2026 it went to auction. It sold for 1.3 million Norwegian kroner — around $134,000 — the most anyone has ever paid for a book in Norway.

The buyer was not a museum. Not a university. Not a collector with a temperature-controlled room.

It was a twenty-five-year-old footballer, and his dad.

And the man who bought it says he doesn’t read.

Quick Facts

What We Were Told

We know what happens when a footballer comes into money. There is a script, and everyone can recite it. Watches. Cars. A house with a gate.

Haaland followed the script exactly — he just used it on a four-hundred-year-old book.

Then he broke it in half.

Image caption: Bryne, Time Municipality — the town in southwestern Norway where Haaland grew up.

What Was Found

Heimskringla is not a small thing. Snorri Sturluson, an Icelander, wrote it around 1230: the lives of Norway’s medieval kings, the Viking roots underneath them, and the long, violent, uneven conversion of a country to Christianity. Kings, queens, farmers, warriors. It is where a great deal of what anyone knows about the Norse world comes from.

The 1594 printing is the first time Norwegians could read it in something close to their own language. And it had to be done in Denmark, because there was no press in Norway to do it.

Haaland bought the last one in private hands and drove it home.

He gave it to the library in the town where he learned to kick a ball.

Not a national institution. Not Oslo. Bryne — population around five thousand, the place his own street is in.

Image caption: The 1594 Copenhagen printing of Heimskringla — the first in Norwegian.

The Detail That Changes Everything

He attached one condition.

The book must always lie open.

Read that again, because it is not a small request. A 430-year-old book is normally kept shut, in a case, in controlled light and controlled humidity, opened by gloved hands for a few minutes at a time. Closed is how it survived long enough for anyone to buy it.

Haaland said no.

“I want the book to always lie open so that people can read about those who came from where I come from. It’s easier to feel drawn to reading when you can recognize yourself in the people and places being written about.”

And then the line that makes the whole thing land:

“I’ve never been much of a reader. But books give so many more people the chance to dream big, see new possibilities, and find their own path.”

A man who says reading was never his thing just paid more for a book than anyone in his country’s history — and his only demand was that strangers be able to walk in off the street and put their eyes on it.

The Central Tension

Here is the thing nobody wants to say out loud, so we will.

Leaving it open will cost something.

Light fades ink. Air moves through paper. A spine held open takes strain that a spine held shut does not. Every conservator in Norway knows this, and every one of them also knows what it would mean to tell Erling Haaland no.

The book survived four hundred and thirty years partly because people kept it closed. It survived by being unavailable.

And a footballer has just decided that a book nobody can read is not really a book.

Image caption: Snorri Sturluson, the Icelandic poet who wrote the sagas around 1230.

Two Ways to Look at It

The preservationist reading is straightforward and not wrong. This object is unique. There is no second copy to fall back on. Anything that shortens its life is a loss that cannot be undone, and open display is exactly that. Keep it safe, digitise it, let people read the scan.

The other reading is the one Haaland gave. An object that exists only in a vault has already, in the way that matters, stopped existing. A scan is not the thing. A child in Bryne walking past a case and seeing an actual page from 1594, sitting open, in their own town, in their own library — that is a different event entirely, and it cannot be reproduced on a screen.

Both are true. That is what makes it interesting rather than obvious.

It is worth noting he did not stop at the book. Time Municipality and Haaland’s own EH9 Foundation are launching a reading competition for local schoolchildren. The class that reads the most books gets taken to Ullevaal Stadium in Oslo to watch Norway play.

He did not donate a relic. He built a machine for getting kids to read, and put the relic at the front of it.

Why It Still Haunts Us

There is something in the shape of this that will not leave you alone.

A boy from a town of five thousand grows up to be one of the most famous athletes alive. He could keep the book. He could lend it to a museum in the capital and have his name on a plaque. Instead he takes it back to the library on his own street and says: leave it open, so somebody like me can see it.

He is not a reader. He said so himself, unprompted, in the same breath. He is not pretending to be the kind of man who buys sagas.

He just seems to have understood something about where he came from that the sagas are actually about — that a place is made of the people who were there before you, and that most of them never got told.

What would you spend it on, if you had it, and if you had somewhere to go back to?

Sources & further reading: Goal.com · My Modern Met, “Soccer Star Erling Haaland Donates Rare 16th-Century Viking Book Worth $135K to His Hometown Library” · The Viking Herald, “Soccer star Erling Haaland donates rare copy of Heimskringla saga to hometown library” · The History Blog, “Footballer donates Norway’s most expensive book to home town” · CityXtra · Time Municipality / EH9 Foundation.

Image caption: Erling Haaland — who bought the book with his father, Alf-Inge Haaland.