Erling Haaland donates Norway's most expensive book to his hometown library

Erling Haaland and his father have donated a 1594 first printed edition of Snorre Sturlason's Royal Sagas — bought at auction for 1.3m Norwegian kroner (£103,000), Norway's most expensive book sale ever — to the library in the striker's hometown of Bryne.

Alf Inge Haaland unveiled the book on Monday at the Time library before an audience of excited schoolchildren. "Sometimes my son and I are a little impulsive," he told the crowd, describing the spontaneous auction purchase last December.

"It's a cool book with a lot of history," he told the children, before leading a rendition of the Norwegian national team's trademark Viking row with a drum. His son appeared in a video interview, recalling his interest in Vikings from a young age. The striker, who said he is not a big reader, reads a lot to his one-year-old son.

Why does a 1594 book matter?

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

The volume is the first printed edition of the sagas in Danish-Norwegian — Norway was under Danish rule between 1536 and 1814 — translated from Old Norse by Mattis Størssøn and printed in Copenhagen, since Norway had no printing presses at the time.

National librarian Åse Wetås said no comparable copies are known. "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 National Library of Norway holds three other copies. None is complete.

What does the gift change for Bryne?

The book will sit in a display case at the Bryne library, with a digitised version of the full text available online with explanatory notes. Wetås called the gift unlike anything she had come across, and especially important when reading, writing and democracy are 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 peaked in Bryne over the summer, when the 26-year-old — born in Leeds, where his father played for Leeds United — led Norway to the World Cup quarter-finals. Visitors from across Norway and the world came to the town where he grew up and trained.

Mayor Andreas Vollsund, Haaland's former schoolteacher, said the striker had always been a star in Bryne, but the book and the reading competition were "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."

Library director Anne Tjørhom Frick said she is elated. "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, measuring time spent reading through November and January, has already gripped local pupils. On Tuesdays, when school closes at 1pm, children arrive 15 minutes later and read until closing time at 6pm — many of them, Frick said, "read in almost complete silence, only getting up to go to the bathroom or pick a book".