The Coming of the Faith — How Iceland Became Christian

In Norway, Olaf Tryggvason had become king, and Olaf was a fierce Christianizer. He sent out to Iceland a priest named Thangbrand — a hard, quarrelsome man, but learned and bold — to preach the new faith.^[1] Thangbrand's ship came to the eastfirths, and there he began his work.

Njáls saga, in the middle of its long tale of feud and law, turns aside to tell the great story of the age: the conversion of the whole country. It frames it as a thing pushed from outside — King Olaf's will, carried by his blunt instrument Thangbrand — meeting the stubborn, argumentative, half-willing Icelanders on their own ground. The saga does not pretend the conversion was gentle or simple; it shows it as a hard, contested, often bloody business, which makes the peaceful resolution at the end all the more astonishing.

Thangbrand's first great convert was Hall of the Side, a chieftain of the eastfirths, who took the priest in for the winter. One morning Thangbrand sang mass with great splendour, and Hall asked in whose memory he kept the day. "In memory of Michael the archangel," said Thangbrand — and when Hall heard that this angel weighs all the good a man does and is so merciful that he tips the scale for any who please him, Hall said he would like such a one for his friend.^[1] On the priest's promise that Michael would be his guardian angel, Hall was baptised, and all his household with him.^[2]

The conversion of Hall is the saga's gentle, human face of the new faith — won not by threat but by the appeal of a kindly guardian who weighs your good deeds and shows mercy. It is a small masterpiece of how a religion actually spreads: through a single attractive idea, taken up by one well-placed man who then carries his whole household and, in time, his whole quarter of the country with him. Hall becomes the Christians' anchor in the east and, later, their spokesman at the Althing.

Thangbrand fared the country preaching, and at Bergthorsknoll he came to Njáll — the wise lawyer at the heart of the saga — and Njáll took the faith, and all his house with him; but Mord and Valgard the guileful went hard against it.^[1] Flosi of Swinefell took the sign of the cross and gave his word to back the Christians at the Thing.

That Njáll, the saga's deepest and most far-seeing man, embraces Christianity at once is no accident. Throughout the saga he is half-prophet, foreseeing doom and longing for a better way than the endless cycle of killing; the new faith, with its mercy and its promise, fits the man who has spent his life trying to end feuds with law and settlement rather than the sword. The saga quietly aligns its wisest figure with the coming faith — and its schemers, Mord and Valgard, against it.

But not all bowed. Poets lampooned Thangbrand in stinging verse; the heathen Steinvora taunted him that her god Thor had wrecked his ship; and chieftains laid ambushes for him. Thangbrand answered the lampoons and the ambushes alike with steel — he shot a spear through Thorwald the scurvy who plotted against him, and slew a berserk who walked through the heathen fire but burned in the Christian one.^[1] At last his ship was wrecked and his enemies many, and Thangbrand sailed back to Norway, telling King Olaf the Icelanders were such sorcerers that the earth had burst beneath his horse.^[2]

The saga is unsparing about the violence of the mission. Thangbrand is no gentle apostle; he is a warrior-priest who converts by killing those who mock or oppose him, and he leaves Iceland looking like a failure — beaten back, his ship wrecked, the country still bitterly divided. This honesty is what makes the saga's account so memorable: it shows that the new faith arrived in blood and quarrel, and that the real conversion, when it came, came not from the priest's sword at all but from a quite different source — the law.

King Olaf, wroth, seized the Icelanders in Norway and would have slain them — until Gizur the White and Hjalti offered themselves as pledges and to go out and preach the faith themselves.^[1] They came to the Althing with a great band of Christian men and rode in array to the Thing, where the heathen had drawn up their own array to meet them.^[2] Christian and heathen each named their own Speaker and made ready to declare two separate laws — and Iceland stood on the edge of breaking in two.

This is the saga's true crisis of the conversion: not a battle, but a constitutional one. Iceland was held together by one thing — a single shared law, spoken at one law-rock. To have two faiths declare two laws would be to dissolve the commonwealth itself. The danger is not damnation but disunion; the thing at stake is the country. The saga frames the whole conversion as a question of law and peace, which is why its resolution comes from the Lawspeaker and not from any priest or king.

Both sides drew back from the brink, and agreed to abide by the judgement of one man — and the man they chose was Thorgeir the Lawspeaker, who was himself still heathen. Thorgeir lay all that day and the night following on the ground with a cloak spread over his head, and no man spoke to him.^[1] What passed in that silence the saga does not say.

The image of the Lawspeaker lying a day and a night under his cloak is one of the great moments of Norse literature — a whole nation's fate suspended while one man, alone in the dark beneath a wool cloak, thinks. The saga gives no glimpse inside; it leaves the silence intact. That both sides trusted a heathen to rule on the supremacy of the Christian faith, and abided by his word, is the heart of the matter: Iceland chose to keep one law and trust one man over splitting into two warring faiths. The peace mattered more than the victory.

The next day Thorgeir rose and went to the Hill of Laws. He said it seemed to him their matter was come to a deadlock if they were not all to have one and the same law — for if the law were sundered, so too would the peace be sundered.^[1] He took their pledges that they would hold to his ruling; and then he spoke it: "This is the beginning of our laws, that all men shall be Christian here in the land, and believe in one God."^[2] A few old customs — the eating of horse-flesh, the exposing of children — were left quietly standing for a while, but the true faith was brought into the law, and so all the country became Christian.

So a whole nation changed its religion by a single ruling at the law-rock, accepted by all because all had pledged to keep one law. The heathen Lawspeaker who gave the verdict for Christ; the small heathen customs left standing to soften the blow; the entire change accomplished without a battle — this is the conversion of Iceland as the sagas remember it, and as no other people's conversion was ever told. For Njáls saga it is the still centre of the book: the proof that law and the will to keep peace can do what the sword cannot, the very thing the wise Njáll spent his whole life trying to teach a feuding land.