thematic thread
The Coming of Christianity
The turn: Olaf Tryggvason, a harrying viking, is baptised by a hermit-seer in the western isles and sets out to make the whole North Christian with the same force he once brought to raiding.
Baptised in the western sea
It was far out in the western isles, the saga tells, that Olaf turned. Among the Scillies he met a hermit-seer who foretold his future and his greatness, and Olaf, moved and convinced, took baptism there — the raider become a Christian at the edge of the world.[1]
From that moment his enormous energy had a single object. He would not merely be a Christian; he would make the whole North Christian, and he would do it with the same force he had brought to raiding. He sailed for Norway to claim his father's throne, and the country, weary of Earl Hakon, took him gladly. The hunted infant, the eastern slave, the western viking was now King of Norway — and a man with a mission that would reach every saga in this atlas.
The source text · 1
The spring after King Olaf fitted out and manned his ships, and commanded himself his ship the Crane. He had many and smart people with him; and when hew as ready, he sailed northwards with his fleet past. Byrd Isle, and to Halogaland. Wheresoever he came to the land, or to the islands, he held a Thing, and told the people to accept the right faith, and to be baptized. No man dared to say any thing against it, and the whole country he passed through was made Christian. King Olaf was a guest in the house of Harek of Thiottö, who was baptized with all his people. At parting the king gave Harek good presents; and he entered into the king's service, and got fiefs, and the privileges of lendsman from the king.— heimskringla
Olaf, now Christian, begins to press the faith on the land (Laing).
Norway by the sword: wherever he goes Olaf holds a Thing and compels baptism, using torture and threat where persuasion fails. The faith is driven into the land, district by district, not coaxed.
Norway by the sword
Olaf converted Norway with a thoroughness that brooked no refusal. Wherever he came — to the mainland, to the islands — he held a Thing and bade the people accept the faith and be baptised; and where persuasion failed he used the sword, the torture, the threat.[1] The man Raud, who would not yield, he had put to a hideous death; the chiefs who resisted he broke. District by district, by reason and by terror, the old gods were driven out of Norway.
The saga does not soften this. Olaf's faith is real and his methods are brutal, and Heimskringla holds both at once. To the family sagas of Iceland, this is the pressure coming from across the sea — the king whose decree that all his realm and dependencies must be Christian would, within a few years, reach the Althing itself and force the greatest decision in Iceland's history.
The source text · 1
The spring after King Olaf fitted out and manned his ships, and commanded himself his ship the Crane. He had many and smart people with him; and when hew as ready, he sailed northwards with his fleet past. Byrd Isle, and to Halogaland. Wheresoever he came to the land, or to the islands, he held a Thing, and told the people to accept the right faith, and to be baptized. No man dared to say any thing against it, and the whole country he passed through was made Christian. King Olaf was a guest in the house of Harek of Thiottö, who was baptized with all his people. At parting the king gave Harek good presents; and he entered into the king's service, and got fiefs, and the privileges of lendsman from the king.— heimskringla
Olaf holds Things and compels baptism throughout the land (Laing).
And carried to the edge of the world: Olaf sends Leif Eriksson to Christianise Greenland — the very voyage on which Leif is said to have found Vínland. The new faith reaches North America.
Leif and the road to Vínland
And then the widest seam of all. Leif Eriksson, son of Eric the Red of Greenland, came to Norway, met King Olaf, and adopted Christianity, passing the winter with him.[1] In the spring the king sent Leif back to Greenland charged with proclaiming the faith there — and it was on that very voyage, blown off course, that Leif is said to have found the shores of Vínland.[2]
So the king from the eastern slave-market reaches, through Leif, the westernmost edge of the known world. Olaf Tryggvason stands at the centre of the whole atlas: born in Norway, raised in Garðaríki, baptised in the Scillies, and the patron who sends the faith — and, by accident, the discoverer — to North America. No single figure in the corpus connects so many of its journeys, from the river-road east to the coast of Vínland.
The source text · 2
Leif, a son of Eric Rode, who first settled in Greenland, came this summer from Greenland to Norway; and as he met king Olaf he adopted Christianity, and passed the winter with the king.— heimskringla
Leif Eriksson adopts Christianity with King Olaf (Laing).
The same spring King Olaf also sent Leif Ericsson Chapter to Greenland to proclaim Christianity there, and Leif went there that summer. In the ocean he took up the crew of a ship which had been lost, and who were clinging to the wreck. He also found Vinland the Good; arrived about harvest in Greenland; and had with him for it a priest and other teachers, with whom he went to Brattalid to lodge with his father Eric. People called him afterwards Leif the Lucky: but his father Eric said that his luck and ill luck balanced each other; for if Leif had saved a wreck in the ocean, he had brought a hurtful person with him to Greenland, and that was the priest.[62]— heimskringla
Olaf sends Leif to Christianise Greenland — the voyage that finds Vínland.
St Olaf completes the work and makes its great image: he confronts Dale-Gudbrand's heathen men, has the huge idol of Thor smashed before the assembly — the mice and adders spilling out — and the people, seeing their god helpless, take baptism.
Dale-Gudbrand's broken god
With the crown won, Olaf drove Christianity into the inland valleys that still held to the old gods — and the saga's great set-piece of conversion is his confrontation with Dale-Gudbrand and the heathen men of the Dales, who brought out their huge wooden idol of Thor to face the king at the assembly.[1] While the people looked to the morning sun, Olaf's man Kolbein smashed the great image with a club, and out of it ran the mice and adders and toads that had fattened on the food laid before the god.
The lesson was brutal and complete: their god could not even defend itself. Gudbrand stood and admitted it — they had taken great damage on their god, and since he would not help them, they would believe in the king's God instead — and all received Christianity; the bishop baptised Gudbrand and his son.[2] It is conversion as demonstration, the new faith proved by the old god's helplessness, and it stands for the whole hard campaign by which Olaf changed the soul of Norway.
The source text · 2
Then Dale-Gudbrand stood up and said, "We have sustained great damage upon our god; but since he will not help us, we will believe in the God thou believest in."— heimskringla
Dale-Gudbrand's idol of Thor confronted and broken (Laing).
Then all received Christianity. The bishop baptized Gudbrand and his son. King Olaf and Bishop Sigurd left behind them teachers, and they who met as enemies parted as friends; and Gudbrand built a church in the valley.— heimskringla
Gudbrand and his people baptised after the idol is destroyed.
The price and the proof: killed at Stiklestad by his own rebel chiefs, the dead king works his first miracle on the very hand that helped slay him. The martyr-king's sanctity begins at the moment of defeat.
The blood on the killer's hand
And then, at the very moment of defeat, the saga turns. Thorer Hund — one of the men who had killed him — went to where the king's body lay, took care of it, and laid it straight; and when he wiped the blood from the dead king's face, it was beautiful, with red in the cheeks as if he only slept.[1] The king's blood ran onto Thorer's wounded hand, and the wound healed at once.
That is the first miracle, granted to the very hand that helped slay him — and the saga's most daring stroke. The dead king begins to undo his enemies from the grave. Thormod the skald, mortally wounded, composed his last verse and died on his feet; the body of the king was hidden and carried away by a farmer and his son for safekeeping.[2] The defeat at Stiklestad has already, in its first night, begun to become a victory of another kind.
The source text · 2
Thorer Hund went to where King Olaf's body lay, took care of it, laid it straight out on the ground, and spread a cloak over it. He told since that when he wiped the blood from the face it was very beautiful; and there was red in the cheeks, as if he only slept, and even much clearer than when he was in life. The king's blood came on Thorer's hand, and ran up between his fingers to where he had been wounded, and the wound grew up so speedily that it did not require to be bound up. This circumstance was testified by Thorer himself when King Olaf's holiness came to be generally known among the people; and Thorer Hund was among the first of the king's powerful opponents who endeavoured to spread abroad the king's sanctity.— heimskringla
The king's blood heals Thorer Hund's hand; the dead face is beautiful (Laing).
Thorgils Halmason and his son Grim went to the field of battle towards evening when it was dusk, took King Olaf's corpse up, and bore it to a little empty houseman's hut which stood on the other side of their farm. They had light and water with them. Then they took the clothes off the body, swathed it in a linen cloth, laid it down in the house, and concealed it under some firewood so that nobody could see it, even if people came into the hut. Thereafter they went home again to the farmhouse. A great many beggars and poor people had followed both armies, who begged for meat; and the evening after the battle many remained there, and sought lodging round about in all the houses, great or small. It is told of a blind man who was poor, that a boy attended him and led him. They went out around the farm to seek a lodging, and came to the same empty house, of which the door was so low that they had almost to creep in. Now when the blind man had come in, he fumbled about the floor seeking a place where he could lay himself down. He had a hat on his head, which fell down over his face when he stooped down. He felt with his hands that there was moisture on the floor, and he put up his wet hand to raise his hat, and in doing so put his fingers on his eyes. There came immediately such an itching in his eyelids, that he wiped the water with his fingers from his eyes, and went out of the hut, saying nobody could lie there, it was so wet. When he came out of the hut he could distinguish his hands, and all that was near him, as far as things can be distinguished by sight in the darkness of light; and he went immediately to the farm-house into the room, and told all the people he had got his sight again, and could see everything, although many knew he had been blind for a long time, for he had been there, before, going about among the houses of the neighbourhood. He said he first got his sight when he was coming out of a little ruinous hut which was all wet inside. "I groped in the water," said he, "and rubbed my eyes with my wet hands." He told where the hut stood. The people who heard him wondered much at this event, and spoke among themselves of what it could be that produced it: but Thorgils the peasant and his son Grim thought they knew how this came to pass; and as they were much afraid the king's enemies might go there and search the hut, they went and took the body out of it, and removed it to a garden, where they concealed it, and then returned to the farm, and slept there all night.— heimskringla
The king's body taken up and hidden by Thorgils and his son.
Victory from the grave: within a year miracles make Olaf a saint and Norway's eternal patron, and his cause is restored. The faith he died for is sealed by his death.
The king who won the country forever
Within the year the dead king conquered. Through that winter many in the Throndhjem land began to declare Olaf a holy man, and his sanctity was confirmed by miracle after miracle — the sick healed, prayers answered, a beautiful spring rising where his body had lain, over which a chapel and then Christ Church were raised.[1] He was proclaimed a saint; Olaf the Saint, who had been king fifteen years and was thirty-five when he fell, became Rex Perpetuus Norvegiae, Norway's eternal king.[2]
And his enemies' victory curdled at once. Canute's young son Svein and his mother Alfifa, set to rule Norway, were so hated that the chiefs who had killed Olaf soon repented — and in the spring Kalf Arnason, who had fought against him, sailed east with Einar to Russia to fetch Olaf's son Magnus home to be king. The road east that had sheltered the father now carried back the son. The next reign begins where this one's exile did — at Yaroslav's court in Kyiv.
The source text · 2
This winter (A.D. 1031) many in the Throndhjem land began to declare that Olaf was in reality a holy man, and his sanctity was confirmed by many miracles. Many began to make promises and prayers to King Olaf in the matters in which they thought they required help, and many found great benefit from these invocations. Some in respect of health, others of a journey, or other circumstances in which such help seemed needful.— heimskringla
Olaf declared holy; miracles confirm his sanctity (Laing).
Early in spring (A.D. 1034) Einar Tambaskelfer and Kalf Arnason made themselves ready for a journey, with a great retinue of the best and most select men that could be found in the Throndhjem country. They went in spring eastward over the ridge of the country to Jamtaland, from thence to Helsingjaland, and came to Svithjod, where they procured ships, with which in summer they proceeded east to Russia, and came in autumn to Ladoga. They sent men up to Novgorod to King Jarisleif, with the errand that they offered Magnus, the son of King Olaf the Saint, to take him with them, follow him to Norway, and give him assistance to attain his father's heritage and be made king over the country. When this message came to King Jarisleif he held a consultation with the queen and some chiefs, and they all resolved unanimously to send a message to the Northmen, and ask them to come to King Jarisleif and Magnus; for which journey safe conduct was given them. When they came to Novgorod it was settled among them that the Northmen who had come there should become Magnus's men, and be his subjects; and to this Kalf and the other men who had been against King Olaf at Stiklestad were solemnly bound by oath. On the other hand, King Magnus promised them, under oath, secure peace and full reconciliation; and that he would be true and faithful to them all when he got the dominions and kingdom of Norway. He was to become Kalf Arnason's foster-son; and Kalf should be bound to do all that Magnus might think necessary for extending his dominion, and making it more independent than formerly.— heimskringla
Kalf and Einar sail east to Russia to fetch Magnus home to be king.
And the faith defended by the saint himself: on the eve of battle against a vast heathen Wendish army, St Olaf appears to his son Magnus in a dream, promising to fight beside him — the dead Christianiser guarding the North against the old gods one more time.
The dream before the heath
Then came his father, out of death, to fight for him. A vast heathen Wendish army was massing against Magnus in Jutland, and on Michaelmas eve, the king dozing before the battle, St Olaf appeared to him in a dream and said: art thou so melancholy and afraid because the Wends come against thee with a great host? Be not afraid of heathens, though they be many; for I shall be with thee in the battle. Prepare to fight when thou hearest my trumpet.[1]
This is the saint's promise made good to his own blood. The St Olaf whose miracles had begun on the field where he died now reaches across to his living son on the eve of his greatest danger. The boy from Kyiv, who never really knew his father, is given him back for one night as a guardian — the dead king of Norway standing watch over the kingdom he had crossed the world to keep.
The source text · 1
The following day was Michaelmas eve. Towards dawn the king slumbered, and dreamt that his father, King Olaf the Saint, appeared to him, and said, "Art thou so melancholy and afraid, because the Vindland people come against thee with a great army? Be not afraid of heathens, although they be many; for I shall be with thee in the battle. Prepare, therefore, to give battle to the Vindlanders, when thou hearest my trumpet." When the king awoke he told his dream to his men, and the day was then dawning. At that moment all the people heard a ringing of bells in the air; and those among King Magnus's men who had been in Nidaros thought that it was the ringing of the bell called Glod, which King Olaf had presented to the church of Saint Clement in the town of Nidaros.— heimskringla
St Olaf appears to Magnus in a dream before Hlyrskog, promising to fight beside him (Laing).
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