Stiklestad

Stiklestad is the most sacred battlefield in Norway — the field where, in 1030, King Olaf Haraldsson fell fighting the gathered army of his own rebel chiefs and farmers, and in falling became Saint Olaf, eternal patron of the realm. The battle itself Olaf lost; the kingdom he won forever. Within a year miracles were told at his grave, a spring rose where his body had lain, and the cause of his killers curdled into ruin. Stiklestad is where the two great currents of Norwegian history cross — the long, violent making of the Christian kingdom, and the cult of the holy king that would bind crown and Church for centuries. The death that looked like the end of everything Olaf built was the seed of all of it. A muddy Norwegian field that became the spiritual centre of the North.