Dala-Guðbrandr

Dale-Gudbrand is the powerful heathen chief of the inland Dales whose great idol St Olaf confronts and breaks — the central figure of the saga's most vivid conversion scene. When the king comes to force Christianity on the still-pagan valleys, Gudbrand and his men bring out their huge wooden image of Thor, fattened on the food laid before it, to face the king at the assembly. While the people look to the morning sun at Olaf's bidding, the king's man smashes the idol with a club, and out of it run the mice and adders and toads that had grown sleek on the offerings — and Gudbrand, seeing that his god could not even defend itself, admits the truth and accepts baptism, he and his people. Dale-Gudbrand is the saga's image of heathenism confronted and broken — the proud pagan chief whose honest acknowledgement of his god's helplessness becomes the model of conversion by demonstration, the old faith yielding when its idol is shown to be only wood and vermin.