Hákon góði (the Good)

Hakon the Good was the best-loved of the early kings — a Christian raised in England who came home to a heathen country and could not bring it with him. Harald Fairhair's youngest son, fostered at King Athelstan's court, he wrested Norway from his cruel brother Eric Bloodaxe almost without a blow and gave the country its great gifts: the ordered law-assemblies and the leiðangr, the coastal levy that wove a standing naval defence into the geography of Norway. But his gentle attempt to bring Christianity failed against the deepest grain of his people; at the feast of Lade they forced their Christian king to partake of the heathen sacrifice, and the conversion died there. He fell at last to an arrow at Fitjar, winning the battle and losing his life, and asked to be buried as a heathen — and his own poet sent him, welcomed, into Valhalla, honoured by the very gods he could not overthrow. The road not taken: conversion by kindness, which the North was not yet ready to walk.