Baldwin of Jerusalem

Baldwin of Jerusalem is the crusader-king who receives Sigurd the Crusader at the holy city — and gives Norway its most sacred relic. King of the newly-won Kingdom of Jerusalem, he welcomes the far-travelled Norwegian king with particular honour, rides out with him all the way to the river Jordan, and bestows on him many holy relics — chief among them a splinter of the True Cross, taken by the king and the patriarch and sworn over as the very wood on which God was crucified, given to Sigurd on his oath to promote Christianity. Through Baldwin, the conversion arc of the whole corpus reaches its literal source: a king from the lately-heathen North carries home a fragment of the Cross from the hand of the king of Jerusalem. Baldwin is the saga's image of the welcoming lord of the holy places — the crusader-king whose gift makes Sigurd 'the Jerusalem-farer' forever, and binds the far North to the centre of the Christian world.