Allogia

Allogia is the queen at the court of Garðaríki who shelters the boy Olaf Tryggvason — the protectress of a future king in his exile. When the young Olaf, raised at the eastern court after being ransomed from slavery, recognises in the marketplace the viking who had killed his foster-father and strikes him dead on the spot, the law of the city demands the boy's life for a killing within its bounds — and it is Queen Allogia who takes him under her protection, judging the child far too comely to die, and pays the blood-fine herself. Her shelter lets the boy live to become the king who will Christianise the North. Allogia is the saga's image of the great lady who shields the marked child — the foreign queen whose mercy to a hot-tempered boy in a far court preserves, all unknowing, the future of Norway's faith. The protector at the eastern court, without whom Olaf Tryggvason's story would have ended in the marketplace where it nearly did.