Þangbrandr

Þangbrandr is the missionary who converts with a sword in his hand. A hard, learned, quarrelsome German priest, he was sent by King Olaf Tryggvason to bring Christianity to heathen Iceland — and he did it half by argument and half by killing. He won gentle converts like Hall of the Side with the promise of a kindly guardian angel, and baptised the wise Njáll and his house; but the poets who lampooned him in stinging verse and the chieftains who laid ambushes for him he answered with steel, spearing Thorvald the scurvy and cutting down a berserk who walked through the heathen fire. In the end his ship was wrecked and his enemies many, and he sailed home in apparent failure, telling Olaf the Icelanders were such sorcerers that the earth had burst beneath his horse. Þangbrandr is the saga's honest, unsparing picture of how the faith first arrived — in blood and quarrel and a warrior-priest's blade — so that the peaceful conversion that followed would shine all the brighter against him.