Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (47 page)

Numbers told and eventually Olaf made a last stand at the stern of
Long Serpent
. Seeing that death or capture were inevitable Olaf, in full armour, jumped over the side of his ship and sank without trace. Norwegians proved reluctant to accept their king’s death and Olaf became a ‘king in the mountain’ like Arthur, Frederick Barbarossa and many others who are still awaiting the right moment to reclaim their kingdoms. Soon after his death stories began to circulate that Olaf had swum underwater to another ship and sailed to Wendland, and from there travelled on to the Holy Land. But, as Snorri put it, whatever the truth of the stories ‘King Olaf Tryggvason never came back again to his kingdom of Norway’.

Danish interlude

With Olaf dead, Norway was divided between Svein Forkbeard, Erik and King Olof. Svein took Viken as his share, while Erik, now jarl of Lade, ruled most of the north and west as his vassal. King Olof received inland districts in central Norway but gave these to his son-in-law, Erik’s brother Svein Håkonarson, to rule as his vassal. Erik and his brother may have converted to Christianity during their exile but if they did they did not try to impose it on their subjects and many Norwegians relapsed to paganism. Danish domination of Norway restored, Svein spent the remainder of his reign plundering England to finance his state-building, ultimately conquering the country in 1014. In Denmark Svein was succeed by his elder son Harald II (r. 1014 – 18) and his younger son Cnut inherited his claim to England. Cnut had to fight for his inheritance but England was such a prize that he attracted the backing of both his father’s old enemy Thorkell the Tall, and jarl Erik of Lade, who made his lands over to his son Håkon. Erik’s absence provided the opportunity for another exiled Norwegian royal, Olaf Haraldsson (r. 1016 – 28), to return home, restore his country’s independence, and complete Olaf Tryggvason’s Christianisation of his people.

Olaf Haraldsson’s ultimate fate was to become a martyr and a saint and, thanks to this, he is without doubt the best documented of all Viking Age Scandinavian kings, a popular subject for hagiographers and royal biographers alike. Dozens of skaldic poems, composed during his lifetime, and within a few years of death, have been preserved in later sagas of his life. However, Olaf’s perceived sanctity also means that objectivity is in short supply: who could criticise a saint in the Middle Ages? When he came to write the
Saga of St Olaf
, the longest of the kings’ sagas in
Heimskringla
, Snorri Sturluson drew on a wide range of earlier sources and deliberately omitted sources he considered too fanciful, but he was a product of his age and even this relatively sober saga comes close to hagiography at times.

Born around 995, Olaf was the posthumous son of Harald Grenske, the king of Vestfold and Agder and a direct descendant of Harald Fairhair. Olaf was probably baptised, with his mother Åsta and step-father Sigurd Syr, the king of Ringerike, as a child during Olaf Tryggvason’s Christianisation campaign, but the Norman writer William of Jumièges (died
c.
1070) states that he was baptised in 1013 by the bishop of Rouen during a visit to Normandy. Olaf was as precocious as Olaf Tryggvason had been and at the age of twelve his step-father gave him a ship and warrior band so that he could embark on a career as a Viking raider. This made Olaf a king even though he as yet had no kingdom. It is hard today to imagine that grown men would follow a twelve-year-old boy into battle, but that was how strong the charisma of royal blood was. In a Viking career that took him from the Baltic to Spain, Olaf more than justified his men’s faith in him. Olaf spent much of his time in England, fighting in alliance with Thorkell the Tall some of the time, at others serving King Æthelred, earning a fortune in the process from tribute and payment for mercenary service.

Soon after jarl Erik left to join Cnut in England, Olaf returned to southern Norway and was proclaimed king with the support of his step-father and a coalition of petty kings. On learning of Olaf’s arrival in Norway, Svein Håkonarson raised a fleet in the Trøndelag and set off south to confront him. Olaf and Svein met in a sea battle at Nesjar in Oslo Fjord on Palm Sunday 25 March 1016. Svein was defeated and fled to take refuge with his father-in-law in Sweden, where he died soon afterwards. When he learned about his uncle’s defeat, Håkon too took flight, going to England where Cnut, now king, welcomed him and made him Earl of Worcester. His power now unchallenged in Norway, Olaf resumed Olaf Tryggvason’s Christianisation and state-building policies and, like him, he based himself at Nidaros, so that he could keep a close eye on this, the most independent-minded part of his kingdom. Despite some reversion to paganism under the rule of the jarls of Lade, Christianity remained firmly established in coastal areas, so Olaf focused his efforts on the uplands, where there were as yet few Christians. Olaf’s approach to evangelisation was, if anything, even more brutal than his predecessor’s. Those who converted enjoyed royal favour, those who resisted suffered death, torture, mutilation or blinding. Many of the petty valley kings lost their little kingdoms and were exiled from Norway, not always retaining all their body parts.

Advised by an English bishop called Grimketel or Grimkell, Olaf made the first steps towards giving Norway an established ecclesiastical structure and in Christianising Norway’s pagan laws. At the Moster thing in western Norway in 1024, he proclaimed new laws on religious observance. Observance of Christian fast and feast days was made compulsory as was baptism of all healthy infants. Christian laws of marriage were imposed. The whole community was made responsible for paying for the upkeep of churches and the clergy. The introduction of the Christian calendar ensured that the practices of the church began to dictate the rhythms of daily life. Copies of the Moster Law, as it became known, were read out at all the local things, which were ordered to approve them.

Olaf inevitably made enemies, especially among the chieftain class, who probably objected to the centralisation of royal authority as much as his religious revolution. Many of them yearned for a return to the days of weak, indirect rule when their king lived far away. After some early conflicts, Olaf made an ally of the Swedish king Olof Sköttkonung by marrying his daughter Astrid, but Cnut, who had added Denmark to his domains when his brother died in 1018, was not so easily out-maneouvred. Cnut believed that Norway was his by right and he sent letters to Olaf telling him that, if he wanted to avoid conflict, he should travel to England and submit to him as his overlord. Olaf refused and, to pre-empt any attempt by Cnut to invade Norway, he allied with his brother-in-law, the new Swedish king Önund Jacob (r. 1022 –
c.
1050) in an attack on Denmark. The allies awaited Cnut’s inevitable retaliation on the Helgeå (‘Holy River’) in Skåne. When Cnut sailed into the river, his large Anglo-Danish fleet was thrown into disarray when Olaf and Önund broke down an earth and timber dam they had constructed upstream, releasing a violent torrent of water that overturned ships and drowned hundreds of his men. Somehow, Cnut managed to regain control of his forces and prevent the battle turning into a rout, but at the end of the day he had to abandon the battlefield to the Swedes and Danes. As it turned out, Helgeå proved to be a hollow victory for Olaf and Önund: they had suffered such severe casualties that they could not continue their campaign and their alliance broke up as each hurried home, fearful that Cnut might get there before them.

Their fears were justified. Within four years Önund was Cnut’s vassal and Olaf was dead. When Olaf returned to Norway after his Danish campaign, he found that his support was evaporating and he felt that of the leading chieftains there were only four he could be sure of. That proved to be over optimistic. When Cnut arrived off the coast of Viken with an Anglo-Danish fleet of fifty ships in 1028, the whole country rose against Olaf, who fled with a few loyal retainers first to Sweden and from there to the court of King Yaroslav in Russia. In Olaf’s place, Cnut restored Håkon Eriksson to his family’s jarldom of Lade and appointed him regent of Norway. The arrangement was not destined to last. In 1029, Håkon was lost at sea returning to Norway from a trip to England to visit Cnut. News of jarl Håkon’s disappearance quickly reached Olaf and in spring 1030 he set out to reclaim his throne, leaving his five-year-old illegitimate son Magnus the Good in Yaroslav’s care.

The Battle of Stiklestad

Olaf returned to Norway through Sweden, where he gathered an army of, according to Snorri, around 3,600 men, crossing the Kjølen Mountains into the Trøndelag. With the benefit of hindsight, Olaf’s court skald, Sigvat Tordsson, thought that if the king had been freer with his wealth he could have raised a larger army. However, it might have proved difficult to feed a larger force on its long march through the sparsely populated mountains on the way to Norway. News travelled fast along the Viking trade routes, giving Olaf’s enemies in Norway ample time to prepare for his arrival. As he descended the valley of the Verdalselva river towards Trondheim Fjord he met a much larger army of bonders near the farm of Stiklestad. While Olaf’s army probably included a high proportion of professional warriors, including the housecarls of his personal retinue, the peasant farmers he faced were not fighting with scythes and pitchforks. All freemen in Viking Age Scandinavia had to be equipped for military service so all would have had at least a shield and spear, and known how to use them, while the wealthier bonders would have been a great deal better equipped than that. The battle probably took place on 29 July 1030, and did not start until the day was well advanced. Olaf attempted to seize the initiative with a headlong downhill charge against the bonders’ army, hoping that if he broke their shield wall the bonders would lose confidence and run. The bonders gave ground but they did not break and run – too many of them remembered Olaf’s brutal rule to want to give in easily – and their superior numbers quickly began to tell. In desperate hand-to-hand fighting, Olaf was, we are told by Snorri, disabled by a wound to the leg, then speared in the guts by Thore Hund, the leader of the bonder army, and finally finished off by a blow to the neck. Now that Olaf was dead his army began to break up and flee: the battle had lasted about an hour and a half. Among the fugitives was Olaf’s fifteen-year-old half-brother Harald Hardrada. Though wounded, the young man was given refuge and treated by a sympathetic peasant, who helped him escape to Sweden once he recovered. Harald travelled on to Russia and then Constantinople, where he joined the Varangian Guard.

After the battle, some loyal peasants hid Olaf’s body from his enemies and secretly buried it on the banks of the Verdalselva. But though Olaf had lost his life and kingdom, he did in a real sense win the peace. Olaf had broken the back of pagan resistance to Christianity. When Olaf fled into exile in 1028, there was no return to paganism under Cnut’s equally militant Christian regime. The bonder army at Stiklestad was given spiritual encouragement by a Danish bishop: if anyone prayed to Odin for victory they did so privately. Olaf’s achievements were irreversible and Norway was now set in its course to become an integral part of Roman Catholic Christendom.

Norway’s royal saint

Miracles were soon reported at Olaf’s burial place and increasing numbers of people claimed that prayers addressed to him had been answered. A year after Olaf’s death, bishop Grimkell exhumed his body and reburied it in or near St Clement’s church in Nidaros. Olaf’s body was found to be uncorrupted, an incontrovertible sign of sanctity to the medieval Christian mind, and Grimkell declared him to be a saint on the spot. Even though the papacy never officially recognised Olaf as a saint, his cult spread rapidly, aided by the unpopularity of Danish rule and a series of bad harvests, which were widely interpreted as a sign of divine anger over Olaf’s killing. This does not mean that Norway was now deeply Christian. Pagan beliefs and sentiments persisted for generations. The church expected this – it was the case with all newly converted populations – and, where it could, it adopted or adapted earlier beliefs to Christian practices to make it easier for converts to engage with the new religion. As a saint, Olaf acquired many of the characteristics of the fertility god Freyr and the popular giant-slaying thunder god Thor. Farmers prayed to St Olaf for a good harvest as they would once have prayed to Freyr, while folk tales proliferated about his battles with malevolent trolls and giants.

The bonders had expected Cnut to rule them with a lighter hand but they were soon disillusioned. There was no magnate of comparable status to replace the drowned jarl Håkon, so Cnut had little choice but to try to rule Norway more directly, rather than relying on informal power-sharing as his father and grandfather had done. To this end, Cnut sent his teenage son Svein to rule Norway under the regency of his English mother Ælfgifu of Northampton. Ælfgifu proved such a harsh ruler that ‘Alfiva’s time’, as her regency was remembered in Norway, became a byword for oppressive government. Olaf’s own brutality was soon forgotten and he became instead a symbol of national unity. In 1034, two Norwegian chiefs who had taken Cnut’s side against Olaf, Kalv Arneson and Einar Tambarskjelve, became so disenchanted with Danish rule that they travelled to Russia to bring back Olaf’s son Magnus. When he arrived in Norway, a popular uprising broke out, forcing Ælfgifu and Svein to flee to Denmark. Svein died there soon afterwards.

Cnut passed away in 1035 and his Anglo-Scandinavian empire fell apart. Harold Harefoot, Cnut’s second son by Ælfgifu, became king of England, while Harthacnut, his son by Emma of Normandy, became king of Denmark. Harthacnut immediately recognised Magnus as king of Norway and the two kings agreed that whoever outlived the other would rule both Denmark and Norway. Accordingly, when Harthacnut died in 1042, Magnus became king of Denmark, appointing Cnut’s nephew Svein Estrithson to rule as his regent. Unusually, Svein took his surname from his mother, Cnut’s sister Estrith, to emphasise his connection to the royal house and to disassociate himself from his father jarl Ulf, who Cnut had executed for treason. Svein had a credible claim on the Danish throne through his mother and rebelled against Magnus and at the Viborg thing in northern Jutland the Danes paid him the homage due to a king. Magnus reacted swiftly and when he arrived in Denmark with a large fleet Svein fled into exile with King Önund in Sweden.