13
The pragmatic Christianity of Håkon the Good
The great leaders of the Viking Age were wary of making claims that could not be substantiated. As we saw in Chapter 10, Harald Bluetooth’s boast on the Jelling stone, that he had ‘won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian’, meticulously avoids any suggestion that he had also made the Norwegians Christian. In Heimskringla, Snorri says that Harald did indeed send two of his earls to Norway to try to impose Christianity, and that the mission was successful in the Vik, ‘where King Harald’s might prevailed’.1 By Harald’s standards it was obviously not successful enough. As had been the case in Denmark, and as would later be the case in Sweden, the conversion of Norway came about largely through the efforts of native kings.
At about the time of the Jelling boast, the ruler in Norway was Håkon, later known as ‘the Good’ that son whom Harald Finehair had sent to England to be fostered by King Athelstan at the court of Wessex. Harald would have known that his son would be raised in the Christian faith and must have been content at the prospect. With Athelstan’s assistance, in about 936 Håkon had driven out his brother Erik Bloodaxe and taken over the throne of Norway. On the assumption that where kings led, their subjects would follow, the English may have hoped that his accession would signal an end to any further west Scandinavian threats against them.
From the Ágrip, however, we learn of the great difficulties Athelstan’s foster-son faced in trying to introduce Christianity to the Norwegian earls during the early years of his rule:
In his time many people were converted through his popularity, and some gave up Heathen worship though they did not take baptism. He built some churches in Norway and appointed men of learning to them. But the people burned the churches and killed the priests, so that he could not continue because of their depredations.2
It may have been an incomplete report of Håkon’s missionary efforts that led Harald Bluetooth to presume that the formal conversion of the Norwegians had already taken place. There is potential support for this theory in one interpretation of the inscription on the Kuli stone, found under the floor of a barn in 1913 on the island of Kuløy in Nordmøre, just north of Romsdal. In a reversal of the more familiar scenario in which a scholar sees runes where there are only glacial striations, this stone, with a cross inscribed on one side, spent fifty years in the museum at Trondheim before the Norwegian historian Aslak Liestøl noticed that it had two lines of runic script cut along one of its edges. The interpretation of the inscription is still debated by runologists, but the majority settle for something like this: Tore and Hallvard raised this stone after Ulvljot, Christendom had been twelve winters in the realm. This is significant for a number of reasons, not least because it is the first known use of the word ‘Christendom’ in Norway. It has not, however, acquired a status, comparable to the Danish Jelling stone, as Norway’s ‘birth certificate’. Harald Bluetooth’s importance as a Danish king makes it possible to give a fairly accurate estimate of the date at which the Jelling stone was raised; but of Tore, Hallvard and Ulvljot we know nothing. The dating of Ulvljot’s death is pre-Christian in its relativity. It is not plotted along an unbroken time-line that begins with the birth of Christ and moves forward to the present moment, but instead relates to the adoption of Christianity as a significant but local event. The result is that the Kuli stone cannot be dated with any certainty at all.3 The ‘twelve winters’ may be counting back to the thing meeting at Moster in 1024, at which Christian thinking began to influence the law in Norway. Or it may relate to the conversion campaigns of Olaf Tryggvason and the Drageid thing meeting of 996. A third possibility is that the twelve years referred to on the stone may have been counted from Håkon the Good’s first serious attempt to introduce Christianity to Norway, which would date the inscription to some time in the late 940s, not long before the erection of the Jelling stone. If Håkon’s efforts were initially successful, as the Ágrip suggests they were, this may have inclined Harald to instruct his rune-master to omit any claim to have converted an already converted people.
Even if there is substance to this latter hypothesis, the inscription on the Kuli stone would hardly have met with general assent in Norway, for the essence of Håkon’s story as told by Snorri in the Saga of Håkon the Good is the same as that sketched in the Ágrip, of the resistance he met from powerful local chieftains to his attempted innovations. The poignancy of it lies in his attempts to compromise with these powerful, conservative forces. To the Ágrip’s description of what happened when he tried to introduce the Church as an institution, Snorri adds details of Håkon’s personal faith, telling us that the king observed Sundays and the Friday fasts, and that he tried to introduce a Christian version of the midwinter festival. In doing this he was striking at the heart of institutionalized Heathen culture in Norway. Little is known of how time was measured before the introduction of the Christian calendar, but it is believed that the Heathens observed a so-called ‘bound’ lunar year, which followed a lunisolar calendar of the type described by the Venerable Bede in the De temporum ratione.4 The twelve months of this year, each lasting from one full moon to the next, had no connection with the twelve, thirty-day months of the Christian calendar. Linguists believe that two of the names of the months used in Iceland after the introduction of the Christian calendar, thorri and gói, are probably survivals from the Heathen lunisolar calendar.5 The year was divided into winter and summer half-years of six months each, and into quarters by four great communal feasts. An autumn sacrifice started the year, and this was followed by the midwinter feast of Jól. Jul remains the standard term for Christmas in all three Scandinavian languages, and yule enjoys a perilous survival in modern English. The etymology of the word is unknown, but the feast’s connection with Odin is apparent in that one of his names was Jólnir; and its antiquity is attested by its occurrence in the ‘Haraldskvæthi’, composed for Harald Finehair by Torbjørn Hornklovi in about 900, where the poet says that the king ‘Úti vill jól drekka’ (‘will drink in Yule’), and adds the obscure reference ‘ok Freys leik heyja’ (‘and play Frey’s game’).6 Snorri says that the ritual brewing and drinking of ale took place, and that horses and cattle were sacrificed and the blood collected in what he calls hlaut-vessels, from which toasts were drunk.7 Odin, Frey, the obscure Njord and possibly Thor were hailed in this fashion.8 The mixture of blood and alcohol may explain the name Jólnir, denoting Odin’s manifestation of himself as god of the intoxication that encourages fellowship, and of the ecstasy that facilitates supernatural communication between men and gods. The toast was drunk ‘til árs oc til frithar’. The first element was a prayer for good catches at sea and good harvests on land; the second prayed for peace, and for good luck in breeding, for livestock and people alike. It may suggest that ‘Frey’s game’ in Torbjørn’s poem was a euphemism for the sexual act.
All of these traditions were challenged by Håkon at the jól feast that was held in the sixteenth year of his reign at Mære, near Trondheim, 9 when he addressed the assembly and proposed the end of the sacrificing, and the conversion of all to Christianity. His proposals caused outrage. The king’s role in these quarterly feasts was central and crucial. Kingship in the Heathen north was a sacral office. Kings were of divine descent and traced their ancestry back through the Swedish Yngling dynasty to the gods Frey and Njord. As such, they stood in a privileged relationship to the gods. The privilege was a two-edged sword, for a king remained accountable to his people through the qualities of the time in which he ruled. We noted earlier the extreme example of the pre-historical King Domaldi, sacrificed by his people at Uppsala in a last plea to the gods to end a period of famine and need. Håkon may not have liked it, but he belonged to this line of sacral kings and was duty-bound to lead his people in festive observations. Sacrificing and the law were inextricably intertwined, and a king who declined to lead his people in the rituals was no longer a king. Worse, there was no longer a valid law.
The conservatives in the Trøndelag were aware of Håkon’s reforming tendencies and were ready for him. Eight of the most important regional chieftains had divided the duty of resistance between them, says Snorri: ‘the four of the outer Tronds should destroy Christianity and the four of the inner Tronds should require the king to come to the offering’.10 At the feast Håkon was given a straight choice, either to ‘ratify the ancient laws’ or be driven from office. Earl Sigurd was the leading chieftain in the region and Håkon’s kingship, proclaimed in the Trøndelag in about 936, had been with his support. He conveyed to the people that Håkon had agreed to their demands and was prepared to drop his insistence on conversion to Christianity. This proved not enough. To remain as king he must play to the full the king’s part in the hallowing of the law. Snorri’s superbly dramatized account describes the king’s response, how he withdrew from the company and took his meals in the company only of a few of his closest Christian associates, until Sigurd persuaded him that he must take the high-seat and play his full part in the ceremonies. The unhappy king then enacted a fateful series of gestures, each more compromising of his Christian faith than the one before. He took the drinking horn, which Sigurd had already blessed in the name of Odin, and made the sign of the cross above it. People demanded to know what he was doing. Sigurd reassured them that their king was merely blessing the goblet in the name of Thor. Snorri’s literary embroidery played on the physical similarity, widely noted at the time, between the hammer of Thor and the cross of Christ, one which enterprising silversmiths of those syncretic times exploited in the creation of small ‘double’ symbols which could represent both gods simultaneously, depending on which way up it was held. Håkon was then driven to a second act of betrayal of his faith. When the flesh of the sacrificed horse was offered to him he rejected it. He likewise refused to drink the sacrificial stew. The people now turned against him and were ready to seize him, when Earl Sigurd came to his rescue:
Sigurd calmed things down, suggesting that the king hold his mouth over the handle of the kettle, on which the fat smoke of the boiled horse-flesh had settled; first the king wrapped a linen cloth over the handle, then he opened his mouth and inhaled over it before returning to the high-seat.
But, as Snorri concludes, this satisfied neither party. As the likelihood of violence increased, Håkon finally made his choice and without first making the sign of the cross above them ate the slice of horse’s liver and drank from the sacrificial broth.11
These pragmatic gestures marked the turning-point in his relationship with his people. While the author of the Historia Norwegie censored him for apostasy and for preferring mammon to god, Snorri eulogized him as a king who brought prosperity and good harvests to the land and called him ‘the most beloved of kings’.12 The length of Håkon’s reign is uncertain, with estimates ranging from fifteen years to twenty-seven.13 From about 955 onwards he was increasingly plagued by the harrying of Erik Bloodaxe’s sons in Norway, fighting with the support of men supplied by Harald Bluetooth. In about 960 at a battle at Fitjar, on the island of Stord, he was mortally wounded by an arrow, allegedly shot by a child. Some medieval historians attributed his death to the sorcery of his brother Erik’s wife, Gunnhild, always a baleful presence in the sources, whether plotting Egil Skallagrimsson’s downfall or urging her sons on against Håkon. To the author of Historia Norwegie, the shame of being killed by a low-born child made it ‘as clear as daylight to every bleary-eyed man and barber’ that this was Håkon’s divine punishment for having ‘dared to renounce the Christ-child’.14 Inverting the thrust of a number of Viking Age stories of inter-faith marriages, in which the wife is usually Christian and the husband Heathen, the Ágrip, dated to about 1 1 90,15 says that Håkon’s wife was a Heathen, and that it was for her sake that he abandoned Christianity. The author goes on to describe the contrition of the king’s final hours:
And when the king saw that he was near death, he deeply repented of his offences against God. His friends offered to carry his body west to England and give it church burial. ‘I am not worthy of that,’ said he. ‘In many ways I have lived like the Heathens, therefore I should be buried like the Heathens. In this way I could hope for greater mercy than I deserve at God’s hands.16
His friends removed his body to Saeheim, in North Hordaland, and he was interred with conspicuously Heathen honours beneath a great mound. In what may have been a gesture of respect for his compromised Christianity, no grave-goods were buried with him.
Eyvind Skaldaspiller’s great poem in praise of him, ‘Håkonarmál’, was perhaps what gave the author of the Ágrip his cue in the prose account of Håkon’s death. Though steeped in the Heathen lore that was the staple and foundation of skaldic art, it manages to convey vividly the densely mixed nature of spiritual life in Norway at this time. After describing Håkon’s death in battle, Eyvind imagines the king’s unease at the prospect of meeting Odin in Valhalla, understandable in one who had been so reluctant in his Heathen devotions. Valkyries bring news of Håkon’s imminent arrival to Odin, and Odin sends two favoured sons to greet him:
Said the rich Skogul,
‘Gondul and I shall ride
To the gods’ green home
To tell Odin
That quickly the prince
Comes to see him.’
‘Hermod and Bragi’,
Said the war father Odin,
‘Go forth to meet Håkon,
For that warrior king
Is called hither to the hall.’
The king said this -
He came from the fight,
And stood bloody and pale -
‘Fierce in mind
Odin seems to me,
Ill is his look.’17
Eyvind bestows a posthumous reassurance on Håkon, telling him that Odin would welcome him gratefully, for in having ‘spared the holy places’ he showed a tolerance that Heathens had learnt not to expect from kings who were Christians.
Now it is known
That the king had guarded
Well the temples,
So Håkon the Good
Was welcomed with gladness
By the kind gods.
That warrior king is born
On a lucky day
Who has such a lofty mind.
His time here
Shall always be
Full of praise and glory.
For Eyvind, it was this tolerance of the old ways, rather than any perceived Christian quality, that was the essence of Håkon’s ‘good ness’. The salutation in the final verse of the poem borrows from ‘The Sayings of the High One’, to which Eyvind adds his own comment on the bad ‘king’s luck’ that was to follow shortly with the rule of Håkon the Bad:
Cattle die, kinsmen die,
the land is laid waste;
since Håkon left for
the Heathen gods,
need rules and bellies are empty.18
The Kuli stone gave us the first use of ‘Christendom’ in a native Norwegian source; Eyvind’s poem marked the first occurrence of the word ‘Heathen’ in Old Norse literature.19 Heithin god (‘Heathen gods’) was a Christian description of the Old Norse pantheon, derogatory in the same way as the Latin pagani, both implying that their worshippers were country bumpkins. A century earlier Eyvind would simply have said ‘the gods’, and his perhaps unthinking use of the term is a hint that the days of the old gods were fewer in number than he cared openly to admit.20
In Denmark Harald Bluetooth was keen to restore to the full Danish hegemony over Norway which had fallen into abeyance during the century of decline that lasted from the death of Horik in 854 until the revitalization process started by Harald’s father Gorm. After Håkon’s death he visited Norway and reintroduced the direct rule of a Danish king in the Vik and Østfold regions of the Oslo fjord. With his blessing, the sons of Erik, under the leadership of Harald gráfeldr, or ‘Greycloak’, ruled in the west of the country from Lindesnes and northward. They had been baptized in England with their parents, probably as part of the deal with Athelstan or one of his successors whereby Erik was recognized as ruler of York. But though they tried to introduce Christianity, ‘they could do nothing to make the men of the land Christians; but wherever they came they broke down temples and destroyed the sacrifice, and from that they got many foes,’ Snorri says.21
Politically if not spiritually Erik’s sons built on the legacy of Harald Finehair and Håkon the Good and consolidated Norwegian power in Norway. With the defeat in battle of the earl of Lade, the Trøndelag region came under their control. Their authority seems to have been recognized in northern Norway as well, increasing until Harald found it inappropriately great. At some point he changed his allegiance and offered his support to their most bitter rival, the exiled Lade earl, Håkon, son of that Sigurd who had guided Håkon the Good through the earlier crisis. Harald Greycloak was killed in battle at Hals on Limfjord, Jylland, probably about 974. With his death the last, direct descendant of Harald Finehair to occupy the throne of Norway was gone, to make way for the last Heathen king to rule Norway. That Harald should have supported a Heathen claimant to the throne against its legitimate Christian rulers shows the significance in the ‘conversion moment’ of the act of baptismal sponsorship: Erik’s sons might have been Christians, but they were not ‘his’ Christians.
‘Vellekla’, a praise poem for Earl Håkon Sigurdsson by the Icelandic skald Einar Helgason, hailed him as lord over sixteen Norwegian earls. But he was himself subject to a Danish overlord, and during much of his reign Harald Bluetooth, too, had to acknowledge the overlordship of the German king and Holy Roman Emperor, Otto the Great, and of his son and successor Otto II. The emperor posed the same kind of threat in the name of expansionist Christianity as Charlemagne had done to Godfrid’s Denmark at the turn of the eighth century, and, as we noted earlier, this threat may have been a factor in Harald’s eventual acceptance of Christianity. But the privileges of membership of the club of Christian peoples remained obscure, and in 974, at least ten years after Harald had joined it, Otto II invaded Denmark in reprisal for Danish raids on Holstein.22
Håkon Sigurdsson paid Harald an annual tribute of twenty falcons. More importantly, he was bound to provide military assistance should Harald ever call upon him.23 ‘Vellekla’ includes references to Håkon’s answering the summons from Harald to help him defend his territory against Otto, and of Håkon’s fighting Otto by the Danevirke.24 Before he returned to Norway, Harald sponsored his baptism and sent him back home with a number of missionary priests.25 As soon as he was able, Håkon compelled them ashore and renounced his conversion. With his intervention against Otto he seems to have regarded his debt to Harald as paid and to have conducted himself thereafter as sole ruler of Norway in the west.
Harald was as little pleased by this as he had been by the independent ways of the sons of Erik Bloodaxe, and in 986 he despatched a fleet up the west coast of Norway to bring Håkon to heel. The Danes were joined by over 100 ships of the Jomsvikings; but it was Håkon who triumphed on the day at the battle at Hjórungavág. Though none of the shorter historical works from the end of the twelfth century that deal with events in Norway mention Hjórungavág at all, the creative imagination of later skalds and sagamen turned the battle into a source of some of the most powerful myths associated with the Viking Age.26 The Saga of the Jomsvikings and Snorri’s Saga of Olaf Tryggvason both tell the tale of the line of Jomsviking prisoners being beheaded one by one, each man boldly disdaining to show fear as he is called forward. The Saga of the Jomsvikings contains a fuller account than does Snorri of the tradition referred to earlier concerning Håkon’s sacrifice of his seven-year-old son Erling for success in battle:
Now the earl goes ashore on the island called Prime Signed and into the trees. He faces north, goes down on his knees and prays. In his prayer he calls on his protector, Thorgerd Holgabrudr. But she is angry and will not hear his prayer. He offers her great sacrifices, but she remains unmoved. The situation begins to seem hopeless to him. Next he offers her a human sacrifice, but she will not accept it. Finally he offers her his son, whose name was Erling and who was seven years old. She agrees to accept the boy. The earl gives the boy to his slave Skofte, and he takes the boy away and kills him.27
Håkon’s victory at Hjórungavág saw off the Danes’ attempt to extend their control over Norway to the south-west and west of the country. Temporarily at least, it strengthened his cause among the conservative forces in the land that appreciated his uncompromising adherence to Heathendom, and to the responsibilities imposed on a leader by Heathen practice and tradition. For all this, ‘Vellekla’ praised Håkon. And yet Einar’s verse would turn out to be the last time a skaldic poet could avail himself, unfettered, of the full range of images, kennings and metaphoric allusions to Heathen mythology upon which skaldic verse depended for its composition, before the encroaching tide of Christianity finally reached Norway and made the practice of the art dangerous, and then undesirable, and finally redundant.
Following the expulsion of Erik Bloodaxe from York in 954, England had enjoyed a quarter-century of respite from Viking attacks. One of the two men responsible for their resumption was Olaf Tryggvason. Olaf’s is one of the emblematic careers of the Viking Age, describing in clear trajectory his graduation from marauding sea-king to missionary land-king. His life and career are the subject of one of Snorri Sturluson’s longer sagas, of another even longer, by a different author, called The Greater Saga of Olaf Tryggvason, and of a lost saga written in Latin by Odd Monk, which nevertheless survives in a free translation. The Greater Saga in particular is infused with a legendary hindsight born of Olaf’s achievements as a grown man, and of the role he played as trail-blazer to Olav Haraldson in finally bringing the Norwegians to Christianity.
Snorri’s saga of Olaf Tryggvason has been described as ‘particularly unreliable’.28 In the light of his posthumous status among Christian writers, the story of Olaf’s childhood reads almost like a Scandinavian version of the infancy of Jesus. Born in 968, he was the son of Trygve Olavsson, a petty king in the Vik area.29 According to saga tradition he was a distant relative of Harald Finehair, which made the family from the start a threat to the dynastic ambitions of the sons of Erik Bloodaxe and their mother Gunnhild.30In Snorri’s narrative Harald Greycloak has Trygve killed but is unaware that Trygve’s wife Astrid is pregnant when she escapes. When her time comes she is rowed out to an island on a lake and gives birth there to Olaf.
The following year the wicked Gunnhild gets wind of the birth and organizes a hunt for the child. Astrid and her tiny band of protectors have to flee eastwards into Sweden and the territory of the Svear. Even among the Svear they are pursued, and when Olaf is three years old his mother crosses the Baltic to join her brother Sigurd in Kiev where, as a member of Vladimir’s hird, he enjoys a high status. En route the group is attacked. Mother and child are separated, Olaf is captured and presently sold to a peasant for the price of a goat. Shortly afterwards he is traded on to an Estonian farmer, this time in exchange for a coat. Some six years later, his uncle Sigurd chanced by the farm of his owner one day. Realizing who the boy was he took him back to Kiev and to Vladimir, who became his foster-father.
Snorri tells us that Olaf’s career as a Viking began as early as 980, when he was no more than twelve years of age, and volunteered to recover for his foster-father certain territories that Vladimir had lost. The Historia Norwegie prefers a less biblical version of the story, which has Olaf fostered in Sweden by a man named Torolv Luseskjegg. Slavers attacked their party as it made its way to Russia, Torolv was killed and Olaf sold into slavery. Rescued by chance by a relative, he was taken to Novgorod and grew up in hiding there. At the age of twelve he made his name by avenging the killing of his foster-father, a feat that brought him to the attention of Vladimir, who in due course adopted the boy.31
Whatever the truth of his early years, we need not doubt that by the time of his first appearance in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the year 991, where Anglo-Saxon nasalization renders the name as ‘Anlaf’, Olaf had become a seasoned Viking raider. In command of a fleet of ninety-three ships, he ravaged in Folkestone and Sandwich before sailing up the coast to threaten Ipswich. From here his army came ashore at Maldon in Essex.
Though not in itself a decisive event, the battle that then took place against an English army under Byrhtnoth became the subject of the Battle of Maldon, a poem regarded as one of the finest achievements of Anglo-Saxon literature.32 The battle is thought to have taken place on or about 10 August, on the banks of the Pante, now the Blackwater, with the Vikings marshalled on the offshore island of Northey, and the English awaiting them on the mainland.33 As the unknown poet describes it, in a prelude to the engagement a warrior advances and calls over the water to the English:
A viking messenger stood on the bank,
Called clearly forth and made his declaration,
Proudly proclaimed the message of the seamen
To Byrhtnoth as he stood upon the shore.
‘Bold seamen send me to you, order me
To tell you that you speedily must send
Rings for defence; it would be better for you
To buy off this armed onslaught with your tribute
Than that our hardy men should deal out war.
We need not fight if you can come to terms.
We will establish with that gold a truce.
If you who are in charge here will agree
That you are willing to protect your people,
And pay the seamen at their own demand
Money for peace, and take a truce from us,
We with that treasure will embark again,
Go back to sea, and keep the peace with you.’
Byrhtnoth will have none of it:
Angry and resolute he answered him:
‘Do you hear, seaman, what this people says?
They plan to give you nought but spears for tribute,
Poisonous point and edge of tried old sword,
War-tax that will not help you in the fight.
Go, viking herald, answer back again,
Tell to your men a much more hostile tale:
Here stands an earl undaunted with his troop,
One who intends to save this fatherland,
Ethelred’s kingdom, and my liege lord’s land
And people. It shall be the heathen host
That falls in fight. It seems to me too shameful
That you should take our tribute to your ships
Without a fight, now that you have advanced
So far on to our soil. You shall not win
treasure so easily; but spear and sword
Must first decide between us, the grim sport
Of war, before we pay our tribute to you.’34
Northey is joined to the mainland by a narrow causeway which is passable at low tide and the first Viking to set foot on it was easily shot down. The Vikings then requested permission to cross the causeway unimpeded so that battle might commence. For reasons best known to himself, Byrhtnoth granted the request. The fatal result of this act of decency or over-confidence is that the English were soundly beaten on the day. The futility of opposing any further what was clearly a particularly strong and well-disciplined army was evident, and on the advice of Sigeric, archbishop of Canterbury, the English King Ethelred, known as ‘the Unready’, agreed to pay a tribute of 10,000 pounds to the Vikings, ‘because of the great terror they were causing along the coast’.35A treaty drawn up between the two sides is eloquent of the plight of the English at this time, helplessly agreeing both to employ their attackers to defend them against future fleets and to supply them with food for as long as they wished to remain.36
The reign of Ethelred has been characterized as a period in which treachery was ubiquitous, and the entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 992 reinforces the impression of a wealthy society on the verge of moral disintegration. In that year Ethelred secretly ordered all serviceable ships to assemble in London to prepare for a surprise attack on the Viking fleet at sea. This English superfleet was to be under the command of two bishops and two earls. One of the earls, Ælfric, betrayed his king:
The Ealdorman Ælfric sent someone to warn the enemy, and then in the night on the day before which they were to have joined battle, he absconded by night from the army, to his own great disgrace, and then the enemy escaped, except that the crew of one ship was slain.37
The Viking fleet headed north, sacking and looting Bamburgh and around the mouth of the Humber. In 994 it returned south, and on 8 September Olaf attacked London with a fleet of ninety-four ships, accompanied this time by the Danish king, Svein Forkbeard. They tried and failed to burn the city down before embarking on a campaign along the coast and on land through Essex, Kent, Sussex and Hampshire. Ethelred offered them tribute and provisions in return for peace. His offer was accepted, and the army settled for the winter at Southampton, the richer by 16,000 pounds.
A delegation of leading churchmen visited Olaf and invited him to accompany them to Andover. Already baptized, he now submitted to confirmation, with Ethelred as his sponsor. The terms of the earlier treaty were restated, the English once again agreeing that ‘if any fleet harry in England, we are to have the help of them all; and we are to supply them with food as long as they are with us’.38 In exchange, Olaf gave his word that he would never return to England with warlike intent. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes that he kept his promise. Along with Alfred’s treaty with Guthrum in about 878 and the St Cloud agreement between Rollo and Charles the Simple in about 911, it stands as a rare example of the success of this policy of spiritual incorporation that had been tried so many times before by exasperated and exhausted Christian rulers.39 Unfortunately for Ethelred, it would avail him little.
Olaf had already, it seems, decided that his army was now large enough, loyal enough, and he himself rich enough from his piracy to be able to sustain their loyalty, to pursue what must always have been his ultimate goal, the crown of Norway. His new, monotheistic religion gave him the moral, military and intellectual justification he needed to set about imposing himself as the sole ruler of the Norwegians in the name of Christianity.
Rather like Hasting in the saga of Rollo of Normandy, it was Earl Håkon’s fate to be cast in the Christian-era sagas as the ‘bad’ Heathen, the better to illuminate the brightness of the Håkon who preceded him, and the near-saintliness of his successor Olaf Tryggvason. Snorri tells us that he had squandered the good-will he earned at Hjórungavág by a habit of borrowing other men’s wives for his use, and that when Olaf appeared with his army Håkon found few friends ready to back him. Theodoricus Monachus records that, on his way to Norway, Olaf called in at the Orkney Islands and gave firm indication of his resolve by threatening to take the life of Earl Sigurd’s three-year-old son before his father’s eyes should Sigurd refuse to accept baptism. Theodoricus seemed to approve: ‘Just as it is written: “Fill their faces with shame, and they will seek thy name, O Lord”, so the earl feared both the righteous wrath of Óláfr and that his son would die.’ Yet he also recognized the realities of the Orkney earl’s situation: ‘So by believing or, rather, by consenting, he was baptized along with all the people who were subject to him.’40
In Norway Olaf met and defeated Håkon and his son Erlend in a naval battle in the fjord at Agdenes. Håkon fled and suffered, according to legend, an ignominious death, killed by a slave in the pig-sty in which he had taken refuge. ‘As often happens to one sad at heart’, writes Theodoricus, ‘sleep had stolen upon him.’ The victorious Olaf decapitated the dead Håkon, as well as his killer, and a rejoicing crowd threw stones at the heads as they were displayed. Later they set fire to Håkon’s body. It was only now, says Snorri, as part of this outpouring of hatred, that people began to call their late ruler ‘the Bad’ or ‘the Evil’.41
According to the accepted chronology, Olaf was twenty-seven years old when he was hailed as the new king in Trøndelag.42 At once he set about the task that had defeated Håkon the Good, and Harald Greycloak and his brothers after him, of converting the country to Christianity. Not for him the subtle and disappointed compromise between cross and hammer: at an early stage of the campaign he herded eighty priests of the old faith, men and women now regarded as sorcerers, into a temple and burnt them along with the images of the gods. Report of the sheer terror inspired by his methods preceded him as he travelled the country. The Trøndelag, a bastion of Norwegian Heathendom, was cowed into acceptance of the new faith. Even those converted by Harald’s missionary earls in the Vik had reverted to the old faith and Olaf struggled hard to force them back. The degree of his success in the regions of Nordmøre and Sunnmøre is uncertain, but with the help of his brother-in-law, Erling Skjalgsson, the people of the Gulathing region, from Hordaland down to Sogn, were persuaded to accept Christianity.43 The men of Hålogoland, the region of Alfred the Great’s visitor Ottar, proved particularly recalcitrant and some of Snorri’s most extreme tales in the Heimskringla of Olaf’s determination to succeed centre on events that took place in the far north of the country. Raud, a chieftain from Salten, who has been among the fiercest opponents of Christianity, is finally captured by Olaf’s men:
The king had Raud brought before him and told him he should submit to baptism: ‘I don’t want your property’, he told him. ‘I would rather be your friend, if you can show yourself worthy of my friendship.’ Raud raged against him and said he would never believe in Christ, and he blasphemed wildly. The king was furious and told Raud he was going to give him the worst death imaginable. He had him tied with his back to a pole, then put a piece of wood between his teeth to wedge his mouth open. He took a snake and tried to force it into Raud’s mouth, but Raud blew at it and the snake wouldn’t go in. Then the king took a hollow stalk of angelica and put it in Raud’s mouth and put the snake into the angelica (some people say he used his horn). He drove it through the angelica with a red-hot iron, and the snake passed into Raud’s mouth, down his neck, and bored its way out through his side: Raud lost his life. King Olaf then helped himself to all kinds of gold and silver goods and other costly items, like weapons. He forced all Raud’s followers to allow themselves to be baptised. Those who refused he killed or tortured.44
Snorri’s story might well contain concessions to the idiom of folklore, but it conveys a compelling sense of Olaf’s fanatical devotion to his self-appointed task of unifying the country in the name of one religion. The obsession occupied the brief span of his reign so completely that Norway and its people must always have remained a foreign land to him, a man who had spent almost his entire life outside its boundaries.
Olaf seems to have shared Harald Finehair’s clear sense that a country settled by so many Norwegians must also logically belong to him, and one of the enterprises of his short reign was the attempt to convert the Icelanders, now over 100 years into their settlement and still to all intents and purposes a Heathen people. The matter struck him as so urgent that after just one year on the throne he had dispatched a missionary bishop named Thangbrand to remedy the state of affairs.45 This marked the first step in what is probably the most striking and well-documented account of the conversion to Christianity of any of the Viking Age peoples. We shall look at its continuation in a later chapter.