St. Olaf, Viking

[c. 995–1030] FEAST DAY: July 29

“Viking” is both a noun and a verb. In the language scholars call Old Norse (which survives virtually unchanged today as the national language of Iceland), a viking is a raider, a freebooter, a pirate. To go “viking” means to sail off in search of plunder and adventure. In pre-Christian Scandinavian society, this was a perfectly acceptable, even heroic way of life that taught adolescent boys how to fight, how to sail, and, if luck went with them, to acquire enough loot to jump-start their fortunes back home.

Viking voyages brought wealth and slaves into the northern lands, opened new markets for Scandinavian furs and other goods, even extended Scandinavian political influence into new territories. By the year AD 1000, descendants of the Vikings occupied the eastern half of England, dominated Irish society in Dublin (a city they had founded), and made up the ruling class in Normandy and in Kievan Rus, a vast region we know today as Ukraine.

There has been a tendency in books and movies to romanticize Vikings as robust, roistering, wild men. To the inhabitants of the coastal towns of Europe who were on the receiving end of the Viking raids, there was nothing romantic about them. On June 8, 793, the first Viking attack fell on Lindisfarne, today known as Holy Island, and famous in Britain for the shrine of St. Cuthbert, one of the country’s best-loved saints. Those monks the Vikings did not slaughter on land they dragged out to sea and drowned. What they could not carry off, or what had no value to them—books especially—they destroyed. But the gold, silver, and ivory sacred vessels, reliquaries, and church ornaments they took with them. From this initial raid the Vikings learned that monasteries were rich and easy pickings; they targeted them on all future raids. Between 795 and 842, no fewer than twenty-six monasteries in Ireland alone were pillaged and destroyed by the Vikings. Among the casualties were the island’s principal religious centers, Armagh, Kildare, Glendalough, and Clonmacnoise.

Soon fleets of Viking ships were going after bigger game. In 843 the Vikings attacked Nantes, slaughtering the bishop, most of the clergy, and countless numbers of inhabitants. In 844 they attacked Seville but were driven back. In 845, with one hundred ships, the Vikings sailed up the Seine and looted Paris. In 859 they sailed to Italy, where they plundered and destroyed Pisa. The years 865 to 895 saw an immense Viking army the Christians called “the Great Heathen Host” ravaging Britain, France, and Belgium.

Olaf was only twelve years old when his father entrusted him to an experienced raider named Hrani. On raids in the Baltic Sea Olaf learned to pillage, kill, and rape with a clear conscience. In the colorful metaphors of the Norse sagas, by his warlike exploits Olaf had “sated the wolf’s brood,” “roused the steel-storm,” “convened the assembly of arrows.”

The boy was about sixteen when he gave up the Viking life to serve as a mercenary against the English under a Norse chief named Thorkell the Tall. At London, Olaf constructed a booby trap near the Thames River that drowned dozens of English defenders. He led the vanguard at Canterbury, slaughtering civilians and burning the city’s castle. Olaf’s service under a Norse lord took him to Rouen, the primary city of the new Norse settlement known as Normandy. There Olaf converted to Christianity and was baptized in about the year 1013. Norse chronicler Snorri Sturlason, who knew Olaf and whose Saga of Olaf Haraldson is the most detailed biography we have of the man, does not explain Olaf’s motives for becoming a Christian.

If Snorri doesn’t tell us what was going on inside Olaf’s head, he does at least give us an idea of what the man looked like. He was of middle height, but very strong; his hair was light brown, his skin pale with ruddy cheeks.

In 1015 Olaf returned home to Norway determined to make himself king and make his people Christians. He deposed King Hakon, then crushed his enemies in battle at Oslofjord. He made Nidaros (modern Trondheim) his capital, and there he built a church dedicated to the martyr-pope St. Clement. As king he enforced the law fairly, making peace and the security of his people his primary objectives. From that perspective, Olaf sounds like a conscientious Christian monarch. In many other respects, however, Olaf just didn’t “get” the Christian ideal.

The king of Sweden claimed several districts in Norway as his own and sent twenty of his men into the countryside to collect taxes. Olaf displayed his contempt for Sweden’s claim by having the foreign taxmen hanged and leaving their bodies on the gallows to rot.

Some Norse chieftains, jealous of Olaf’s power, plotted to murder him. Unknown to the conspirators, one of the men they had invited to the meeting, Ketil, was loyal to Olaf. When Ketil revealed the details of the plot, Olaf received the news calmly. First he went to Mass. Then he went to dinner. Finally, with four hundred of his warriors, he sailed all night to a place called Ringsaker where the chiefs were staying. At daybreak the chiefs awoke to find themselves surrounded and outnumbered by Olaf’s army. Olaf had the leading conspirator blinded, and another’s tongue cut out. Two other chiefs he banished. As for the conspirators’ retainers, he mutilated some, confiscated the estates of others, and exiled the rest.

Nor was the king a gentle proselytizer. There was a political dimension to Olaf’s resolve to make Norway Christian. As the last pagan region of western Europe, Scandinavia was outside the cultural mainstream of the Continent. Christian kings were reluctant to enter into alliances with pagan Norsemen. And the ordinary Christian inhabitants of Europe regarded the Norse as blood-crazed, heathen barbarians. It was essential to Olaf’s policy to place Norway on par with other Christian kingdoms, and he would not let anyone or anything stop him.

He brought in missionary priests from England, but at the head of the Church in Norway he placed a Norse bishop, Grimkell. The conversion of Norway proved to be a slow, tedious business, and Olaf was in a hurry to get the job done. With three hundred of his best men-at-arms he marched to those regions of Norway where resistance to Christianity was strongest. He destroyed pagan temples and smashed images of pagan gods. Anyone, of whatever rank, who would not abandon paganism risked execution, or blinding, or having a hand or foot lopped off. As Snorri tells us, the king “let none go unpunished who would not serve God.”

It’s interesting to note that Olaf’s brutal, violent approach to converting a brutal, violent society worked. By 1030, Norway was a Christian country, nor did it backslide into paganism after Olaf’s death.

Olaf’s only political rival in Scandinavia was Knut, king of Denmark and of England. But with half the island of Britain recognizing the Anglo-Saxon contender, Aethelred, as their king, Knut had been occupied for many years in England, fighting to strengthen and expand his authority there. About the year 1026, when he had some breathing space, he turned his attention back to Scandinavia. Knut asserted that Norway was part of his kingdom, a claim Olaf rejected. Rather than attack Olaf outright, Knut was cunning. He flooded Norway with bribes, buying the allegiance of great lords and small landowners alike. In 1028, when Knut invaded Norway with a huge fleet, so few men rallied to Olaf’s side that he was compelled to flee to Kiev, to the court of his kinsman Yaroslav (the son of St. Vladimir).

When Olaf went into exile he took with him his concubine, Alfhild, and their son, Magnus, whom he had named for Charlemagne (Karla-Magnus in Old Norse). His wife, Astrid, and their daughter, Ulfhild, Olaf left in Norway. Once again, in certain areas Olaf had not managed to reconcile within himself the demands of Christian morality and the standards that were perfectly acceptable in pagan Norse society.

Olaf’s banishment did not last long. In the summer of 1030 he sailed back to Norway at the head of an army. At a place called Stiklestad, Olaf drew up his forces to meet his enemies. Snorri says the day began in the classic saga style, with the king rising early and commanding a skald to recite a battle poem that would fire up the men. Once Olaf’s warriors were arrayed for battle, he gave them their battle cry, “On! On, Christ’s men! Cross-men! King’s men!”

For hours the armies hacked and slashed at each other, with neither side gaining the upper hand. When a solar eclipse darkened the sky, each side feared the portent was for them. If it was an omen, it was for Olaf. He was fighting near a large boulder when three of Knut’s warriors came at him at once. One crippled him, striking him above the knee with an axe. Another speared him in the belly. The third sliced open the left side of his neck. Gripping the stone with one hand, Olaf slipped slowly to the ground and died. At the death of the king, Olaf’s men scattered.

After the battle, one of Olaf’s retainers, Thorer Hund, returned to the field to claim his lord’s body. He laid it out straight on the ground, covered it with a cloak, and wiped away the blood from the king’s face. During the battle a sword had slashed Thorer’s fingers, but when Olaf’s blood touched the wounds they healed instantly. Later that same day a blind man inadvertently dipped his fingers in Olaf’s blood. He ran his hand over his face and at once he could see.

In the eleventh century individual bishops had the authority to canonize people from their own diocese; now Bishop Grimkell exercised his right, declaring Olaf a saint. It was a canny move on Grimkell’s part, one that gave the Norse Christians a native-born saint and a royal martyr, while at the same time placing Olaf’s cause firmly on the side of right. Still, it was the type of canonization that could only have been carried out by the fiat of a local bishop who had in mind the needs of the local church rather than how his saint would play in the universal Church. It is safe to say that under the formal process of canonization that has been in place in the Catholic Church for the last several hundred years, Olaf would never have made the cut.

Grimkell enshrined the king’s body in the Church of St. Clement in Nidaros, where it remained until 1070, when a handsome cathedral was built in honor of Norway’s first saint. For the next five hundred years his tomb was a goal of pilgrims from throughout Scandinavia and northern Europe. When Scandinavia became Lutheran in the sixteenth century, the pilgrimage to St. Olaf’s shrine came to an abrupt end. According to the Reverend Knut Andresen of the Nidaros Cathedral, in 1584 the cathedral clergy hid the relics of St. Olaf somewhere inside the church. They have never been found.