Olaf Tryggvason

• 1. Introduction

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  Olaf Tryggvason stood on the deck of a warship called the Long Serpent on the 9th of September 1000, and then he disappeared. Danish chroniclers said he leapt into the sea, surrounded and defeated at the Battle of Svolder. Norwegian sagas described a flash of light at the stern and then nothing. The last alleged sighting was recorded in 1046, nearly half a century later. Before that day on the water, Olaf had ruled Norway for five years. He founded the city of Trondheim. He baptized Leif Ericson. He tortured and killed men who refused to convert to Christianity. And yet he had begun his life as a slave, sold on the shores of Estonia as a child. He killed his former enslaver in a Novgorod marketplace, and a queen paid the blood money to save him. He raided England in 991 and inflicted a defeat that became the subject of a famous Old English poem. He seized the Norwegian throne when his rival was hiding in a pigsty. How Olaf moved from the Baltic slave market to the throne of Norway is what the sagas have argued over for centuries. What happened when the Long Serpent fell silent is a question they never settled.

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• 2. Sold Three Times

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  On an islet in Fjærlandsvatnet, Olaf's mother Astrid gave birth to him while hiding from her husband's killers. His father, Tryggvi Olafsson, had been murdered by Harald Greycloak, son of Eirik Bloodaxe, who with his brothers had seized the Norwegian throne from Haakon the Good. Astrid Eiriksdottir was the daughter of a man named Eirik Bjodaskalle. She fled first to her father's home in Oppland, then to Sweden, believing Olaf would be safer there. Harald Greycloak sent men to the Swedish king asking that the boy be returned. Astrid fled again. This time she aimed for Gardarike, the Norse name for Kyiv, where her brother Sigurd served Vladimir the Great. Olaf was three years old when they boarded a merchant ship bound for Novgorod. In the Baltic Sea, Estonian vikings seized the vessel. Some passengers were killed; others were taken as slaves. Olaf came into the possession of a man named Klerkon. Klerkon killed Olaf's foster father Thorolf, judging him too old to be useful. He sold Olaf and his foster brother Thorgils to a man named Klerk, for a ram. Klerk sold Olaf to a man named Reas, in exchange for a fine cloak. Reas kept him for six years. Then Sigurd Eirikson, Astrid's brother, came through Estonia collecting taxes for Vladimir. He noticed a boy who did not look like a local and asked him his name. The boy answered: he was Olaf, son of Tryggve Olafson and Astrid Eiriksdattir. Sigurd bought both Olaf and Thorgils and brought them to Novgorod. In that city, under Vladimir's protection, Olaf had safety for the first time in years. Somewhere in the same city, Klerkon, the man who had enslaved him and killed his foster father, was also living.

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• 3. Klerkon's Reckoning

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  One day in the Novgorod marketplace, Olaf spotted Klerkon, the man who had enslaved him and killed his foster father Thorolf. Olaf killed him with an axe blow to the head. A mob formed and chased the boy through the city, intending to kill him in retaliation. Olaf fled to Queen Allogia, the woman under whose protection he had been living. Only after Allogia paid blood money for Olaf did the crowd disperse. The killing did not diminish his standing. As Olaf grew older, Vladimir the Great made him chief over his men-at-arms. After a couple of years, Vladimir grew uneasy with Olaf's popularity among the soldiers. Fearing that such a following might threaten his reign, the king withdrew his friendship. Olaf read the situation and decided to seek his fortune elsewhere. He set out for the Baltic. In 982, a storm forced his ships into a harbor on the coast of Wendland, a territory ruled by a queen named Geira, daughter of King Burizleif.

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• 4. Queen Geira of Wendland

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  Geira learned that a large fleet had anchored offshore. Rather than treating them as a threat, she invited the strangers to a feast. The feast became a negotiation. Olaf and Geira found in each other an alliance neither had anticipated. They agreed to marry while his troops were still camped in her territory. During one of their conversations, Geira told Olaf that certain towns had long defied her authority. Her words were direct. She told him she could name the towns that had escaped her control. 'We have suffered their arrogance for a long time,' she said. Olaf went out and recaptured those towns. He then raided Skåne and Gotland. His marriage connected him to the politics of the wider region. Holy Roman Emperor Otto II assembled an army of Saxons, Franks, Frisians, and Wends to fight the pagan Danes. Olaf joined the campaign through his marriage into the Wendish ruling family. Otto's army marched on Danevirke, a great wall near Schleswig, where King Harald Bluetooth and Haakon Jarl held the fortification. Otto could not break through. He changed tactics, sailed around to Jutland with a large fleet, won a battle there, and forced Harald and Haakon to convert to Christianity. Harald kept his new faith when he returned home. Haakon did not, and went back to worshipping the pagan gods. Geira's death, after three years in Wendland, would send Olaf back to sea.

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• 5. A Seer's Prophecy

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  The grief of Geira's death was severe enough that Olaf could no longer bear to remain in Wendland. He set out to plunder in 984 and raided from Friesland to the Hebrides. He landed on one of the Scilly Isles. He heard of a seer living there. Wanting to test the man, Olaf sent one of his crew ahead posing as Olaf himself. The seer was not fooled. Olaf went in person. The hermit's words, as the saga records them, were specific about what lay ahead: 'Thou wilt become a renowned king, and do celebrated deeds. Many men wilt thou bring to faith and baptism, and both to thy own and others' good; and that thou mayst have no doubt of the truth of this answer, listen to these tokens. When thou comest to thy ships many of thy people will conspire against thee, and then a battle will follow in which many of thy men will fall, and thou wilt be wounded almost to death, and carried upon a shield to thy ship; yet after seven days thou shalt be well of thy wounds, and immediately thou shalt let thyself be baptized.' Olaf returned to his ships. Mutineers attacked him there. He was wounded almost to death, exactly as the seer had predicted. He survived. Seven days later, he converted to Christianity. The scholar David Hugh Farmer wrote in the Oxford Dictionary of Saints that it is tempting to identify the seer with Saint Lide. Saint Lide lived on the island of St Helen's in the Isles of Scilly. A separate account places Olaf's entry into the faith near Andover, Hampshire, where Saint Ælfheah of Canterbury met with him in 994. By that account, Olaf was already baptized. The Andover meeting was a confirmation of his faith, part of a Danegeld treaty in which he agreed to stop raiding England. The Saga of Olaf adds that after Geira died, Olaf traveled to Russia and had a dream in which a voice told him he did not yet know his Creator. The accounts disagree on the sequence and the place. What they agree on is that by the time Olaf led a major raid on England in 991, he was a baptized man who had not yet finished using violence for hire.

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• 6. Battle and Throne

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  The Battle of Maldon in 991 was the first large-scale Viking attack on England in a generation. A large force under Olaf's command harried Ipswich and then inflicted a major defeat on the English at Maldon. Sweyn Forkbeard, the Danish king, was probably also one of the commanders. Four years later, Olaf turned his attention toward Norway. In 995, rumors circulated there of a man of Norwegian royal blood living somewhere in Ireland. Jarl Haakon, the ruler of Norway, grew worried. He sent a man named Thorer Klakka to Ireland, disguised as a merchant, to find out whether the man was Tryggvi Olafsson's son. If so, Haakon wanted Thorer to lure him back to Norway where he could be brought under Haakon's control. Thorer befriended Olaf and told him what was happening at home. Haakon had become deeply unpopular. He had a habit of taking daughters of the Norwegian elite as concubines and dismissing them after a week or two. His campaigns against the Danish king had also weakened him politically. Olaf sailed. By the time he arrived, much of Norway had already risen against Haakon. The jarl was forced to hide in a hole dug in a pigsty, together with a slave named Kark. Olaf met the rebels, who accepted him as their king. He held a meeting just outside the pigsty and promised a great reward to whoever killed Haakon. Both men in the hole heard the speech. Haakon grew distrustful of Kark and feared the slave would act on the offer. He could not leave and could not stay awake indefinitely. When he fell asleep, Kark cut off his head with a knife. The next morning Kark presented the head to Olaf. Olaf did not give him the promised reward. He decapitated Kark instead. The demand for baptism traveled with Olaf through every territory he then claimed. Those who refused would soon learn what his Christianity required of them.

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• 7. Converting Norway

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  In 997, Olaf established his seat of government at Trondheim, the site where he had first gathered the rebels against Haakon. He chose the location for a strategic reason. The River Nid bent back on itself before entering the fjord, creating a defensible peninsula. A single short wall across its neck was enough to block a land attack. From Trondheim he attempted to build a Christian Scandinavia. He made overtures to Sigrid the Haughty, queen of Sweden, proposing marriage. She refused, unwilling to abandon her ancestral faith. Olaf struck her with his glove. It was not a diplomatic gesture. Sigrid spent years afterward working to unite his enemies against him. Instead of an alliance with Sweden, Olaf made an enemy of the most connected woman in the region. He then married Tyra, the sister of the Danish king Sweyn Forkbeard. Tyra had fled her heathen husband Burislav, a ruler of the Wends, in defiance of her brother's authority. The marriage enraged Sweyn and began assembling the coalition that would meet Olaf at sea. Olaf also reached outward through the faith. He baptized Leif Ericson, the explorer, who sailed back to Greenland with a priest to convert his kin. He converted the Earl of the Orkney Islands, which were Norwegian territory at that time. He sent missionaries to other lands and baptized visiting dignitaries. Within Norway itself, the approach was different. Those who refused to convert faced exile, hostage taking, mutilation, torture, and death. Pagan temples were destroyed. A man named Thorlief the Wise was sentenced to blinding. He bore the pain so stoically that his torturers fled after tearing out only one eye. Raud the Strong refused to open his mouth. A wooden pin failed to pry it open. A venomous snake was then driven through a drinking horn into Raud's throat by a hot poker. Eyvind Kinnrifi refused and died with a brazier of burning coals resting on his belly. The saga names these men because they were exemplary cases, not exceptional ones. The expedition that ended Olaf's reign began with Tyra: she told him that her former husband Burislav still held her lands, and in 1000 Olaf sailed to recover them.

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• 8. The Long Serpent

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  Ormrinn Langi had thirty-two rowing places. It was the greatest ship in Olaf's fleet. Olaf sailed it in 1000 to recover the lands his wife Tyra had lost to Burislav. Off the island of Svolder, the combined fleets of Denmark, Sweden, and the Jarls of Lade were waiting. What happened next is told differently by every source that attempted it. Adam of Bremen wrote that Olaf leapt into the sea when all was lost. He described the death as 'the end befitting his life.' Saxo Grammaticus said Olaf jumped overboard in full armour rather than see his enemies victorious. The Norwegian and Icelandic accounts are more complex. The saga known as Ágrip records that as the fighting lessened, Olaf still stood alive on the high deck at the stern. When Earl Eiríkr went to the stern in search of the king, a light flashed before him like lightning. When the light disappeared, the king was gone. The sagas offer various explanations for his absence. He may have swum to shore. He may have been rescued by Wendish ships. Some accounts suggest he was assisted by angels. Other versions have him joining a monastery and seeking salvation abroad. The compilation known as Mesta describes a series of reported sightings in the Holy Land, the last occurring in the 1040s. Oddr Snorrason recorded sightings in Rome and Jerusalem. Olaf's court poet, Hallfreðr, had already alluded to rumors of his survival before those later accounts were written. King Ethelred the Unready and Olaf's sister Astrid were both said to have received gifts from Olaf long after the battle. A Viking chieftain named Tryggvi later invaded Norway, claiming to be Olaf's son by a woman named Gyda. His forces were defeated by Svein Knutsson, son of Cnut the Great. An account in Morkinskinna states that Tryggvi was then killed by a farmer. When Harald Hardrada was later king of Norway, he passed by the site of that battle. An old friend pointed out the man alleged to be the killer. Harald questioned the man, heard a confession, and had him hanged, citing his bond to Tryggvi and his duty to avenge the death. Adam of Bremen's assessment of Olaf's faith was hostile. He called Olaf a sorcerer and an apostate. The basis was a nickname, Cracabben, meaning Crow's bones, which Adam took as evidence that Olaf had performed divination with birds before battle. Independent evidence suggests his court was a place of genuine religious mixture. Olaf's own poet held ambivalent beliefs between Christianity and the Ásatrú. Thangbrand, the priest Olaf sent to convert Iceland, famously broke Canon Law by killing, which the Church forbade to priests. A statue of Olaf stands in the central plaza of Trondheim. Whether the man it represents was a Christian king, a pagan in disguise, or something genuinely in between remains a question the sources raised and never settled.

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