The Vikings (43 page)

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’.
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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.
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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.
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In 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.
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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.
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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.
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As the unknown poet describes it, in a prelude to the engagement a warrior advances and calls over the water to the English:

Byrhtnoth will have none of it:

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’.
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A 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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.’
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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’.
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According to the accepted chronology, Olaf was twenty-seven years old when he was hailed as the new king in Trøndelag.
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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.
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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.
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