The Vikings (56 page)

Thus began the long and irreversible process of the institutional replacement by law of Viking Age, Heathen culture with modern, Christian culture. At the heart of the legislation lay the enforcement of certain crucial Christian practices: the fast and feast days that were to be observed; the baptism that would enrol all healthy, normal infants into the Church; the adoption of Christian rules concerning marriage, including regulations governing the degree of consanguinity permitted by the Church between the bridal pair; and the burial of the dead in Christian ground. The Church’s urgent need was for a way of imposing these practices with only a rudimentary institutional clerical structure at its disposal. As the founders of Islam in the seventh century, the French Revolutionaries of 1789, and Josef Stalin in the Soviet era in Russia all show in their different ways, a reform of the calendar is a perennially popular way of announcing a revolution that at the same time facilitates the large-scale social control of people. Across the Heathens’ loose conception of a year that followed the seasons and rhythms of nature, Olav and his successors and their clerical advisers imposed a calendar that was as man-made as was practicable, austerely stamped throughout with the demand for discipline in the form of fasting. There was to be fasting during Lent, and the other Quadragesimal fasts that preceded Christmas, St John’s Day and Assumption Day; the four, three-day fasts spread across the year known as the Quatember fasts were to be observed, as were the three Rogation Day fasts. The Church also required that each Friday be a day of fasting, and with the demand that Sunday be held a day of rest there remained hardly more than a hundred days in the calendar which had not, in one way or other, been requisitioned in the name of the new religion.
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So that the demands should not be hollow, the law required priests to send out reminders of imminent fasts and feast days, in the form of a marked wooden calendar which was carried on a fixed round from farm to farm.

By embedding detailed aspects of Christian culture in the law in this way, these early legislators were able to ensure that it was manifest in every aspect of the daily lives of the individuals and families who made up the community. None of the laws specifically addressed the issue of Christian belief, but the numerous laws on fasting encouraged a resistance to the demands of appetite and instinct that was seen to be essential to the practice of Christianity at the individual level.

 

For five years following Olav’s death Norway was ruled by Cnut’s thirteen-year-old son Sven, with his English mother Ælfgifu acting as his regent.
¹⁹
The regime quickly revealed itself as a colonial exploitation. New laws were introduced that made the testimony of a single Dane enough to outweigh that of ten Norwegians. No one was allowed to leave the country without the king’s permission, and anyone who did so would forfeit his or her possessions to the crown. New taxes were introduced. At Christmas a measure of malt was due to the king from every household, a ham from a three-year-old ox, and a unit of butter. Five fish from every catch were the king’s part, and on each ship leaving the country a space was reserved for the king’s use. For the levy seven men were to provide a complete set of equipment for one able-bodied man, defined as anyone over the age of five. Women were to contribute a separate tax, a measure known as a ‘lady’s tow’ that was as much clean flax as could be held between thumb and forefinger.
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The hostages held by the crown were enough to discourage any thought of revolt. To hard laws were added the burden of harsh seasons when people had to eat cattle fodder. Sigvat’s poem easily conjures a syncretic connection between the good luck associated with the sacral kingship of Heathen times and Olav’s Christian kingship:

As discontent with direct Danish-English rule grew, those farmers and chieftains who had opposed and killed Olav began to regret their actions. The burgeoning store of legends and miracles associated with the dead king added to their unease, and at some point word was sent to Bishop Grimkel. He obtained permission to open the grave and, having exhumed the body, declared, according to Snorri, with the assent of the king and the people, that Olav was a saint.
²²
This was powerful medicine indeed, and the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
reported on these happenings in Norway with quiet bewilderment. The scribes who began the work in the reign of Alfred over a hundred years earlier can scarcely have imagined the development that was reported in the C version of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
for 1030: ‘In this year King Olav was killed in Norway by his own people, and was afterwards holy.’
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Among the enigmas of Olav’s beatification are the fact that the men who defeated and killed him were themselves Christians; that they were neither Danes nor Englishmen but his fellow-Norwegians; and that his own army at Stiklestad was largely made up of foreigners, many of them Heathens. In the first instance, the cult fed on reports of miracles associated with his name. The evidence of the ‘Erfidrápa’, composed by his friend and skald Sigvat in about 1040 and so only about ten years after his death, is that the cult was already well established by that time. In the poem, Sigvat refers to a St Olav’s mass, to the existence of a reliquary containing the saint’s remains, and to a miracle said to have taken place almost immediately after Olav’s death, concerning a blind man who stumbled and fell at the spot where the blood-tinged water used to wash the king’s body had been thrown. The water splashed up into his eyes, and he regained his sight. A century later another skald, Einar Skulesson, enumerated fourteen miracles worked by Olav, and by the end of the century and the time of the
Passio Olavi
, a hagiography written in Norway around 1170, the number had risen to twenty-five.
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Well before that date, there were churches dedicated to Olav in Iceland, England, Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man.
²⁵
The reference on a memorial rune-stone from Sjusta in Uppland, Sweden, to a man who ‘
daudr i Holmgardi i Olafs kirkiu
’ (‘died in Holmgard in Olav’s church’) shows that, within decades of his death, his cult had established itself in the Byzantine east.
²⁶
By succeeding in their efforts to present Olav’s death on the battlefield at Stiklestad as a triumph, the Church was able to suggest a parallel with the death of Christ which, in time, was reinforced by a claim that Olav had faced his killers unarmed. To make a hero and an exemplar out of a beaten man who had refused even to defend himself at the moment of his death turned every tenet of Viking Age Heathen ethics on its head. In a later and final posthumous transformation, this remarkable Norwegian Viking adventurer became his country’s patron saint and its
Rex Perpetuum Norvegiæ
, its king in all perpetuity.

In response to a groundswell of despair at the misrule of Sven and Ælfgifu and hope aroused by the fact that they now had a saint of their own to look to, a group of leading Norwegians made the journey to the court of Prince Jaroslav in Kiev, where Olav had taken his young son Magnus when he fled the country in 1028, and brought the eleven-year-old prince back with them to be their new figurehead. Even the boy’s name was another sign that the Viking Age in Norway was over. It was given to him at his christening by Sigvat in honour of Charlemagne,
Karla Magnus
in Norwegian, the man who had once wept as he contemplated the trouble the inhabitants of this most northerly part of the known world would visit on his descendants and their peoples. With the same curious ease and dispatch with which Olav had taken power in 1015, Magnus found himself accepted as king of Norway in 1035. Sven and his mother fled to Denmark.

At the start of his reign Magnus almost compromised the large amount of good-will he enjoyed as the native son of a saint with a verbal attack on the men of the Trøndelag at the Nidaros assembly. The
Ágrip
conveys a vivid impression of the reception given to the eleven-year-old boy’s speech: ‘They all stuck their noses in their cloaks, and were silent and gave no answer. Then a man named Atli stood up and said no more words than these: “So shrinks the shoe on my foot that I cannot move” ’. Sigvat, his godfather, rebuked the boy in verse:

There were at least fifteen more of these
Bersoglisvísur
, or ‘Plain-Speaking Verses’. The boy-king is said to have retired for the night, chastened by his godfather’s words. In the morning he delivered a second and much more successful speech to the gathering in which he ‘promised all men kindness and kept what he had promised, or better’.
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And yet he remained a boy. His own accession in 1035 and the death of Cnut in the same year created an unstable situation in the region which he and his advisers attempted to exploit. Though it offers no circumstantial detail, the thirteenth-century Icelandic collection of kings’ sagas known as
Morkinskinna
describes a period with a ‘great deal of strife and warfare’ that preceded an encounter at the mouth of the Göta river between fleets led by Magnus and by Cnut’s successor in Denmark, Harthacnut, who at fifteen years of age was about four years Magnus’s senior.
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Theodoricus Monachus offers a devastat ingly clear analysis of how hostilities were avoided:

Whereupon the leading men, seeing that the two kings, still immature, could easily be swayed in any direction, and that they themselves would more likely bear the blame for anything the kings might do amiss, fell back on the more sensible plan of negotiating peace.
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As a result of these negotiations it was agreed that, if one of them died without leaving an obvious heir, the survivor of the pact should inherit both kingdoms. Twelve of the leading men on each side swore on oath to observe the terms of the agreement. According to the
Morkinskinna
, the treaty was modelled on that made between Cnut and Edmund Ironside at Alney in 1016.

Cnut’s and Emma’s son, Harthacnut, had added the crown of England to his Danish crown in 1040. Following his death just two years later the treaty came into operation, and Magnus of Norway was elected king of Denmark without opposition. Snorri tells us that this ready acceptance was in part because ‘King Olav’s saintliness and his miracles were then known all over the land.’
³⁰
In a dramatically rapid inversion of a long-established tradition, it was now the turn of a Norwegian king to appoint a tributary ruler to run his affairs in Denmark. Snorri also claims that Magnus addressed a letter to Harthacnut’s successor in England, Edward, later the Confessor, telling him that, as far as he was concerned, the treaty between Harthacnut and himself also made him the legitimate ruler of England: ‘I will that you give up the kingdom to me or otherwise I shall seek it with forces from both Denmark and Norway.’
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In 1044 the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
tells us that Edward ‘sailed out to Sandwich with thirty-five ships’.
³²
No reason is given for the mustering, but Florence of Worcester assumed that it was a response to this threat by Magnus to invade England.
³³

Though Magnus did not act on his threat, the existence of the Norwegian claim would prove a fateful element in the chain of events that led to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. It was at about this time that the late King Olav’s half-brother Harald, later Hardrada or ‘the Hard-Ruler’, returned to the region. Having fought alongside Olav as a fifteen-year-old at Stiklestad, he had fled to Sweden and thence to Jaroslav’s court at Novgorod, where he remained for three years before travelling south to join the Byzantine emperor’s Varangian Guard. During his ten years in Constantinople he had amassed a fortune, and by the time he returned to Scandinavia he was still only thirty years old. His first move was to strike up an alliance with Sven Estrithson, Magnus’s tributary king in Denmark, who was not at all pleased at the humiliations imposed on him by the recent inversion of the status quo.

Harald played off his nephew Magnus and his ally Sven against each other. When Magnus asked for his help in bringing Sven back into line, Harald offered to do so on condition that Magnus cede half the kingdom to him, as he claimed was his hereditary right. After some hard and acrimonious dealings, an agreement was reached: Magnus would indeed share Norway with his uncle, but remain sole monarch of Denmark. Harald, content with his prospects, duly took a fleet to Denmark to re-impose Norwegian overlordship on Sven. Magnus was killed fighting in Jutland in the year following their agreement and Harald Hardrada inherited all of Norway.

Harald also inherited the Norwegian claim to Denmark, which Sven never ceased to dispute throughout the twenty years of Harald’s reign. Finally, in 1064, Harald recognized him as king of the Danes. Turning his attention to another and richer prize he then resurrected the claim to England that derived from the earlier agreement between Magnus and Harthacnut. He spent the next two years preparing an invasion fleet, and in 1066 crossed the North Sea and sailed up the Humber. The army that came out to meet him was defeated at Fulford Gate, York was captured by a Norwegian king and for a moment it looked as though Viking history, this time with a cross rather than a hammer around its neck, might be about to repeat itself. Edward had died early in the year, to be succeeded by Harold Godwinson, and only a few days after the occupation of York Harald’s men were surprised by Harold’s English army at Stamford Bridge, some seven miles east of the city. Harald himself was killed, along with a huge number of his followers. Three hundred ships had been required to bring his army over; a mere twenty-four sufficed to take what was left of it back across the sea to Norway. On 27 September 1066, two days after Harold’s victory, the Norman Duke William, later ‘the Conqueror’, landed with an army at Pevensey in Sussex. About four days later, news of his arrival reached Harold Godwinson in the north. He at once turned his troops about and set off for the south again. Four days later, on 5 October, he was in London. After a week of rest the army was on the move again, still marching south, still tired, as they headed for Hastings to a confrontation that would lead to yet another cultural upheaval for the English - whoever ‘the English’ were by this time - with the introduction of the names, language and mores of William’s Franco-Norman aristocrats. But that is another story, and it is not a Viking story.