VII. Olav and the work of Christianisation
It is now that he employs all his strength to Christianise Norway. It would indeed be wrong to think that Olav was confronted by a totally pagan populace. Large numbers of the people were already Christian, at least in the name if not in reality. Christianity had already taken firm root in the coastal districts from Viken in the south to the outermost counties of Trøndelag in the north. The major chieftains - who were to kill Olav later on at Stiklestad - were all Christians, after a fashion. It was in the inland settlements in Østlandet and Trøndelag that paganism was still deep-rooted. Many negative words have been written about Olav's «compulsory» Christianisation of Norway, but this is true only up to a point. As I have mentioned, large parts of the population had already been Christianised. When he engaged in missionary activity in the inland villages, it was usually some demonstrations of power that led people to accept baptism - we remember the story of Hundorp, where the king had the village's image of Tor cut down. Mice and snakes crept out, but nothing else happened! No hammer from Tor came whistling down through the air to kill the one who mocked the god. Nothing more was needed to demonstrate the powerlessness of the pagan gods and the omnipotence of White Christ. People accepted baptism and stopped offering pagan sacrifice. The gods disappear, or are suppressed so that they enter the realm of the demons.
But the introduction of Christianity was not always so easy. Snorre tells us repeatedly that those who were not willing to accept baptism were threatened with the loss of their lives, their limbs and their property. Because of Olav's mission with the sword, many doubt his holiness. This provides them with evidence for the view that Olav was the opposite of a saint: he was a cruel man.
The hardest task for an historian or a novelist who wants to describe persons from a period in the past is to empathise psychologically the world of their thoughts and ideas. The author of this little book is old enough to remember what life was like for domestic staff in the years before the War: hard work from morning to night for 25 kroner a month - putting up with a smile when cheeky youngsters said terrible things - one half-day free each month - no overtime payment for working at nights in the small hours, when the employers had a party - a tiny room when they crawled dead-tired to bed. This is how girls from the countryside slaved for families in the town no more than 53 years ago. There would be loud cries of protest in the whole country, if similar social injustice were to be uncovered today, but at that time not even one voice was raised in protest. That was how housewives treated their domestic servants then - and they had a good conscience in doing so. That was how thing were meant to be. They treated them like this in subjective good faith. They went to church, said their evening prayers and were at peace with themselves, with God and with everyone else. It is difficult for us to grasp this fifty years later, with our social conscience: so how virtually hopeless it is investigate motives and pronounce moral judgement on a person who lived more than 900 years ago!
It is not enough to trumpet out criticism on the basis of the tolerance and freedom of religion in our own days - a visit to the Muslim society of Saudi Arabia today would provide a continuity back to the days of Olav Haraldsson. Throughout history, the ruler has seen it as his crystal-clear right to decide about his subjects' practice of religion. This was the case in Scandinavia too. In the pagan clan society, it was the oldest man on the family farm who was responsible for sacrifices and the ancestral cult. The people saw the Scandinavian kings as the descendants of the gods. As such, they stood nearer the «powers» than the common man. They were sacrificial priests who ensured society's link with the gods of fertility who gave good harvests and peace. As kings, it was their task to make the people happy. The young Olav certainly took such ideas with him when he became a Christian. There was much mixing of religions in the missionary period - can one expect anything else? The transition from a pagan to a Christian way of thinking is a process that takes many years. Snorre indicates that Olav looked on Norway as his ancestral inheritance. He himself was the first in the ancestral land. This is why he had the chief responsibility for the close contact with the higher powers. But it was here, in the world of the gods, that a change of generation had taken place: Tor, Odin, Njord and Frøy had been replaced by the White Christ and his host of angels and saints. But Olav's duty to mediate luck from the God of heaven, since he was the chief of his clan, remained the same as before. This is how he must have understood it. It is very striking how often the sagas speak of king Olav's luck. He can give this to whomever he chooses. It takes on almost a magical quality.
Olav had become a member of White Christ's court. Through baptism and confirmation, he had sworn an oath of fealty to the heavenly king. Now he stood on Christ's side in the struggle against Satan and his fallen angels. Everyone had to bow to God's will. If this did not take place by convincing them, then it had to take place at sword's point. The heavenly king did not tolerate rebelliousness, and all Olav did was to carry out his orders. Whoever refused to submit to God's will had to pay for this by loss of life, limbs, farms and sustenance. Compulsory missionary activity must have been a matter of conscience for Olav. He acted in subjective good faith. His great model, Charlemagne, had done the same when he compelled the Saxons to accept baptism.
We can be surprised that the court bishops whom Olav brought with him from England did not rebuke him and persuade him to abandon the mission with the sword. The Anglo-Saxon clergy were in agreement with the Catholic Church's teaching that no pagan may be compelled to become a Christian: the Word must be proclaimed, and conversions must take place voluntarily. We think of king Håkon the Good and his humane method of mission; he has grown up at the English court. Well, it cannot have been easy for the English court bishops to bring the newly-converted king to adopt milder ways. If we can trust the author Sigrid Undset, Olav may have thought that demonic powers lay behind the pagan worship of the gods, and no one deals gently with the powers of hell. The English prelates can scarcely have found a reply against this effective argument. They may well have felt themselves to be on uncertain ground. For they knew that old Anglo-Saxon laws ordained that warlocks and witches should be expelled from the country or killed, unless they repented. We are told in Odd the monk's saga about Olav Trygvasson that bishop Jon-Sigurd often rebuked the king for his brutal missionary method, but without being able to stop him.11
It can be tempting for those who lack all understanding in terms of the history of religion for Olav's mission with the sword, to point to the lack of religious freedom in our own country until our own days. All Catholic activity was forbidden by law in Norway from 1537 to 1843. And as late as 1955, a Norwegian student who entered the Jesuit Order was forbidden to reside in Norway. The Catholic Church herself has not been completely free of guilt in questions of religious freedom well into our own days.
But let us return to Olav Haraldsson's mission with the sword. Olav was certainly no «Sunday school-child». He must have believed that he was acting in keeping with God's will, when he compelled people to accept Christianity. But his mind - i.e., the feelings that filled him when he acted violently like this - must have been anything but Christian. When he burnt pagan sanctuaries, burned farms, killed or mutilated pagans who resisted him, the thin wall (only a few years old) between the pagan pirate and the Christian king was broken down. Can we expect anything else? There are priests who hold that it takes from five to ten years before a Protestant who converts to Catholicism today has learned to «think like a Catholic», and the difference here is not really so large. How much longer does this process take for a pagan Viking!
After this close look at Olav's mission with the sword, it is now time to look at all the positive things he achieved for Christ's cause in Norway. As I have already mentioned, Olav had come to grasp, during the winter he spent in Rouen, that Christianity is not just a vague theory hanging in the air. He learned that it had been brought out into the various countries by a united Church which had much more effective organisation than he had seen in the world's kingdoms. He was also told that the highest chief sat in Rome, while his commissioners cared for his sheep in clearly-defined dioceses, with priests under them, each in his parish. This form of Church organisation, with its fast laws and rules, was now to take root in Norway. Up to now, Christian living had been a fairly arbitrary matter: what counted was being baptised and ceasing to participate in sacrifices and the ancestral cult. Understood this way, Christianity did not make any great impact on the traditional culture of the great men. But things would be different when the Church's organisation took on stricter forms.
Olav took four bishops with him from England. The one who had most significance for the organisation of the Catholic Church in Norway was bishop Grimkjell, who was Olav's closest friend and collaborator in ecclesiastical matters. Some time in the 1020's (1023?), an epochmaking assembly was held at Moster in Sunnhordland. lf we accept the results of Fridtjof Birkeli's historical investigations, this was not a customary parliamentary assembly, but a synod on the Anglo-Saxon pattern - were the bishops and the king's men met. The purpose of this synod was not to decree that Norwegians as a whole were to accept the Christian faith; this had already been accepted at the local assemblies throughout the land. The completely new element in Norwegian history was the establishing of Christian law (the Church's laws were to be decreed).12 King Olav had little experience in this area, so it was surely bishop Grimkjell who took the initiative for this synod and had the main responsibility for the shape given to Christian law on Norwegian soil. When this was done, the Christian law was adopted in the local assemblies from south to north. It is difficult to establish which Christian laws go back all the way to Moster, and which were added later in the course of the centuries. But the remarkable thing is that the entire body of legislation from that time - both the ecclesiastical and the secular parts - were called «St Olav's law» up to the Reformation in the sixteenth century, and for a good time in the succeeding centuries. This tells us all the more about the role king Olav played in the people's consciousness as the man who gave and carried out the law.13
What, in brief, does the Christian law say? It was a question of external commandments and prohibitions to be observed by the Christian people. The Gulating law begins like this:
The first point in the laws is that we shall bow down to the east and pray to the holy Christ for good harvests and peace, and that we may keep our land built up and have our land's king happy. May he be our friend and we his, and may God be the friend of us all.
There follow laws prescribing that newborn babies are to be allowed to live and not to be exposed in wood or field. Slaves are to be ransomed each year. Polygamy is forbidden: one man is to have only one wife. Severe penalties were imposed for rape and the kidnap of women. It was forbidden to eat meat on Fridays. A fast was to be kept for seven whole weeks before Easter. It was forbidden to bury the dead in mounds or cairns as in pagan times. The corpse is to be taken to the church and then buried in consecrated ground. Burial in consecrated ground is denied to those who have committed atrocities, to traitors, murderers, thieves and suicides. Churches are to be built in each county. The bishop has authority over them, and is to appoint priests to them. Men within the county boundaries have responsibility to maintain the church and to provide for the priests.
As we see, Christian law is a question of concrete legal commandments which set an external framework around people's Christian life. Concepts of a later period such as personal conversion and an inner life of faith are unknown for the present. Christianity is to be «held». The priests are to promote the inner life of faith through administering the sacraments, through preaching and pastoral care. Everything suggests that the transition from holding external rules to living an interior Christian life took many generations (apart from individual exceptions). Such a gradual introduction of Christianity was necessary. Bishop Grimkjell was a prudent religious psychologist. He will have reflected that, if a house is to be built, one does not start with the roof: the first thing to do is to lay the foundations. The Christian law was established at Moster and then was taken into the Norwegian laws of the country, at the local assemblies, on the same footing as other legal prescriptions.
Olav Haraldsson was zealous for the Christian law. In his zeal for the cause of the White Christ, he journeyed continually along the far-flung coast and back and forth in the inland districts. Wherever he came, he held assemblies with the farmers where he had the Christian law read aloud. The first thing he wanted to know was whether people really kept it. Snorre tells us that «people were baptised almost everywhere in the coastal villages, but most of them did not know the Christian law». Many farmers and great men will have had their difficulties with it: was one really obliged to free one's own slaves from work on Sundays and holy days? What would happen to the business of running the farm then? Should a father give up his right to expose a child that was a weakling or deformed? Should the village chief or the great farmer voluntarily accept giving a foreign bishop jurisdiction over the county's churches, indeed even over their own private churches on the family farms? Were they to let this foreigner have the decisive voice in appointing priests in these churches? Was a great man freely to renounce polygamy and send away his second and third wives? Conflicts could easily arise here. Here the Christian kingdom was in sharp disagreement with the autonomy of the clan chieftains - in matters where they had exercised customary rights from ancient times onwards.
How did Olav react to open opposition? There is a sentence repeated often in the sagas, with slight variations: «As for those who were unwilling to submit to the Christian law, he threatened them with the loss of life and limbs and all their property, applying this to the great just as much as to the small». In other words: equality before the law! It might be acceptable that he dealt harshly with the humble people, but it was difficult for many of the great men to swallow his rupture with the religious autonomy of the clan society, when he compelled the mighty ones to submit to legal regulations that came from outside and had an alien and destructive character in their eyes. I may jump ahead for a moment and mention here already that this was one of the conflicts that created those enemies who killed king Olav at Stiklestad. The claim so often repeated by modern historians, that the battle at Stiklestad had nothing to do with Christianity, is dubious. It is indeed true that most of those who fought in the farmers' army were baptised men; but many a baptised chief found the Christian law unacceptable. And this was one of the reasons why they wanted to kill the king who imposed the Christian law on them. On the other side of the conflict there stood the Christian king with his sacred conviction that he was doing God's will when he gently or forcibly wove the people's Christian lives into a legislation that was the common Christian property in the Catholic Europe of that period.
The saga makes it clear that king Olav did not look on the Norwegian Church as exclusively a national affair. His aim was to link it to the universal Catholic Church which now raised its vault above most of Europe. This is why he sent his court bishop Grimkjell to the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen. The Norwegian ecclesiastical province was under his jurisdiction from now on, for a long time in the future; this had also been the express wish of the Pope. The journey to Bremen had presumably also the intention of winning the archbishop's approval of the form taken by Christian law in Norway.
Behind all king Olav did, we glimpse the legislator and the man who put the law into practise. He was interested not only in the Christian law, but also - indeed, just as much - in the secular part of the laws of the land, as these had been formed by the parliamentary assemblies from ancient times onwards. The king did not have any legislative power. But the saga makes it clear that he had some degree of influence on the legal prescriptions. Snorre writes: «He summoned to himself all the most learned men, both mighty men and humble people. So he often had them recite to him the laws Håkon Adelsteinfostre had established in Trondheim (Trøndelag). He adapted the laws according to the counsel of the most learned men, abolishing some and adding others where he thought this necessary.»14
Nor had the king any judicial power. But the saga relates that many brought their legal cases to him. Snorre writes that when the king held an assembly with the farmers in Valdres, he asked them «whether there were any at the assembly who had lawsuits with one another that they wished him to adjudicate for them». The narrative goes on to make it clear that many who were at odds with one another brought their charges before the king. «He spent the whole day on this work. The assembly was dissolved in the evening.»15
It was as the executor of the law that the king had his most important task, i.e. to punish those who committed crimes against the law of the country. Here too there lay potential for great conflicts: it was the parliamentary assemblies that had the legislative and judicial power in the old clan society, while it was left to the injured party himself to see to the executive power: if a violent criminal was outlawed, it was up to the members of the injured family to kill him. This was probably the most obvious solution in a land which was as yet without police or prisons. At a period when the clans were fairly equal in power and society was basically uniform, it was possible to arrange things this way - even if the execution of the sentence could take a very long time (the outlawed giant Grettir hid for twenty years on Iceland, before his enemies caught him).
Things were different in king Olav's days. The clan society was partly dissolving. The clan chief had now become the village chief or local chieftain over large territories - but he continued to think locally, seldom in terms of the country as a whole. These clan chiefs settled their dispute as best they could. They uttered sentence on the farmers and the humble people at the parliamentary assemblies in accordance with the laws of the country. But they allowed themselves liberties that threatened the peace of the land. Many a great man felt no hesitation about wreaking havoc in his local society or in areas further away along the Norwegian coast. The Gulating law has a chapter devoted specifically to Viking raids in one's own land.16 Snorre speaks of this with distaste: «It had been the custom in Norway for the sons of courtiers or rich farmers to sail in ships of war and acquire wealth by creating devastation both abroad and at home.» Here we see one more example of the continuation of the narrow and restricted clan morality. The end justifies the means: the wealth of the clan is to be increased. Weaker clans and humble people along the Norwegian coast are harassed, killed and plundered.
Snorre goes on to say: «But after king Olav took over the kingdom, he gave the land peace in such a way that he stopped all plundering in the country, and even if those involved in breaking the peace or committing other crimes were the sons of mighty men, he was not satisfied with anything less than depriving them of life and limb, if it was possible for him at all to punish them. Neither entreaties nor fines were of any avail here.» Snorre bases his account on a poem written by king Olav's closest friend, the poet Sigvat.17
They who broke the peace
oft offered gold to buy themselves
from punishment. But the great minded
ruler took no fines thereof.
The heads of these men he bade
be struck off -for so shall the land
be guarded. For robbery
they had to suffer fitting pains.The dear lord who fed
the wolves full,
lessened the race of thieves and robbers:
robbery he stopped.
The strong king ordered
every bold thief to lose
hands or feet. Thus he got
peace for the land folk.It is most proof of his might
that many vikings lost
their heads through the keen
weapons of the land's watcher.
The generous father of Magnus
hthd done much good;
most of Olav Digre's victories
have furthered his honour.
In this context, we must especially note the weight both Snorre and Sigvat the poet attach to the king's feeling for justice: for him, all are equal before the law. If he had merely contented himself with punishing small criminals and village rowdies, not one voice would have been raised in protest. But they could not tolerate the fact that he dared to break into the clan chieftains' claim to sow disorder within and outside the area of their own power. When the king punished the crimes of the great men just as severely as the villainies of the small, the powerful in the land felt that he went too far. Snorre writes towards the end of his saga of St Olav: «He punished rich and poor in the same way, but people thought this was excessive, and so there arose enmity towards him, as people lost their relatives after the king's righteous judgement in a lawsuit where there was valid reason to have a grievance. This was the reason why people in the land rose against Olav: they could not endure his righteousness, and he would rather have lost the kingdom than judge one unjustly.»18
Under king Olav's reign in Norway, the special interests of the clans were in conflict with the king's struggle to ensure justice and peace for all. The king could not deviate at all from this programme of government, and this was to be his downfall. Norwegian historians are quick to characterise king Olav as a vengeful hothead, when he made inroads into the mighty clans. The saga paints a different picture: when the king punishes mighty men for breaking the law, this is not described as an impulsive act of revenge. The saga relates that the king was exceedingly angry when the law was broken the passionate blood of the Hårfagre family and the obsession of the Viking life never left him - but he always preserved his calm. A reasonable royal judgement preceded the execution of the punishment, and this often took one or two days to come.19
Did king Olav really have any choice in his relationship to the mighty men? He could have sat pretty well undisturbed as king in Norway, if he had let the chiefs be their own masters, as they wanted. But what would have happened to the cause of God? In a country where no restraint was put on conflicts between the clans, on opposition to Christianity, and on acts of devastation in one's own land, Christianity would have had little chance to be anything more than gilt over a society where the right of the powerful was the law.
The emperor Charlemagne was his great ideal. It would go too far to claim that he clearly understood this emperor's person and pattern of ruling when he left Rouen and set his course homewards, but this ideal took on ever clearer outlines as Olav developed his kingly activity. No doubt many long conversations with the English bishops were a significant factor here. In the royal estate which he had build in Nidaros, the court bishop Grimkjell had a place next to the high seat of the king. This prelate accompanied him on all his journeys. Grimkjell must have been a pious and learned man. He came from the Anglo-Saxon Church, where the clergy were zealous supporters of the Cluniac reforms. Grimkjell must have painted an enticing portrait for Olav's mind of what a king should be - he must have described what it meant to be a rex iustus («righteous king»), a «king by the grace of God», a «vicar of God» in the exercise of law and justice. He must have said much about the hope that the Pope had placed in the Frankish king Charlemagne when he crowned him as emperor, and how Charlemagne had committed his whole life to putting an end to the unrest that had followed the population movements in Europe and stopping the flow of blood from the Germanic clan chiefs' unceasing family feuds. Grimkjell must have told Olav how the emperor was victorious in the struggle for law and order. Nor will he have kept silence about the emperor's weak sides: that he interfered too much in the Church's internal affairs, or that he used excessive harshness, especially against the Saxons. Grimkjell must have told king Olav about the great decline in Europe that followed on Charlemagne's death, and then described how Charlemagne's concept of kingship was reborn many centuries later, in an improved form, in the wake of the Cluniac reforms. Here the righteous king was seen as the one who struggled for peace, law and order in his kingdom, so that the Christian life could blossom and develop fully.
If king Olav was to succeed in living up to this ideal of kingship, then he would have to work against the retrograde effect of the special interests of the great men, who preferred the prosperity of their own clan to what was best for the whole people. He did not have any other choice, if he was to fight for the cause of Christ in Norway. This is how king Olav must have seen things: to fight for law and order, and to struggle against the attacks of the clan chieftains, was just as much a part of the work of Christianisation as to build churches and to speak on behalf of God at the parliamentary assemblies. It was this work of peace that made him powerful enemies, who finally succeeded in taking his life. In this context too, therefore, it must be maintained that the battle at Stiklestad was concerned to the highest degree with Christian values.
King Olav tried first the path of diplomacy. He sought to win the mighty men over to his side by making them his vassals («lendmenn») with authority over large areas of land. In return, they were to swear an oath of allegiance, become his men and support him in matters affecting the politics of the whole kingdom. When he saw that their friendship was only half-hearted, and that they continued to live the same wild life as before, he established «årmenn» who were to govern on the royal estates in the various parts of the country. They came from lowlier families than the «lendmenn», and they owed all their status to the king. The årmenn were to protect the farmers and the humble people in the king's name in disputes and lawsuits. Besides this, they were to keep an eye on the lendmenn's own breaches of the law, and report them to the king. This, naturally enough, was not well accepted. The lendmenn saw this as an interference with their own rights, and looked down with scorn to the årmenn, calling them the king's slaves. The overture to the rising against king Olav was precisely such a conflict between the son of a mighty man and an årmann.
