King Olaf II

Olaf II Haraldsson, known in Old Norse as Óláfr Haraldsson and later venerated as Saint Olaf or Olaf the Holy (Norwegian: Olav den hellige), was King of Norway in the early eleventh century and became the principal national saint of Norway. He was born about 995 in the district of Ringerike in eastern Norway, the son of the petty king Harald Grenske and Åsta Gudbrandsdatter. After Harald Grenske’s death, Åsta married Sigurd Syr, a local ruler in Ringerike, in whose household Olaf was raised; a later half-brother from that marriage was Harald Sigurdsson, the future king Harald Hardrada. As a youth Olaf took part in Viking expeditions in the Baltic, in England during the wars of Æthelred’s last years and the Danish conquest, and in Normandy. Medieval kings’ sagas present him as receiving Christian baptism at Rouen, an episode later tradition treated as decisive for his subsequent career as a missionary king.

Returning to Norway around 1015, Olaf displaced the earls who had governed under Danish overlordship and established himself as king, ruling until he was driven out in 1028. His reign was marked by a determined effort to complete the Christianization of Norway begun under Olaf Tryggvason. He founded churches, brought in clergy (notably the bishop Grimkell), suppressed pagan cult sites, and associated Christian observance with the law of the land in provisions later remembered as Olaf’s law. He married Astrid Olofsdotter, daughter of King Olof Skötkonung of Sweden. By a concubine named Alfhild he had a son, Magnus, later called Magnus the Good, who would rule Norway after him; by Astrid he had a daughter, Wulfhild (Ulfhild), who married Ordulf of Saxony. These family ties linked the Norwegian kingship to both the Swedish royal house and the Saxon dukes.

Olaf’s centralizing kingship and his enforcement of Christianity provoked resistance among powerful regional chieftains. He also came into conflict with Cnut the Great, king of Denmark and England, who claimed overlordship in Norway. In 1028 Olaf was forced into exile. He spent time in Sweden and then at the court of Yaroslav the Wise in Kievan Rus’. In 1030 he returned with a modest force to recover his kingdom and met an army of chieftains and farmers at Stiklestad in Trøndelag. There, on 29 July 1030, he was killed in battle. Contemporary and near-contemporary poetry and later saga narrative made the battle the defining moment of his life and death.

Reports of miracles circulated soon after he fell. His body, said to have been found incorrupt, was translated and enshrined at Nidaros (modern Trondheim), first in connection with the church of St Clement and later at the cathedral that became the centre of his cult. Bishop Grimkell declared him a saint as early as 1031, a local canonization typical of the period rather than a later papal process; the cult was already widely established when the archbishopric of Nidaros was organized in the twelfth century. Olaf came to be styled Rex Perpetuus Norvegiae, the perpetual king of Norway. His feast on 29 July, known in Norway as Olsok, became a major liturgical and popular observance. Churches dedicated to him spread across Scandinavia, the North Atlantic settlements, the British Isles, and the Baltic. Although the Reformation altered public cult in much of the North, Saint Olaf has remained the patron saint of Norway and a central figure in the country’s Christian and national memory, with Nidaros Cathedral as the historic focus of his shrine and pilgrimage.