Olaf II of Norway

Olaf Haraldsson, known to posterity as Olaf the Holy or Saint Olaf (Old Norse: Óláfr inn helgi), was a king of Norway in the early eleventh century whose reign, death in battle, and rapidly formed cult made him the principal national saint of Norway and a central figure in the Christianization of Scandinavia. According to the medieval kings' sagas, he was the son of Harald Grenske, a petty king in Vestfold claimed as a descendant of Harald Fairhair, and of Åsta Gudbrandsdatter. After Harald Grenske's death, Åsta married Sigurd Syr, a local ruler in Ringerike, and Olaf was brought up in that inland district of eastern Norway. As a young man he followed the customary path of a royal scion without a kingdom, leading Viking expeditions in the Baltic and around the British Isles. Saga tradition, supported in part by skaldic verse, places him in England during the wars between King Æthelred and the Danish invaders, and later in Normandy, where he is said to have been baptized at Rouen by Archbishop Robert. Whatever the precise itinerary, by the time he turned his attention to Norway he presented himself as a baptized Christian prince with military experience gained abroad.

In 1015 he returned to Norway and asserted a claim to the whole kingdom as heir of the Fairhair dynasty. He defeated Earl Sweyn Hákonarson at the Battle of Nesjar in 1016 and thereafter brought most of the country under his rule, though the great chieftains of Trøndelag and the west remained restive. Olaf's government combined political unification with a forceful missionary policy. He destroyed pagan temples and images, imposed baptism, and punished with death, maiming, or exile those who refused Christianity or who challenged royal authority. He founded or endowed churches and sought to organize a territorial church under bishops such as Grimkell, who had English connections. Around 1019 he married Astrid Olofsdotter, daughter of the Swedish king Olof Skötkonung, after an earlier plan to marry her sister Ingegerd had failed when Ingegerd was wed to Yaroslav of Kiev. Astrid bore him a daughter, Wulfhild (Ulvhild), who later married Ordulf of Saxony. By a concubine, Alfhild, Olaf had a son, Magnus, who would reign as Magnus the Good.

The same severity that advanced conversion and royal power alienated many Norwegian magnates. They found a patron in Cnut the Great, who already ruled Denmark and England and who had his own claim to overlordship in Norway. In 1028 a combination of Danish pressure and domestic revolt forced Olaf to leave the country. He withdrew first to Sweden and then to the court of Yaroslav the Wise at Kiev, where he spent about two years. In 1030, encouraged by news of discontent with Danish rule, he returned through Sweden into Trøndelag with a relatively small army of Norwegians, Swedes, and others. On 29 July 1030 he met a much larger force of local farmers and chieftains at Stiklestad in Verdal. He was defeated and killed. Later legend named Thorir Hund, Thorstein Knarresmed, and Kalv Arnesson among those who inflicted his wounds; the historical details of the melee cannot be recovered with certainty. His body was taken from the field and buried in secret beside the river Nid at Nidaros.

Within a year, stories of miracles and of the incorruption of his remains led Bishop Grimkell to translate the body and to declare Olaf a saint, an act of local canonization typical of the period before the papacy reserved that right. The shrine at Nidaros became the greatest pilgrimage centre in the Nordic world, and Nidaros Cathedral was raised over the site of his burial. Olaf's cult spread along the sea routes of the North: churches dedicated to him, often under the name St Olave, appeared in Norway, Iceland, the Faroes, Orkney, England, and Ireland. He was styled Rex Perpetuus Norvegiae, the perpetual king of Norway, a title that expressed the idea that the Christian kingdom itself was under his heavenly protection. His feast on 29 July, called Olsok in Norway and Ólavsøka in the Faroe Islands, remained a major civic and liturgical observance. The written tradition of his life is dominated by the various versions of Óláfs saga helga, especially the account in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, which blend skaldic testimony, local memory, and hagiographical patterning; historians treat them as indispensable but not as straightforward chronicle. At the Reformation the shrine was dismantled, yet Olaf continued to be remembered as Norway's national saint, and his cult has been revived in modern Lutheran as well as Catholic devotion.