Olaf Haraldsson

Life and Ministry

Olaf Haraldsson was king of Norway from AD 1015 to 1028, born into the royal line of Harald Fairhair and baptized in Rouen, Normandy, during his Viking-period campaigns in the west. He returned to Norway in AD 1015 to claim the throne and used the office to complete the Christianization of the country begun under Olaf Tryggvason a generation earlier. He destroyed pagan temples, suppressed the great sacrifices at Mære, codified Christian law in the regional things (assemblies), brought English bishops north to ordain Norwegian clergy, and met the resistance of the great chieftains with both legal and military force. His harshness in the Christianization made enemies among the regional nobles, and in AD 1028 they invited the Danish king Cnut the Great to displace him; Olaf fled to Russia.

Circumstances of Death

Returning from exile in AD 1030 with a small army to retake his kingdom, Olaf met the coalition of Norwegian chieftains and Cnut's local agents at Stiklestad in Trøndelag on 29 July AD 1030. He fell in the battle, struck by three weapons — sword, spear, and axe — in succession. His body was hidden by a friend in a sandbank by the Nidelva river and recovered a year later, said by the witnesses to be incorrupt; this was the beginning of his cult. His half-brother Harald Hardrada and his son Magnus the Good took up the cause, restored the kingdom to the Christian line, and built the cathedral at Nidaros (modern Trondheim) over his shrine, which became the great medieval pilgrimage center of the North.

Legacy

Olaf is the patron saint of Norway and the figure around whom Norwegian national and ecclesial identity coalesced. The Lutheran Reformation did not displace him; Norwegian Lutheranism kept his feast day and his cathedral as the seat of the Lutheran archbishop, and his cross became part of the Norwegian arms. His witness combines king and martyr in a particular way: he died not as a confessor refusing the sword, but as the Christian sovereign of a half-converted people, struck down by the resistance to the gospel he had sometimes pressed too hard but at no point recanted. His blood at Stiklestad watered the Christianization of Norway as Boniface's at Dokkum watered the Frisians.