Olaf Haraldsson

Olaf Haraldsson converted Norway to Christianity by force, was driven out by his own nobles, was killed trying to return, and became the country's patron saint within a year of dying. He spent his youth as a viking in the Baltic and in England, where he fought for and against the Danes - the story of pulling down London Bridge with ships' cables belongs to him, and is the likely origin of the nursery rhyme - and was baptised in Rouen around 1013. He took the Norwegian throne in 1015 while Cnut was occupied conquering England, and spent fifteen years imposing both royal authority and Christianity on a country of independent chieftains, using missionary bishops from England, a written law code, and a good deal of mutilation and burning of those who kept the old sacrifices. Both projects made the same enemies. Cnut bought the Norwegian nobility with English silver, Olaf fled to Kiev in 1028, and he returned in 1030 with a small force to be defeated and killed at Stiklestad by an army of Norwegian farmers and chieftains - not a foreign army, which is the uncomfortable fact the cult had to absorb. Miracles were reported almost at once, his body was found uncorrupted, and Bishop Grimkell declared him a saint in 1031. Cnut's rule proved unpopular enough that Olaf's son Magnus was brought back as king in 1035, and the dead king became the eternal king of Norway, in whose name later monarchs held the land. Nidaros cathedral was built over his grave and became the northernmost great pilgrimage site in Europe. The grave itself was lost at the Reformation. His axe appears on the coat of arms of Norway to this day. The pilgrim route to Nidaros was revived in the 1990s and is walked again. Snorri Sturluson gave him the longest saga in Heimskringla, written two centuries after his death.

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