Olaf Tryggvason

Olaf Tryggvason was king of Norway for five years and converted it to Christianity at sword point. The sagas give him a childhood of the kind that suggests later embroidery: born after his father's killing, sold into slavery in Estonia, recognised years afterwards in a Novgorod marketplace by an uncle. What is better attested is his career as a Viking commander in the west. He raided England through the 990s, probably commanded at Maldon in 991, and took Danegeld from Æthelred twice; on the second occasion in 994 he accepted confirmation as a Christian with Æthelred standing sponsor, and undertook never to return in war. He kept that. He sailed instead to Norway, took the kingship in 995, and imposed the new religion on a country that did not want it, destroying temples, and by the sagas' account torturing and killing those who refused. He founded Trondheim in 997. He also sent the mission that converted Iceland by decision of its assembly in 1000, and Leif Eriksson is said in the sagas to have been sent from his court to convert Greenland. He was killed in 1000 at Svolder, ambushed at sea by a coalition of Danes, Swedes and disaffected Norwegian nobles, and went over the side of his ship in armour rather than be taken. Rumours that he had survived Svolder and escaped to the east circulated for decades, which is usually a sign of how much people wanted him alive. Snorri Sturluson gave him the longest saga in Heimskringla. Norway reverted to Danish overlordship after his death and was not decisively Christianised until Olaf Haraldsson, a different Olaf, finished the work thirty years later.

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