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Don Hollway’s account of the life of the Norse warlord Olaf Tryggvason (king of Norway in the years c.995-1000) covers a period of momentous social and religious change in the lands bordering the Baltic Sea. The author tracks his hero’s extraordinary journeys, from the jagged, ice-strewn fjords of Norway to the bustling Kyvan slave marts, along the labyrinthine streets of sunny Byzantium and through the wind-swept English Channel to the court of King Aethelred (the Unready) of England, then back to Norway via Dublin and the Orkneys.
One of several coloured illustrations shows a 10th-century amulet cast as Thor’s hammer by Viking smiths, but decorated with two inlaid Christian crosses. The image conjures the sense of the Norse, an engagingly superstitious people, placing their orders but hedging their bets. Described by 11th-century chronicler Adam of Bremen as a ‘pagan wizard’, Olaf is held to have converted to accept ‘the white Christ’ while overwintering in the Isles of Scilly (c.990). Four years later, he launched an unremitting crusade to convert non-believers in Norway and the Orkneys to the new faith; but he didn’t spread the Gospel by word alone: much of his evangelising was done at the point of the sword. Hollway describes the crusading king as wielding a blade in one hand and a Christian cross in the other, dramatically personifying Norway’s sometimes brutal transition from a pagan past to a Christian future. Hammer of the Gods is an apt title.
Around the year 1200, the unknown author of the Orkneyinga Saga wrote of Olaf in his early 30s making landfall in the Orkneys (c.995), having travelled from his homebase at Dublin with five longships. On arrival, he demanded that Earl Sigurd, Orkney’s ruler, at once embrace the Christian faith, adding, ‘If you refuse, I’ll have you killed on the spot, and I swear that I’ll ravage every island with fire and steel’. Overawed, the earl was duly baptised, and gave Olaf his only son as a hostage against his backsliding. After this, all of Orkney is said to have embraced the new faith, willingly or not.
The crusading king wielded a sword in one hand and a Christian cross in the other.
But when he heard the news of his son’s sudden death in Olaf’s custody, Sigurd reneged on his oath. He allied himself with Olaf’s enemies and fought alongside them at the Battle of Svolder at the turn of the millennium, where Olaf (spoiler alert) lost his life. Tradition has it that he preferred a quick death by drowning to being captured by his enemies. The historic backdrop to the sea battle was the struggle for dominion over Norway between competing Scandinavian warlords. After Olaf’s death, the fractured land was ruled by a coalition of despots, the most notable of them being Sven Forkbeard, king of the Danes and a future king of England.
Larger than life
The sagas tell of Olaf occasionally entertaining his men by juggling with three sharpened knives and keeping them spinning in the air, all the while dancing up and down the side of his ship over outstretched oars. As a young man living in modern-day north-west Russia and the Baltic states, he is alleged to have exceeded all other men in manly achievements, popularity, and natural gifts, to the extent that an early sponsor, Prince Vladimir of Novgorod, was warned not to allow Olaf to become too powerful ‘for such a man may become a danger to you’. His departure from the Baltics marked the start of his buccaneering career in British and Irish waters.
Olaf is said to have owned a magnificent longship capable of accommodating 500 fighting men (an exaggeration, like his athletic capabilities, in keeping with his larger-than-life persona). Better attested is that Olaf’s flagship, named the Long Serpent, had enough room for 160 fully armoured fighting men, plus 40 clerics packed in the stern armed with prayers alone. In battle, Olaf wore a helmet inlaid with gold. He held a gilt shield in his left hand and a sword in his right. He wore a bright red cloak over his chainmail armour to remain conspicuous while in the thick of the fighting, and positioned himself prominently on the Long Serpent’s quarterdeck before any engagement.
Longships appearing off the coasts of Britain and Ireland in the 980s presaged what historians now refer to as a Second Viking Age (the first having ended with the death in battle of Eric Bloodaxe, King of York, in the year 954). The raids escalated from hit-and-run sorties against vulnerable coastal targets at places like Portland and Southampton to larger-scale attacks threatening the hinterland of England. Not all succeeded. Many of the Vikings assailing the coastal settlement at Watchet in Somerset (c.988) never made it back to their ships. Whether Olaf Tryggvason was present is not known, but he is credited in the sagas as having completed an impressive circumnavigation of the British Isles at around this time. The Southampton suburb of Woolston on the River Itchen is held to have originated as ‘Olaf’s Town’ and is recorded in the Domesday Book as ‘Olvestune’.
the Battle for Britain
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 991 (Winchester Manuscript) records Olaf commanding 93 longships at large in the English Channel, carrying out attacks on places like Folkestone and Sandwich in Kent and Ipswich in Suffolk, before berthing up on one or more of the islands in the Blackwater Estuary to threaten the important town of Maldon in Essex, which boasted a royal mint. Today there are three islands extant in the estuary: Mersea, Northey, and Osea. Over the course of centuries, changes in sea level and riverine and coastal sedimentation have drastically altered the local geography. According to a famous contemporary poem fragment known as The Battle of Maldon, a Viking herald, probably stationed on Northey island, the closest to Maldon, shouted threats and ultimatums across a narrow channel of water to the mainland, demanding the English forces gathering there pay tribute to avoid bloodshed.
The English commander Ealdorman Byrhtnoth stood his ground and offered battle, even allowing the enemy to cross to the mainland unopposed via a narrow causeway to allow the opposing armies to fight on an even footing: an early example of English manners and propriety. In the battle that followed, the Vikings – warriors by vocation, not part-timers like the English – gained the edge. Although warfare in England became more professional in the later medieval period, even a rich, well-organised kingdom like 10th-century Anglo-Saxon England called on local farmers to make up the bulk of any army. Byrhtnoth and his household troops died fighting. In the words of the cloister-bound Winchester Chronicler, the heathens ‘had possession of the field of slaughter’.
Maldon was decisive in that the defeat triggered the payment of annual tribute (Danegeld) to the raiders. In 994, formalisation of what became an elaborate protection racket took place in London. Olaf and the English king, Aethelred II, afterwards travelled together to Andover in Hampshire, where Olaf was formally baptised into the Christian Church and was made Aethelred’s godson. The English king promised to dispatch English missionaries to Scandinavia to aid Olaf’s conversion efforts. In return, Olaf swore never to again visit England in a war-like capacity. He may even have left behind Viking mercenaries to bolster the English defences. Certainly, by the turn of the millennium, after Olaf’s death, the English needed all the help they could get. Sven Forkbeard, the most powerful of the victors at Svolder, began launching attacks on the country. By the year 1013, he had forced Aethelred’s ouster, only to die soon after. After a short-lived fighting comeback led by the Anglo-Saxon king Edmund Ironside, England fell under the sway of Sven’s son Cnut the Great.
Sven Forkbeard may perhaps have fought at Maldon alongside Olaf. He is mentioned as being in London with a man named Olaf in 994, the year of the Andover baptism. But which Olaf? Historians (Hollway included) question the reliability of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, suspecting that dates, names, and events in the first half of the 990s might have been conflated by successive monks when making copies and corrections. The Chronicle never mentions Olaf specifically as Olaf Tryggvason, although its editor identifies the man as Tryggvason in the footnotes. English and Irish chroniclers were not precise in this respect. Many Olafs, Olofs, and Anlafs feature in the literature of the time. The Olaf baptised at Andover could, at a stretch, have been Olof Skötkonung, the teenage future king of Sweden, sometimes stylised as Olaf the Swede. He succeeded his father Eric the Victorious to the throne of Sweden in 995, a year after the Andover baptism, and fought alongside Sven at Svolder. Today in Sweden, his 25-year reign is considered, like Olaf Tryggvason’s shorter reign in Norway, as marking the transition from the Viking Age to the Middle Ages.
Hammer of the Gods is a veritable Scandi Game of Thrones. Don Hollway is a master at interweaving fact and fable, and this book is the third in his trilogy of Viking bio-dramas. A must-read for all lovers of the genre.
REVIEW BY JEFFREY JAMES
Hammer of the Gods
Don Hollway
Osprey Publishing, hbk, 400pp (£20)
ISBN 978-1472871589
