Saint Olav - King of Norway

XII. The Canonisation

After the king's death the tone changes - first among the chiefs and then among the farmers. Tore Hund, who prepared the king's body for burial, is the first to claim that the king was holy; Einar Tambarskjelve, who was not present at the battle, makes the same claim. Kalv Arneson too - probably the one who gave the king the fatal blow - changes his mind, as does chief after the other. The common people in Trøndelag, who «had been raging their hostility to the king», change theirs almost overnight. «That winter, there were many in Trondheimen (Trøndelag) who began to say that king Olav was truly a holy man, and that many wonders took place because of his holiness. Many began to pray to king Olav about things they thought important.»

This change in tone is a mystery which is difficult to explain - the only possible cause is that the king was in fact holy, for there are no other theories to cover all the facts, even though the numerous theories do not lack a trace of probability. For example, reference is made to the hard times that came when king Canute's son Svein was made governor of the land together with his mother Alfiva, and stricter laws were in force than those Olav had laid down; there was a bad feeling at having killed their own king; there were pagan ideas of the king as mediator between human beings and the home of the gods - they had killed him, and now they began to experience terror and confusion. This is all very well up to a point, but nothing positive has never generated by such negative factors. New values must have come on to the scene. Repentance and sorrow tend to depress the spirit, not to lift it up. The repentance of the men of Trøndelag is an insufficient cause to explain the fire of enthusiasm for Olav that spreads from Stiklestad across the whole of northern Europe.

Besides this, it was people from outside who were the strongest supporters of Olav's canonisation: Einar Tambarskjelve, who came home from England and had not taken part in the battle; the Danish king Svein, who gave his approval to the canonisation; his court poet Torarin Lovtunge, who praises his dead enemy as a saint and encourages Svein to seek Olav's intercession; Sigvat the poet, who receives the news of his friend's death when on a pilgrimage to Rome. None of these persons can have been seized by a psychosis of repentance.

We must say the same about bishop Grimkjell, who canonised him, (at this period, it was the local bishop, not the pope who had the responsibility for this). As I have mentioned, he was in Oppland during the king's exile. After a year had passed since St Olav's death, the people of Trøndelag sent messengers to summon him. The bishop did not delay in coming, for he «believed that what was said about king Olav's miracles was true, and that he was a saint».

Olav's body, which his friends had buried in the dark of night at the mouth of the river just above the town, was now dug up. Snorre relates in detail the miracles that had taken place with the king's sacred remains: a wonderful fragrance streamed forth from his body; he was ruddy in the face, as if he had just been sleeping; his hair and nails had grown. (I cannot omit to mention here that four independent sources from just before and after the Reformation in 1537 relate that St Olav's body lay incorrupt in his shrine - so this is not just true of the time of his canonisation.) Snorre writes about his canonisation: «So it was decided, after the bishop's formal statement and with the king's consent and the judgement of the whole people, that king Olav was truly holy. The king's body was borne into the Church of St Clement and laid to rest above the high altar.»

The miracles were certainly not the only reason why the bishop carried out the canonisation. He was probably the king's spiritual advisor during his reign in Norway. He was well acquainted from England with the plundering raids of the Vikings, and he understood their mentality. In an exceptional way, he understood king Olav both as a man and as a Christian, and knew what had happened in the mind and body of the twenty-year-old Olav after he had been baptised. Bishop Grimkjell knew about the demands God made of the newly-converted pirate king. He had observed how God's power worked in him. But he had also witnessed - often, perhaps many times - how Olav's cooperation with God's grace had broken down, especially when the Hårfagre inheritance and his past life as a Viking became too strong for him. But the bishop had seen just as often how Olav picked himself up after each fall, and took up the struggle afresh.

Bishop Grimkjell was not encumbered with the error many Norwegian historians seem to have inherited: namely, that the life of a saint must be free from sin. This directly heretical idea comes from a more recent age. It is well known that we read in 1 John 1,9: «If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth does not dwell in us.» The Catholic Church bears some of the responsibility for allowing such an error to sneak into our own ideas and those of others. It was in the eighteenth century that saints began to be portrayed as a mirror of virtues. Biographies of the saints wiped away every trace of the dust of sin from their polished haloes. It was only after the Second World War that something was done about the «sugar-sweet saints». Genuine biographies of saints - not the finely-cleaned interpretations of the saints' lives - show clearly that the saints often took twisting and dangerous paths before they arrived at perfection. The superiority of the saints does not consist of a moral stainlessness, but in the fact that they allowed grace to win the victory in their lives. The Franciscan theologian Bonaventure wrote in the thirteenth century: «Do you not know that many saints were sinful? When they committed great sins, they learned how to show mercy to us sinners.»25

The poet Torarin Lovtunge must have thought something similar about St Olav when he wrote in a song: «Thus Olav sinlessly saved his soul before his death». God forgave him all his sins, so that he could enter cleansed into the heavenly palace: This is how bishop Grimkjell too must have understood his holiness: he saw how the young Olav stood with one foot in the Viking times and one foot in Christianity. Thus he witnessed how Olav struggled over the course of years, with the help of God's grace, to get the «Viking foot» over and into the Christian camp - and how he finally succeeded.

Snorre saw the victory in Olav's martyrdom at Stiklestad. At that period, the Anglo-Saxon Church from which Grimkjell came had a broad concept of martyrdom: Christian kings who fought against pagans and died in the battle were accorded the status of martyrs.26 Naturally, Olav knew very well that he was not fighting against pagans at Stiklestad. Nevertheless, we can say that he gave his life for Christ's sake: for he must have understood that Christianity would have no chance whatever of remaining more than a thin covering over a divided and lawless clan society, unless he himself took over the reigns of government in the land. He understood, better than we understand today, that the struggle for the unified kingdom and the struggle for Christianity were one and the same thing. What Olav did not achieve while he was alive, he attained through his death: after Stiklestad, the unified kingdom is an undisputed fact. This also lays the foundations for a Christianity that grows. It is after Olav's death in the battle on 29 July 1030 that Christianity slowly grows from a matter of external regulations to become an inner piety of the people.

No man in this country has meant more for Norway than St Olav. Older people have difficulty in understanding him, but it will be easier for young people, who see at first hand how we are slowly but surely slipping back into the paganism Saint Olav abandoned and fought against, to be fascinated by him, to take the «driving force» in his life as a model, and to pray for his intercession.

Father Olav Müller

Almighty, everlasting God, you sent Olav Haraldsson to Norway to bring Christianity to the country and people. You let him build churches and install priests. At his intercession, give many Norwegians the vocation to become priests today.

Amen.