Saint Olav - King of Norway

V. Olav Haraldsson returns to a divided Norway

Let us follow Olav on his journey home. He went first to England, where he left the long-ships and took two merchant ships with him, with a crew of two hundred and twenty handpicked men with coats of mail and good weapons. He put out to sea and sailed northwards in autumn 1015. He reached land at the island of Selja near Stad, where (according to the legend) St Sunniva had landed a few decades earlier. Can there be a divine plan in this?

What kind of Norway did Olav return to? Our spacious land far in the north had much in common with the divided Europe that Charlemagne had seen at the beginning of his reign hundreds of years earlier, and that he had succeeded in uniting into one single Christian kingdom. Norway too was divided politically and religiously when Olav set his foot once more on Norwegian soil after many years' absence. After Olav Trygvasson fell in the battle at Svolder, the country was divided among the victors: the Danish king, the Swedish king and the earls of Lade. The Danes and the Swedes established themselves in Båhuslen and the land around the Oslo fjord. The earls of Lade became rulers in Trøndelag and North Vestlandet. In other places, the local rulers were able to do as they liked: Erling Skjalgsson was lord in South Vestlandet and Agder. The local kings in Østlandet retained their power in Oppland. Hålogaland was ruled by the powerful chiefs in Tjøtta and Bjarkøy.

But the divisions went much deeper in the land to which Olav believed himself to be the heir: Norway was still to a large extent a society based on clan lines. For reasons of space, I must describe this only in broad lines. In prehistoric times, the most important social unit in Norway was the clan or extended family, governed by the clan's oldest man. When the extended family grew so numerous that there was no longer place for everyone on the ancestral farm, the younger members moved out and built their own farmsteads. But as a rule, they remained close enough to be able to maintain the bonds that united them to the clan and to the ancestral farm. In such an extended family, the individual person's individuality was submerged in the community. All that one did had one single goal: to serve the clan as well as possible. The clan was held together by ties of blood, but also by the ancestral cult. The ties to the ancestors, who were buried in mounds on the farm, were maintained through sacrifices, magic rites and family feasts at which the dead were invisibly present. It was also here on the family farm that legal conflicts were tackled and resolved. The extended family was also the only effective protection its members had against attacks and injuries from outside. The one who had no family was also without legal protection, and could not expect any help in lean years: he was certain to die. Two families could be united in friendship through marriage. Thus the woman became a pawn employed by both families in their common interest in growth in power.

Apart from this, there was nothing that held the various extended families together: each one was self-sufficient, and the one family stood against the other. Bloody revenge was exacted when a member of the family was killed by an assailant from another family. It was not the moral aspect of the murder that offended them, but the fact that the entire extended family was weakened by the loss of the member. This meant that bloody revenge need not in the first place affect the murderer himself any member of his family could be cut down. Thus the murderer's family in turn was weakened, and the power-relationship re-established. To exact a death in revenge was a duty incumbent on the extended family: if it was neglected, one lost all honour and was looked on by everyone as a coward. It goes without saying that to take the law into one's own hands in this way led to many bloody conflicts between the families. A murder initiated, with inexorable regularity, a series of new murders. Vengeance was passed on in inheritance from father to son. Blood was shed over many generations with an inhuman logic. By the nature of things, a unified and unifying kingdom has a poor chance of survival in a divided society based on families, where the one family stand against the other. Nor could Christianity, with its message of peace, find welcoming soil in this kind of society. For bloody vengeance and clan conflicts are not in harmony with the Church's message about peace on earth for all persons of good will. It is difficult to reconcile the importance attached by Christianity to the individual's wholly personal responsibility before God in all ethical questions with a clan morality where the only norm of good and evil is the prosperity of the clan. And the Church's proclamation of a love of neighbour that is to be shown even among the poorest of the poor is not in accord with the clan society's sovereign disdain for everything and everyone outside one's own extended family.

It must be mentioned here that the clan society was in the process of disintegration when Olav Haraldsson returned to Norway. Villages and small kingdoms under a chief or a local king had emerged. Legal conflicts were resolved in county courts and larger courts. But the growth of such institutions was very much hampered by a clan structure that still had deep roots among the people. Even earls and chiefs like Erling Skjalgsson, Kalv Arneson, Hårek on Tjøtta and Tore Hund thought primarily in terms of their clan's prosperity. In terms of practical politics, they were certainly aware that Norway needed a higher king who could organise the defence of the country against foreign Vikings and provide for peace and order at home. But if the result of having one kingdom for the whole country was the decrease in power of the chiefs' clans, then they preferred to have a foreign king who sat on his throne a long way off and allowed the local chiefs to govern within the areas of their own authority. And if the worst came to the worst and the Norwegian king were to put to death a man from a great family who had broken the country's laws, then the idea of bloody vengeance lay perilously close at hand. We shall see later that bloody vengeance was one of the forces that brought down Olav at Stiklestad. There are historians who hold that the transition from the clan society to the state lasted as long as the thirteenth century. We sense already here the difficulties Olav would encounter in his activity as king.10