Insurance isn't one size fits all, and shopping for it shouldn't feel like squeezing into something that just doesn't fit.
That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years.
With the Name Your Price tool.
You tell them what you want to pay and they show you options that fit your budget.
Enough hunting for discounts, trying to calculate rates, and tinkering with coverages.
Maybe you're picking out your very first policy, or maybe you're just looking for something that works better for you and your family.
Either way, they make it simple to see your options.
No guesswork, no surprises.
Ready to see how easy and fun shopping for car insurance can be?
Visit progressive.com and give the Name Your Price tool a try.
Take the stress out of shopping and find coverage that fits your life on your terms.
Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates.
Price and coverage match limited by state law.
He was a major figure in the Christianization of the Vikings and a towering figure in the second half of the Viking Age.
But what do we really know about the life of Olaf Tryggvason?
In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Don Holway guides James Osborne through the thrilling story of the Norse warlord and asks where does he sit among the Vikings' most legendary figures?
Today I'm joined by Don Holloway, author and historian, whose new book Hammer of the Gods, King Olaf's Viking Conquest, pulls together the story of Olaf Tryggvason from across multiple sources.
Don, I feel like every time I speak to a historian about the Viking Age, the conversation at some point ends up on Olaf Tryggvason.
Can you explain for listeners why he's such an important figure within the broader Viking story?
He's what I would call sort of the instigator of the Second Viking Age.
If you look at the Viking Age in total, you have this prelude to it from the raid on Lindisfarne up in Northumbria starts up there, goes into the great pagan conquests and you know where the Vikings came up against Alfred the Great.
And that went on until ultimately the Vikings were pushed out of England.
Eric Bloodaxe was killed and all his Vikings retreated.
Now some of the Danes lived on, stayed as English subjects, but they weren't totally Viking anymore.
They were English subjects.
So there was a kind of pause where –
The Anglo-Saxons were ruling England and the Vikings were over in Denmark and Norway, basically fighting among themselves and everything and not mounting any real challenge to England again.
And then later on, around 990, Olaf Tryggvason reappears on the scene.
And he's described in the book, he's more or less of a world traveler as far as Vikings go.
Most of these guys were Vikings, farmers most of the year and jumped on a ship and went raiding once a year or something like that, whereas he was more of a professional raider at that point and had built up such a reputation as a successful Viking.
And he was able to recruit an entire army and reinvade England.
And that sort of set off a whole new what they call the Second Viking Age.
So he's not just an important figure within the story of Anglo-Scandinavian relations.
Though he is that, he also has this incredibly textured, fascinating story.
So he has both.
He's both really important and really interesting, isn't he?
Yes, he is.
I mean, he's another one.
He's like Harold Hadrata, who crops up much later in history, but their lives had so many parallels.
World traveler.
Went all over the medieval world and came back and ultimately, I think most famous for Christianizing Norway when he became king of Norway.
So had a great effect on European history, not just English history, but European history.
Hmm.
I guess, before we really get into his life and his story, I do think it's important to look at the sources that you were drawing from when you were creating this picture of him.
It's interesting because the Vikings, they didn't really record their own stories in their own time.
This was a mostly oral culture who preserved their history through oral traditions.
How do we know about him and how certain can we be about what we think we know about his life?
Yeah, the sources, like you say, we're a thousand years after the fact here.
And, you know, the stories kind of get built up over that time.
He did have what were called scowls, which were like court poets.
And one or two of his did write down his story just in snippets.
And so those initial accounts survived in little snippets and everything.
It wasn't really until 200 years later that some of the Christian monks in Iceland put these things all down into king sagas.
And Olaf's saga is supposedly the first full-length saga.
Norwegian King Saga.
And it went through several versions because it was like a legend keep getting modified and amplified.
And I think the latest total version was done around the 1300s.
And it's almost to that time the legend is outgrown itself that it's verging on elements of fantasy in it where, you know, Olaf is talking to the gods and everything like that.
So, I mean, you have to take that – that's not reality.
But in a sense, I'm not really shooting for the reality.
I'm trying to retell the legend.
I trust my readers are going to be able to figure out, well, that's –
That's hokey.
But, you know, I'm I'll leave that up to them.
They can tell that, you know, I'm retelling the legend as it's been told for over a millennium now.
And that's what's in the book.
So this is clearly history that's been infused with legend over really generations and it's had elements of fantasy infused into it.
But we really do know that there is at least a kernel of historical literal truth at the basis of this.
Yeah, sure.
Because there are the early accounts that don't get quite so flowery about him.
They document what he's been doing.
Now, some of them conflict and you have to sort of figure out what's going on.
But there's enough contemporary stuff.
That, yeah, I mean, he's not a made up character.
I mean, he really he was in England and, you know, went to Norway and Christianized Norway.
So there's some parts in there that are obvious fiction, but still part of the story.
OK, well, let's get into that story.
I think something that's interesting about I Love Tregvason is that.
His story begins before he's born.
It actually begins with the death of his father, and his father dies while Olaf Sigvason's mother is still pregnant with him.
Can you explain the story behind this family background and his father's death?
Yeah, Olaf was born from a royal line.
His great-grandfather was Harald Fairhair, which is usually taken to be one of the first great kings of Norway, even though he really only ruled a small part down in the southwestern coast down there.
Now, his big problem, as with a lot of Vikings, was he had a lot of wives and girlfriends and a lot of sons.
And you know, it's always the way the emperor, he sets up the kingdom and then he dies and the sons all start fighting and betraying each other.
And that's where it sort of ended up with Olaf's father.
He and his cousins had been fighting back and forth for years.
And finally, some of his cousins decided to lay a trap for Olaf's father.
Olaf's father was named Trygve, which means trusting.
And that was his downfall.
One of his cousins came to him and said, let's put all this aside.
Let's go raiding again.
If you bring, if you bring one third of the ships to the fleet, you know I'll bring two thirds, but we'll split the take evenly.
You put in a third, you'll get a half.
And Trigley thought, well, that's you know, that's not a bad deal.
And it'll Do me good to make peace with my cousins.
So they went to the rendezvous.
His cousin shows up with twice as many ships and twice as many men and killed Olaf's father at the rendezvous to get him out of the way.
And at this point, this was a distance from Olaf's home, but Olaf's mother was pregnant with him.
And she knew that because of the way they did things, there was blood vengeance back there, that the cousins who were also kings, they would look at her and she would need to die because her family would try and exert blood vengeance.
So they were kind of coming after her.
Okay, there's so much to unpack there.
I guess the first point I kind of want to drill down into is that, like so many, so many of the Viking sagas, so many of these Norse sagas, it begins with conflict between family members.
In this case, this is a large, fractured family of chieftains in a large fractured kingdom, so there is this internecine violence that is all about jostling for power and about trying to control the line of descent and ascendancy.
That's about right, isn't it?
That's how.
That's the world that olaf is born into is.
Everybody wants to be the one who found or continues the dynasty.
You know, they all want to get the other guys out of the picture.
Yeah okay So, as you said, Olaf's father is killed.
His mother, Astrid, she's pregnant.
She gives birth to Olaf in around the year 960.
963.
Great.
So these early years, I think...
This is really Astrid's story, actually, isn't it?
During those early years.
Can you just take us into her shoes and explore that moment a little bit deeper?
So her husband has just been murdered and she's pregnant.
So she knows that she has to leave because her newborn son is in great danger, isn't it?
Correct.
Yeah, she's actually not of royal blood.
She was a commoner, which spoke pretty high of their relationship, her and her husband, that he married a commoner.
So there's almost like a romantic aspect to the story there.
And they made it about halfway across Norway before being pregnant.
She just couldn't go on.
She had to stop and give birth.
So they basically hid out along, sort of like a hut or something, on the lakeside a finger lake in Norway stayed there all summer until they were able to escape over to her father in the fall.
And all this time, I think probably what saved her was that Yeah, the uncles wanted to kill her.
Her husband's brothers and cousins wanted to kill her, but they were busy again, still fighting among all themselves.
They were going to get around to her eventually, but she was still just a minor thing, so she had some time to get away.
She lived at her father's farm on the Norwegian coast for a little while.
And they found out that she was there and she just barely got out of there ahead of being captured.
And the same thing.
She went over to Sweden and stayed there for three years until they found out she was there.
And then they sent people over there to try and kill her and kill Olaf as well and get them both out of the picture.
So she was not going to be safe in Scandinavia at all.
That's why she ended up going across the Baltic.
And as you say, they decide to move into Eastern Europe.
I think so often when we think about Viking expansion, we think about how they went westwards towards the British kingdoms and the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and Iceland, et cetera, et cetera.
But also there is this massive contingent that heads east and this is where they go.
And this is the story of the Rus people, isn't it?
So they're heading east into the lands of the Rus, and this is where they get captured and sold into these slave networks.
Can you tell us about the Rus people and how how they were different to the Viking compatriots in the West?
Sure.
Well, you think you know.
Just geographically, if you look at the map, it makes more sense for the Danes and the Norwegians to head west.
I mean, that's sort of the way they're facing across the water.
But on the east side, the Swedes are looking across the Baltic.
They're looking east.
And so they went exploring that way.
And there's a network of rivers and lakes that go across into northern Russia and then down the rivers into the heart of Russia.
And over decades, these Swedish Vikings did that, pushed down.
That's how they ended up moving into Russia.
Yeah, and this is the space that Astrid and her very young son Olaf, move into as they're trying to escape family and the threat that they're posing.
They get separated.
As you said, they get separated and they each get sold into these Baltic slave networks.
So Olaf From his perspective, he's now in these strange lands.
He's been separated from his mother, his family trying to kill him, and he's only three years old.
So this isn't really the best start to life.
Do we know what his early experience was like growing up in this Eastern European, Russ environment?
Do we know how hard and how difficult these years were for him and what he learned and things like that?
Well, the sagas don't tell from his perspective what was happening to him, and I sort of had to flesh it out.
He's here.
What was that like?
So you research what the people were doing there at that time and then you put him back in the story and this is what he must have experienced, if the sagas don't tell you that story.
This is what would have been happening to him, and you have to look at a slaver buying a three-year-old boy.
I mean, it's not like he's going to go to work in the fields or anything, but I think what they did was basically look at it as an investment.
It's like putting money in the bank and letting it accumulate interest until he –
He's big enough to do field work or something like that.
And I think that's what happened to him because, again according to the legends, he changed owners a couple of times.
He was sold and resold.
I think he was sold for like a cloak and for a goat.
So he was handed on down the line.
And his last owner.
Again, this is a typical story.
Roy liked him and treated him more or less as a son and didn't work him all that hard and saw something in him.
So I think he was in for six years.
I think he was like nine when he was released.
His uncle, the brother that his mother was originally trying to reach, just happened to stumble across the farm where Olaf was working and said oh, you know what's your story.
And Olaf started telling him.
And the uncle, Sigurd, suddenly realized, this is my nephew.
You know, what are the odds?
And so he bought him from his current owner, sat down and negotiated with him and bought him and then took him back to Russia proper, where the uncle Sigurd was actually way high up in the power structure.
He was serving what they call the prince himself. who was the ruler in Novgorod at the time.
So he goes from this lowest rung of society back up to really the highest point really that you could achieve at this time, back into the kind of levels of aristocracy that really he should have been born into.
So what's his experience at this moment in time?
Now he's involved in this Eastern European Viking Russian court.
What's that like for him?
Well, that's a whole different experience.
I mean they find out his uncle Sigurd, explains that Olaf is of royal blood and you know we've rescued him here and they treat him that way.
He's really raised in the royal court.
And taught the princely duties.
I mean, he learns all the things that a royal person would have learned, you know, the hunting and how to make war and how to negotiate with the underlings, and the things that were necessary to turn him into a leader.
And as he grew older in the court he really became the prince's I would say like a right hand man or almost an adopted son, and played an important role there in the royal court.
Right.
So I think at this point where we're talking about Olaf now in his middle to kind of late teens, I think it's really interesting to note that.
Already, at this point in his life, he's gone through.
He's fled from his home country at a very young age.
He's experienced immense hardship slavery.
And then that has been combined with royal style education, elite military experience with the Varangians.
So really he has this immensely well-rounded background really that has that goes on to shape the rest of his life, doesn't it?
He hasn't just been raised in a rich, wealthy environment with no hardship and he hasn't just experienced the hardship, he's had both, and i think that's really important, isn't it?
He's a fairly well-rounded viking and so, as you say, i mean he's seen all aspects of medieval life And he sort of gets thrust back in the same way that the chieftains are fighting over in Scandinavia.
The royal brothers in Russia are fighting among themselves.
You have one Grand Prince in Novgorod, up in the north, where Olaf is, and you have another royal brother down in the south.
And they're all fighting.
The southern brother comes up and actually chases Olaf's prince out of the country again.
And they actually go back to Sweden for a little while.
And I think Olaf was probably at risk of being discovered.
But I think by that time a lot of the old antagonists that he had over there were dead and it didn't matter.
So his prince recruits a whole army, goes back over into Novgorod and makes war on his brother.
And this is where Olaf really learns.
I mean, I described it in the book.
I mean, you know, this is where you're killing a guy right up close with a sword and cutting him to pieces and trying not to get cut into pieces yourself.
I mean, definitely an eye-opening and maturing experience for him.
Yeah, it's absolutely brutal, isn't it?
It's not just like learning about warfare theoretically and being told about it and learning it through stories.
This is really first-hand experience of the most violent kind of warfare, and that's actually going to set him in very good stead, given that he's living in the Viking Age.
Yeah, he's been coming up and he's learning how to lead.
But now he is a leader that other men will follow.
And he's still very young at this point.
I mean, he's maybe 20.
But if you have the royal blood, for one thing, people were trained back in those days to think that royal people were better people because of their royal blood.
You know and we take that these days we forget all about that.
But in those days Yeah, if you had royal blood, even if you had been a slave, you were still somebody that was due respect.
And if you could demonstrate, as Olaf did, that you could lead in battle, then you're somebody that people are going to follow and you can form your own power structure off of that.
Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney+.
Let's go!
Get ready for a new case.
We're gonna crack this case and prove we're the greatest partners of all time!
New friends.
Gary the Snake.
And your last name?
The Snake.
Dream Team.
New habitats.
Zootopia has a secret reptile population.
You can watch the record-breaking phenomenon at home.
You're clearly working it.
Zootopia 2.
Now available on Disney Plus rated PG.
Ooh, that face.
Quantum Fiber Internet loves that face.
That's Jamila.
G'day to Jamila.
She's thinking outside the box from inside the box.
Quantum Fiber Wi-Fi keeps her meeting games strong.
From the back door to the front lawn.
Rushing all of her video calls.
Back to back to back video calls.
Quantum Fiber Internet blowing the socksies of all those people in all those boxes.
Switch today at quantumfibre.com.
Additional pods may be needed to achieve Wi-Fi coverage in some locations.
Limited availability.
Service in select locations only.
So I think this is now a good moment to move into what I guess is really like the third phase of his life.
If the first two phases are him fleeing from Norway and him being pursued and him being sold into slavery,
And then if the second phase is him growing up in this courtly context in the Rus regions.
This third phase now is he leaves and he decides to create his own path, doesn't he?
Yeah, while he was in Russia he took the opportunity, as many of the Vikings there did, to go down to Byzantium.
And experienced – Constantinople was the largest city in the world.
I mean, it made every village that Olaf had ever known.
You could put them all together and they wouldn't even count as a suburb of Constantinople.
I mean it was a huge city.
So it really opened his eyes to how great things could be, and also opened his eyes to Christianity, because the Byzantines were Christian.
And I think that's where he got his his first experience of the Christian God and didn't have an immediate conversion or anything like that, but just took note of it that we have our own gods.
Speaking from his viewpoint.
We have our own Viking gods, Odin and Thor, and the Slavs that were there.
They had Slavic gods.
But the Christian god... had made Constantinople.
And at that point you're starting to think Maybe this is, maybe this God is the real thing you know.
And so, as I say, he wasn't sold on the concept at that point.
But when he went back to Russia, I think they saw the change in him.
And he decided at this point that, you know, I am due for I'm destined for bigger things.
I'm not going to get it being the prince's right-hand man here.
I need to go home and start working on my own future.
So he went back up the river route and back into the Baltic and started heading over to the West.
So he's left.
He's gathered this amazing education and experience and he's really had the full spectrum of life at this point, and then he leaves.
What is the next chapter in the story for him?
Well, he goes into the Baltic Sea and goes down towards the southern part of that and ends up in Jomsburg, which is a legendary city.
It depends on which historian you ask.
Some of them say it's total fiction because it wasn't written about at the time, and others say yeah, it was definitely there.
If you read the contemporary tales about it.
One of the German writers described Jomsburg as being compared to like London and Paris, said it was a great city.
Now, Great cities in Europe at that point are relative terms.
You know, it's not it's not like Constantinople.
It's just a big, big town with a wooden walls around it and everything.
But they do have a trading network, the same way that the Rus do, because the river's from the southern part of the Baltic there northern Germany, northern Poland lead down into the center of the continent, where the Holy Roman Empire is.
So there's a river route and people along it are getting rich.
And as Olaf moves in The queen there Gera, they meet each other and it dawns on them that she needs a husband.
Her husband had passed away.
It was out of the picture.
And Olaf, of course, he's never been married.
He's this young, studly Viking guy.
And they just sort of think this could work out.
And she invites him in and they're married and he's a ruler in Europe, in jamsberg, for a while.
So this is the region that olaf has stepped into now, coming from eastern eastern europe, and he's married into aristocracy right to european royalty.
He's back in that picture where you know before he was born, that's where you always would have expected him to be right.
How does he begin to emerge as a real, significant leader in his own right?
Is this that moment?
Yeah, I think so because just by coincidence, he arrives there at the time of the Great Slavic Revolt.
And I realized that he was there at that time.
And I think that the writers of his saga, They didn't refer to it as the Great Slavic Revolt, as we do in hindsight.
They just pictured him doing this fighting in his neighborhood there.
But as I looked it up I was like, oh well, he's involved in this Great Slavic Revolt when the German peoples, the Saxons, who were in the Holy Roman Empire, were coming up against the Slavs who were living in Poland and towards the east.
And they had been pushing on the Poles for decades, decades.
And finally, the Poles just decided, enough, we've got our backs to the wall here.
And they revolted, and there was a huge war there for a little while.
And it's not something that comes up in a lot of Western history.
I really knew little about it until I started researching the book.
But as I say, you know, I realized that Olaf was taking part in this.
His saga writers just didn't describe it that way.
They just described the fighting that he was in.
So he's really fighting as the king of his Polish kingdom.
And again, learns more about the warfare and everything.
And I think he's a good king.
Brings a lot of the territory that was lost to the Saxons.
Brings that back into the kingdom for his queen.
So at what point does he become enmeshed again in the story of the Western Viking sphere, back in Norway and Denmark and the Anglo-Saxon era?
At what point is he drawn back into the orbit of those goings-on?
Well, what happened was his wife died, and you have to sort of figure out what happened to her.
I mean, death was so common back then.
I make the point in the book that most people didn't live to your age.
When his wife died.
They don't state it that way in the sagas, because you don't write that way about a Viking, even back then.
But, I mean, it was pretty obvious his heart was broken.
He just didn't want to stay there.
He didn't want to be king anymore.
And he handed it off to some guys who later turned it into the headquarters of the Jamsvikings and went his own way.
He collected some men, threw them on a ship and went up around Denmark and started raiding down the European coast into the Channel.
So this is the moment where he kind of becomes a Viking again, doesn't he?
Like he really takes on this mantle that his father and his family have. would have had.
He finds a lot of success with these raids, doesn't he?
Having such a hugely rounded background, is that what makes him so successful?
Yeah, he's a successful Viking.
I and even touches on, like northern france, sails up around the northern part of england, around scotland the sagas mentioned that that he's raiding up there, sails down into the irish sea and fighting there and that's.
That's like total anarchy down there.
I mean there's, you know You go reading and find a little secluded nook to hide your ships for a little while, drink the beer you've captured and, you know, spend your money and go right back to it again.
I mean, it's like the pirate age over there in the Irish Sea.
But I think that he's aimless.
He spends, I think it's three or four years doing that to no real purpose.
I mean, he's not trying to form a kingdom or take somebody else's kingdom.
He's just sort of biding time.
I think that he's kind of given up on the idea of ever being a king.
And, you know, the prophecy is still out there.
And I think that's what ultimately brings him around, because he hears word of another prophet who's living down in the Silly Isles.
But anyway, they're way down there in the southwestern part off the southwestern coast.
And he hears about a prophet who lives down there, a Christian monk, but you know who supposedly has the powers of prophecy?
And Olaf goes down there and visits him and this guy basically says yeah, you're going to be a king, but first you're going to be nearly killed.
And on the spot, Olaf's men basically mutiny against him, or else he's attacked.
The sagas are a little unclear, and he has a near-death experience.
And when he comes out of it, just as the prophet predicted, he thinks there is something to this.
This Christian God knows what he's talking about, and he undergoes baptism and becomes a Christian.
And I guess it's also important to remember that this isn't his first experience of Christianity because, as you said, he has previously died, spent time in Constantinople.
And I think I'm right in saying that the Rus kingdoms were Christianizing as well around the same time, and he's lived there.
So he's encountered Christianity before, hasn't he?
Yeah, a lot of the Vikings' Christianity was spreading up through into Russia at that time.
And yeah, he was not a Christian before this, but he was Christian-curious.
I mean, he had seen—you look at the Byzantine Empire, they're Christians.
You look at the Holy Roman Empire, who had bounced the Vikings out, they're Christians.
You look at the English kingdoms, they're Christians.
I mean any Viking of that age has to be looking around and saying you know, this Christian god is a powerful god where Odin and Thor are getting pushed out wherever we come up against him.
So I think a lot of them, they weren't so opposed to becoming Christians.
The Christian god was almost a god of war to them, a victorious god of war.
Okay.
So at this moment Olaf has Christianized and he has this new kind of sense of purpose and motivation and he's looking now defiantly to reclaim his throne and try and find some way to do that.
That, I think, is a good point to bring us to the Battle of Maldon.
Olaf appears really prominently in this resurgence of Viking raids that happens in the 990s.
What brings him into the story?
This is again when the second Viking Age is beginning.
There's a question.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers to Olaf at Malden, but his king sagas don't even refer to the battle.
I think as far as they were concerned, it was just another battle.
It wasn't any big deal.
We know the battle mostly because of the poem The Battle of Malden, which was written right around the same time and gives the English account.
That doesn't even mention Olaf because that writer had no idea who he was.
But it was some of the English monks who were writing the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle said that these Vikings were led by Olaf.
Onloff was the way they wrote his name in Anglo-Saxon Old English.
So at this point Olaf has a fleet of almost 100 ships, and this is the biggest fleet to hit England in decades.
I mean, there have been scattered little raids, but it's like three ships at a time or something like that.
It's like I said before, a couple of farmers jumping in their dragon ships and going chicken thieving.
But this is a real invasion, and the English are worried that it's going to be a real invasion.
So they try to get their forces together.
The Vikings are hitting hard and fast.
They hit one town and then take whatever they want and then move up the coast.
And the English are trying to catch up to him.
But Olaf moves up the coast and turns back and comes down again to Malden, a little town in the river there.
And that's where the English catch up to him, because they've been coming up and he came back down and that's where they catch up to him.
And this is where they have this standoff then, isn't it?
And as you say, this is the Battle of Malden.
This is one of the most famous clashes of the Viking Age, I think, certainly from the Anglo-Saxon perspective.
And as you say, that's because it's preserved in old English literature as a poem.
And I have to confess it is.
One of my absolute favorite pieces of old English literature.
It's also how you open your book and you recount it really evocatively.
Can you tell us what happens at the Battle of Maldon?
Olaf's Vikings come up the river and they come to an island, Northy Island, which is in the estuary of the river, in the river mouth.
Vikings, when they were raiding, they loved to beach on water islands, because that's a natural moat water all around.
You can have your base there and the even you can be in the heart of enemy country and they can't come across the water to you.
Now, Northey is connected to the riverbank, the southern riverbank, by this little, maybe like 300-yard-wide causeway that was built back in the Roman age.
The problem is that the tides there are very variable.
At low tide, the causeway is a road leading to the island.
At high tide, it's about 10 feet underwater.
So when the English arrive on the riverbank, they're looking across to the island and it's like holy smokes.
Look at all these Vikings over here.
This is a serious invasion for us.
But the tide is up and they're cut off.
They can't do anything about it.
So you have this almost funny situation where you have the... And they're within shouting distance.
I mean, it's just a little distance across the water where you have all the Vikings on the island and all the English on the riverbank, more or less shouting curses at each other.
And the Vikings are saying, you better pay us or we're going to come over and fight.
And the English are saying, and nobody can do anything because the causeway is underwater.
And they decide that the Vikings know that they can't cross the causeway and have a battle because you can only send people.
You know it's only two lanes wide.
It's still there.
I mean, you can see it at low tide and you would not be able to send your full force across.
You would only be able to send a few men in the front of your full force, Whereas as soon as they get to the other side, they're just going to get swallowed up by the English.
And the Vikings know that.
You know this isn't such a.
This island is a great spot for defense, but not so hot for offense.
You know, we can't just go across there.
So they call over to the English commander and ask him, hey, will you let us come over and fight?
And he says, yes, I will.
And most of the historians just cannot figure out why he would do that.
I mean the Vikings are sealed off.
They don't necessarily have to fight, but he knows that he has to defeat them right now.
If he lets it go, they're just going to hop on their ships, sail off and start raiding again.
And he's going to be playing the catch up game.
He wants to have a decisive battle then and there.
So he calls across to him and says.
The tide's going out.
The road's soon going to be open.
Come over and let's do it.
And I think it's that element of the story that makes it so memorable and so tragic, isn't it?
And as I said to you, you recount it absolutely brilliantly in the book.
And I would also recommend that anyone reads the original poem itself as well in addition to that.
So the outcome of that battle is that the Vikings win, don't they?
Olaf's Vikings win specifically.
And I think this is one of the major military victories that can be chalked up to him.
After this, how does he ultimately make the leap from warlord war leader to becoming the king of Norway?
Because this is quite soon after now, isn't it?
It's only a handful of years.
Yeah, as you said, it's all the local forces on the English eastern part of England.
They're basically wiped out at the Battle of Malden.
So the Vikings...
They're just running roughshod over the whole part there of England.
And finally, King Æthelred, who is known as the Unready, which is not really accurate.
His nickname actually meant ill-advised, and part of the bad advice that he got was A lot of his advisors said we have no army to fight these Vikings, but let's just pay them off.
Let's just pay them to go away.
And they make that deal and Olaf does go away, but it dawns on him that there's a lot more money back there.
Let's go bluff them into giving us some more.
And this really sets a trend through Æthelred's reign of paying off Vikings.
The Vikings show up, and it's like a protection racket.
The Vikings are like, Nice kingdom you got there.
Shame if something happened to it.
And he pays them.
And finally, this gets to the point where he's having a hard time paying them off and where he's starting to run out of money.
And it dawns on him that the best way to fight a Viking is with a Viking.
And he goes to Olaf, who is a Christian, and says, I will be your godfather.
And that has a lot more meaning then than it did now.
I mean, it was really like an adoption thing.
It sort of made Olaf into something like an English prince.
And Olaf agreed to do that and not fight in England anymore.
And he stuck to that promise.
But he went back to his little Earl or kingdom on the on the Irish Sea.
And at this point.
He's starting to catch the attention of the Norwegian Earl, Earl Haakon.
So Haakon Jarl Haakon, the Evil knows that.
Oh, this is the Olaf that I was supposed to have killed way back all those years ago.
I need to trick him into coming over here to Norway before he comes over with an army and tries to take over.
Hakan's problem was that he was such a malicious ruler.
He had a habit of betting the wives of all his nobles that by the time that Olaf did come over, Hakan had been overthrown and there was really not that much of a war.
And Olaf is looking at this as God's doing.
He eliminated the resistance to me taking over as king.
The Norwegians, who are more or less united by this time, but are pagan, they say to Olaf, be our king.
And Olaf becomes king.
There's so much more detail in this story that we're not getting into.
We skipped a chunk there.
We have skipped chunks.
We've skipped several chunks because this is such a long and detailed story.
And yeah it's, it's all in your book, brilliantly told.
Once he becomes the king of norway, he is most remembered for his role in converting the country in a quite iron-fisted way to christianity.
Can you take us through that?
And can you also take us through how that starts to lead us towards the Battle of Svalder, which is the end of Olaf's story?
The climax of the story.
Yeah, I said that Norway was united, but it was mostly still pagan.
When Haakon, the Evil was ruling there, he was pagan and most of the people went back to worshipping the old gods.
Now that Olaf is king...
King, by God's grace.
As he sees it, he forcibly converts everybody to Christianity and he doesn't care who he's going to kill or cripple or maim or blind.
He goes ahead and does that and converts all of that, all of Norway into Christian society.
But he makes a lot of enemies when he does that.
Earl Hakon's sons have fled into exile and they sort of strike up a deal with the Swedish king and also with Olaf's old friend Svein Forkbeard, who had been fighting with him and was actually with him in England at a certain point.
But Orohakan's sons go to the Swedish king and find Forkbeard and say –
If we can get Olaf out of there and we go back to Norway, we will be your vassals.
We will make Norway.
We'll cut it up.
We'll make part of it part of Sweden and the rest of it can be part of Denmark.
And, of course, find Forkbeard and the Swedish king.
They immediately agree that they will combine all their forces and lay a trap for Olaf and get him out of the way.
And the perfect opportunity arises.
They sort of trick him into coming down to visit his ex-in-laws down in Poland at Jomsburg, where Olaf spends basically a whole summer there visiting with his in-laws.
And his men, you know, fall's starting to come on.
They want to get home and get the harvest in and everything.
So they say, we want to go.
And he's like, okay, you know, you're that anxious, take off.
I'll be along.
I'm going to follow up with you.
You know, we'll leave the same day, but you guys can go on ahead.
So the fleet sort of trails out in a long, long line as the lead ships are sailing home.
The enemy fleets, which are combined at this point, are all hidden behind an island as the fleet is going past Spine Forkbeard and the Sons of Hakon are all standing on a promontory watching most of the Viking fleet go past.
And Olaf is down to, I think they say, like 11 ships at the very end.
And that's when the enemy fleet comes out to attack him, because the ships that are way out in front –
Don't even know that there's going to be a battle back here behind them and they won't find out what's going on.
Olaf is hugely outnumbered.
The enemy fleets just basically surround him at the island's folder.
And by most accounts, that's the end of his story.
Yeah, there's a degree of ambiguity, isn't there?
Because I don't think anyone actually gets the credit for killing him.
I believe that he kind of vanishes in a mysterious way.
Well, there's a couple versions of it.
Everybody thinks that he jumped overboard and drowned because he was wearing full armor and everything.
But as I was researching it...
First, I had to find out where Sfolder was because nobody knows that for certain.
But I came up with what I thought is probably the most likely candidate an island off the North German coast.
And some other historians agree with that, that the battle probably was there.
Most historians think that he died there.
But as I was researching the location...
I think that I think he could have survived because these ships were all.
They were very shallow draft.
They only took up like two or three feet of water.
And if you went overboard you could be underwater, but standing on the bottom and water shallow enough that you could get your head up and take a breath.
Most people think not.
The more I researched it, the more I think this could have been done.
It could have been done.
I guess either way, it's the end of his story as...
As we know it for certain, really.
I think it's a really interesting ending because he has had this long, by Viking standards fascinating life, all pointing him towards becoming king.
But actually, he only has a very short rule.
And during his rule, he makes a lot of enemies.
Yeah, it's only about five years.
Yeah.
And it feels like actually most of his life, it's not really about his kingship.
Really, his life is about the story up to it.
I guess his lasting impact really is on the Christianization of Norway.
I guess that is his biggest lasting impact.
When we're thinking about Olaf Tryggvason's legacy and his role in the Viking Age, how do you think we should think of him as compared to other great Viking figures?
You mentioned Harald Hardrada as being very similar in lots of ways.
Do you think they're comparable figures?
Yeah well, for one thing, if you look at their two lives, Harold Edrada and Olaf Tryggvason, there's so many similarities in their lives.
So that's one thing.
But you mentioned Harold Edrada, who died in 1066, and there's almost a direct line between the two of them.
I mean, Olaf was the one who really started the Second Viking Age story.
When he died, Svein Forkbeard, who had been his compatriot, sort of continued it went back over and conquered England.
And his son, Cnut the Great, made England part of his North Sea Empire with Denmark and Norway.
And Harold Hadrada, when he came on the scene, his idea was to recreate that North Sea Empire.
And for that, he needed to go back over to England and conquer it, which he ultimately failed to do.
But as I say, there's almost a direct line.
So I think that the last decades of the Viking Age really start again with Olaf Tryggvason.
That was historian and author Don Holway speaking to James Osborne.
His new book, Hammer of the Gods, shares more about the life of Olaf Tryggvason and the surrounding context of the Viking Age.
