4 - The Noble Heathen and the Missionary Saint

Summary

Introduction

The sagas of Icelanders discussed in the last chapter take an oppositional attitude towards the saint and question the presuppositions of hagiography. Other sagas are more open to what hagiography has to offer: its contextualisation of human action within the cosmic drama of salvation, and its clear vision of moral and religious truths. One of the most obvious areas in which the sagas interact with hagiography is in narratives about the Christian missions to Iceland and the official conversion in 999/1000. The story of ‘how Christianity came to Iceland’ (as the opening of Kristni saga puts it) is inevitably also the story of how a local people come to enter the universal Church. By the end of the thirteenth century, the Icelanders were familiar with a wide range of missionary literature: the translated sagas of apostles and of classic missionary saints such as Martin; the lives of the Norwegian missionary kings, Óláfr Tryggvason and Óláfr Haraldsson; and the narratives about Iceland's conversion to Christianity in Íslendingabók, Kristni saga and the kristniboðsþættir (‘conversion stories’) preserved in compilations of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta. Although, as discussed in Chapter 1, Iceland had no official conversion-age saints, these narratives about the missions to Iceland can be described as ‘semi-hagiographic’: they draw on both hagiographic conventions and local oral traditions of storytelling (p. 22–3). The first missionary to Iceland, the German bishop Friðrekr, is a saintly figure, who performs several miracles and lives an exemplary life: Kristni saga describes him as ‘sannheilagr’ (‘truly holy’) and Þorvalds þáttr víðfõrla tells us that he ended his life ‘með háleitum heilagleik’ (‘with sublime holiness’). The Icelandic missionary Þorvaldr and the German or Flemish cleric Þangbrandr are more ambiguous figures, who, like Óláfr Tryggvason, combine saintly fervour with heroic acts of violence – they preach and perform miracles, build churches and found monasteries, but they also engage in scurrilous poetic contests and carry out revenge killings: they are ideal material for a saga narrative.