6 - The Saint as Friend and Patron

Summary

Introduction

Christian missionaries and desert saints extend the generic range of the sagas of Icelanders, allowing them to embrace new values and produce different types of hero. In this final chapter, I wish to come full circle and return to royal saints in the sagas: King Óláfr Tryggvason, the would-be saint of Chapter 2, and King Óláfr Haraldsson, patron saint of Norway. The importance of these two kings is clear from the central position of their lives in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla as well as in the various separate sagas about them, including the large compilations of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (p. 18). Their relationship to the Icelanders has a political edge: Óláfr Tryggvason was traditionally responsible for the conversion of some prominent Icelandic chieftains, and resistance to his policy of forced conversion provided a way of asserting Iceland's autonomy vis à vis Norway. In the case of Flateyjarbók, Rowe has argued that the relationship between king and Icelander is viewed as one of ‘cultural paternity’: Norway is reasserted as the spiritual fatherland to promote the ‘benevolent coexistence of Olaf's paternalism and the Icelanders’ self-will’. Either way, what is striking is how the figures of Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláfr come to mediate between saints’ lives and sagas of Icelanders: uniquely, they are able to cross between these two genres, and thus these two literary worlds. The ‘interference’ of the two Óláfrs in the lives of Icelanders is most obvious in the cases of Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld and Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld: Hallfreðr and Þormóðr were the court-poets, respectively, of Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláfr, and their poetry is quoted in the kings’ sagas in tribute to the lives and deaths of these two kings. The sagas of Hallfreðr and Þormóðr might thus be thought of as companion pieces to the lives of the kings they served, allowing a different narrative angle on the same body of events. This is no doubt why later compilers cut up Hallfreðar saga and Fóstbroeðra saga and inserted them in roughly chronological order into Snorri's lives of Óláfr Tryggvason and St Óláfr, creating a multi-generic approach to the problem of heroism and sanctity.