Their fears were justified. Within four years Önund was Cnut’s vassal and Olaf was dead. When Olaf returned to Norway after his Danish campaign, he found that his support was evaporating and he felt that of the leading chieftains there were only four he could be sure of. That proved to be over optimistic. When Cnut arrived off the coast of Viken with an Anglo-Danish fleet of fifty ships in 1028, the whole country rose against Olaf, who fled with a few loyal retainers first to Sweden and from there to the court of King Yaroslav in Russia. In Olaf’s place, Cnut restored Håkon Eriksson to his family’s jarldom of Lade and appointed him regent of Norway. The arrangement was not destined to last. In 1029, Håkon was lost at sea returning to Norway from a trip to England to visit Cnut. News of jarl Håkon’s disappearance quickly reached Olaf and in spring 1030 he set out to reclaim his throne, leaving his five-year-old illegitimate son Magnus the Good in Yaroslav’s care.
Olaf returned to Norway through Sweden, where he gathered an army of, according to Snorri, around 3,600 men, crossing the Kjølen Mountains into the Trøndelag. With the benefit of hindsight, Olaf’s court skald, Sigvat Tordsson, thought that if the king had been freer with his wealth he could have raised a larger army. However, it might have proved difficult to feed a larger force on its long march through the sparsely populated mountains on the way to Norway. News travelled fast along the Viking trade routes, giving Olaf’s enemies in Norway ample time to prepare for his arrival. As he descended the valley of the Verdalselva river towards Trondheim Fjord he met a much larger army of bonders near the farm of Stiklestad. While Olaf’s army probably included a high proportion of professional warriors, including the housecarls of his personal retinue, the peasant farmers he faced were not fighting with scythes and pitchforks. All freemen in Viking Age Scandinavia had to be equipped for military service so all would have had at least a shield and spear, and known how to use them, while the wealthier bonders would have been a great deal better equipped than that. The battle probably took place on 29 July 1030, and did not start until the day was well advanced. Olaf attempted to seize the initiative with a headlong downhill charge against the bonders’ army, hoping that if he broke their shield wall the bonders would lose confidence and run. The bonders gave ground but they did not break and run – too many of them remembered Olaf’s brutal rule to want to give in easily – and their superior numbers quickly began to tell. In desperate hand-to-hand fighting, Olaf was, we are told by Snorri, disabled by a wound to the leg, then speared in the guts by Thore Hund, the leader of the bonder army, and finally finished off by a blow to the neck. Now that Olaf was dead his army began to break up and flee: the battle had lasted about an hour and a half. Among the fugitives was Olaf’s fifteen-year-old half-brother Harald Hardrada. Though wounded, the young man was given refuge and treated by a sympathetic peasant, who helped him escape to Sweden once he recovered. Harald travelled on to Russia and then Constantinople, where he joined the Varangian Guard.
After the battle, some loyal peasants hid Olaf’s body from his enemies and secretly buried it on the banks of the Verdalselva. But though Olaf had lost his life and kingdom, he did in a real sense win the peace. Olaf had broken the back of pagan resistance to Christianity. When Olaf fled into exile in 1028, there was no return to paganism under Cnut’s equally militant Christian regime. The bonder army at Stiklestad was given spiritual encouragement by a Danish bishop: if anyone prayed to Odin for victory they did so privately. Olaf’s achievements were irreversible and Norway was now set in its course to become an integral part of Roman Catholic Christendom.
Miracles were soon reported at Olaf’s burial place and increasing numbers of people claimed that prayers addressed to him had been answered. A year after Olaf’s death, bishop Grimkell exhumed his body and reburied it in or near St Clement’s church in Nidaros. Olaf’s body was found to be uncorrupted, an incontrovertible sign of sanctity to the medieval Christian mind, and Grimkell declared him to be a saint on the spot. Even though the papacy never officially recognised Olaf as a saint, his cult spread rapidly, aided by the unpopularity of Danish rule and a series of bad harvests, which were widely interpreted as a sign of divine anger over Olaf’s killing. This does not mean that Norway was now deeply Christian. Pagan beliefs and sentiments persisted for generations. The church expected this – it was the case with all newly converted populations – and, where it could, it adopted or adapted earlier beliefs to Christian practices to make it easier for converts to engage with the new religion. As a saint, Olaf acquired many of the characteristics of the fertility god Freyr and the popular giant-slaying thunder god Thor. Farmers prayed to St Olaf for a good harvest as they would once have prayed to Freyr, while folk tales proliferated about his battles with malevolent trolls and giants.
The bonders had expected Cnut to rule them with a lighter hand but they were soon disillusioned. There was no magnate of comparable status to replace the drowned jarl Håkon, so Cnut had little choice but to try to rule Norway more directly, rather than relying on informal power-sharing as his father and grandfather had done. To this end, Cnut sent his teenage son Svein to rule Norway under the regency of his English mother Ælfgifu of Northampton. Ælfgifu proved such a harsh ruler that ‘Alfiva’s time’, as her regency was remembered in Norway, became a byword for oppressive government. Olaf’s own brutality was soon forgotten and he became instead a symbol of national unity. In 1034, two Norwegian chiefs who had taken Cnut’s side against Olaf, Kalv Arneson and Einar Tambarskjelve, became so disenchanted with Danish rule that they travelled to Russia to bring back Olaf’s son Magnus. When he arrived in Norway, a popular uprising broke out, forcing Ælfgifu and Svein to flee to Denmark. Svein died there soon afterwards.
Cnut passed away in 1035 and his Anglo-Scandinavian empire fell apart. Harold Harefoot, Cnut’s second son by Ælfgifu, became king of England, while Harthacnut, his son by Emma of Normandy, became king of Denmark. Harthacnut immediately recognised Magnus as king of Norway and the two kings agreed that whoever outlived the other would rule both Denmark and Norway. Accordingly, when Harthacnut died in 1042, Magnus became king of Denmark, appointing Cnut’s nephew Svein Estrithson to rule as his regent. Unusually, Svein took his surname from his mother, Cnut’s sister Estrith, to emphasise his connection to the royal house and to disassociate himself from his father jarl Ulf, who Cnut had executed for treason. Svein had a credible claim on the Danish throne through his mother and rebelled against Magnus and at the Viborg thing in northern Jutland the Danes paid him the homage due to a king. Magnus reacted swiftly and when he arrived in Denmark with a large fleet Svein fled into exile with King Önund in Sweden.