549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
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Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Strange tales were told of Olaf Tryggvason's return to Norway. One day it was claimed the new king was in a fit mood to be entertained. At his side, there suddenly appeared an old man, cloaked and white-haired, with only a single eye. Entering into conversation with the stranger, Tryggvason found that there was nothing the old man did not seem to know, nor any question to which he could not give an answer. All evening the two of them talked, and even though the king was eventually persuaded to retire to bed by a twitchy English bishop who had grown suspicious of the one-eyed stranger, Trigvason could still not bear to end the conversation, but continued it even as he lay on his furs late into the night. At last the old man left him, and the king fell asleep.
But his dreams were strange and feverish, and waking up abruptly he cried out for the stranger again. Even though his servants searched high and low, however, the old man could not be found, and Tryggvason, brought to his senses by daylight, shuddered at his close escape. When it was reported to him that two sides of beef, a gift from the stranger, had been used in a stew, he ordered the entire cooking pot flung out. A godly and responsible act, for clearly it was out of the question for him, as a follower of Christ, to feast on meat supplied by Odin. Well, that riveting passage, finely wrought prose, that was produced by none other than our very own Hollywood's own Tom Holland in his book Millennium. It's about the end of the world and the forging of Christendom. Is that the subtitle of the book, Tom? Yeah, that kind of stuff. Exactly.
I thought a nice compliment to the reading from your own book on this subject with which we ended the previous episode. So a nice segue.
They're a perfect match. We ended last time. With a reading from Fury of the Vikings, listeners may remember that Danish refugees, in the wake of a terrible massacre in the towns and villages of England, have fled across the North Sea to Scandinavia to bring the news to the Danish king, and revenge is coming. So today, in this mighty series about the events of 1066, we turn from England... to Scandinavia, to the Northlands. We look north to the world of the Vikings, which is now beginning to change. And that opening reading about Olaf Tryggvason rejecting Odin's beef is a reminder of the throes of cultural and social change that are transforming Scandinavia. So, Tom, you talked last time about this guy, Olaf Tryggvason.
He is a terrifying, slightly sinister Viking leader who had beaten an English army in 991 at the Battle of Malden, who had led all these pillaging raids across southern England, and has extorted a huge amount of silver from England's king, Æthelred the Unready. But... Olaf Tryggvason is an embodiment of change in himself, isn't he? Because he's converted to Christianity and he's been paid off by Æthelred and he has gone back to Norway. So tell us a little bit about him and why he matters.
Yes. So he's returned to Norway, the North Way, the great road that kind of winds up the coast of Norway. He is setting about transforming himself from a pagan Viking chieftain into the intimidating figure of a Christian king. He does this with the same buccaneering enthusiasm that he had shown in extorting cash from the English. So he goes up and down the North Way and he smashes idols and he menaces local pagan leaders and he forces conversions of his countrymen at the point of a sword and he throws out Odin's beef. And I think as that story suggests, his conversion is up to a point pretty genuine. But the question then is... why would he, having imposed himself so formidably on our Christian kingdom, why would he then convert to the God of the seeming losers? And I think the answer is that everything he does is very finely calculated to make him look good, to kind of redound to his glory, to add to his potency and power. And the truth is that even though he had extorted money from the English, he
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