By Amy Fahey
Norwegian football star Erling Haaland recently made headlines not for his athletic performance or his pseudo-Viking antics, but for his record-breaking purchase of a 1594 printed edition of the Heimskringla: the lives of the Norwegian kings from their legendary beginnings to the death of Magnus V in 1184. Haaland and his father donated the volume to the library of his hometown to promote reading: “I want the book to always be open so that people can read about those who came from the place where I come from. It is easier to be drawn to reading when you can recognize yourself in the people and places written about”.
His father agreed: “Roots are important… deep roots that can be found in the stories of the sagas of the kings of Snorre”.
Nearly a third of the volume recounts the life of King Olaf Haraldsson (c. 995-1030), today known as St. Olaf, whose feast is celebrated on July 29, the date he fell in the Battle of Stiklestad in his attempt to unite the divided and small kingdoms of the region under a single political structure grounded in Christian law.
Almost immediately after his death, rancor and division subsided, and Olaf’s sanctity was confirmed through countless miracles. He was canonized locally by Bishop Grimkell of Nidaros in 1031, which was confirmed by Pope Alexander III in 1164.
St. Olaf’s Kristenret or “law of Christ” included prohibitions against the abandonment of infants and marital infidelity, among other common pagan practices. He is the patron saint of troubled marriages and woodcarvers. My favorite story about him in the Heimskringla (one that also impressed C.S. Lewis) tells how he began carving wood on the Lord’s Day while mentally preoccupied with worldly matters.
“He fell into deep thought and paid no attention to the hours,” the saga says. His servant then reminded him that it was Sunday. Olaf asked him to “bring him a lighted candle and gathered in his hand all the shavings he had cut; he set fire to them and let the shavings burn in the hollow of his hand. With this he made it clear that he would hold fast to the law and commandments of God and would not set aside what he knew to be right”.
It may be a bit of Viking theatrics, but anyone who has read the sagas knows that uprooting from the human heart what Tolkien rightly called “the self and the indomitable will” requires radical measures in any age. Both the saga author and the saint give us visceral proof of this.
Someone who followed the desire to “recognize herself” in the captivating and complex story of St. Olaf and found in it the “deep roots” she had been seeking was the Norwegian novelist, convert to Catholicism, Nobel Prize winner, and now soon to be Servant of God, Sigrid Undset. Confronted with the consequences of her own sins and her own will, the young Undset found in St. Olaf a model of perseverance and redemption on which to rebuild her own life.
In her work Saga of Saints (1934), Undset notes: “[Olaf] was a man in whose mind most other men could find something akin to themselves, but he had subdued his own pagan nature, had struggled in prayer for God to mold him as He wished. And so God had granted him the power to become a friend of humanity”.
In his 2025 homily on the feast of St. Olaf, Erik Varden, Bishop of Trondheim, noted: “We venerate and love St. Olaf not because he was born a saint, but because he became one through a persevering battle against all that was false, unworthy, and ugly in himself and in the world; he fought to let the peace of Christ rule in his heart”.
In Sigrid Undset’s monumental and masterful Kristin Lavransdatter, the main character makes a penitential pilgrimage to St. Olaf’s shrine with her newborn son. “She wept so strongly that she had no strength to rise when the others stood during the service; she remained there, collapsed in a heap, holding her son”.
Then she hears St. Olaf speak in her heart about his wayward nation: “Lord, hear my prayer for this people, whom I love so much that I would rather suffer exile, want, hatred, and death than see a single man or woman grow up in Norway without knowing that you died to save all sinners”.
Historical novels work on multiple levels: they comment on the era in which they are set and the era in which they were written. They speak to any reader who encounters them in any age; and, ultimately, they exist in a perpetual literary present.
The imagined words Undset places in St. Olaf’s mouth work on all these levels. They also spoke directly to Undset, sealing her entry into the Catholic Church at age 42. When she became a Dominican tertiary, she chose the feminine form of her most beloved “friend of God”: Olave.
And yet, the fictional prayer Undset attributes to St. Olaf goes even further, for Undset ultimately turns it into her own prayer, in her attempt to help her Norwegian compatriots and all non-believers find Christ.
Undset suffered “exile, want, or hatred” for her open opposition to tyranny, eugenics, and other moral evils, and for her public defense of Catholicism. She devoted her limited financial resources and considerable influence to various Catholic and pro-life causes in Norway and beyond. She helped finance the construction of a Catholic chapel in Stiklestad. On May 20, her birthday, Bishop Varden rededicated the chapel, having commissioned new and vibrant devotional images from the Norwegian iconographer Solrunn Nes.
Bishop Varden noted in his rededication homily: “Devotion to Wisdom was part of Olaf’s political and (I risk the term) existential project… The Wisdom that the Church brings, of which it bears witness, is not an optional tool for self-improvement; it represents the principle by which we, and our choices, will be judged”. Sigrid Undset, like St. Olaf, understood this clearly. Let us pray that the impulses of their lives and testimonies continue to be felt in Scandinavia and far beyond.
About the author
Amy Fahey is a professor at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. Her essay, “Sigrid Undset, Novelist of Mercy” appears in the forthcoming volume, Women of the Catholic Imagination (Word on Fire, 2024).