When Viking reenactors (like me) chat around campfires among our wedge-shaped tents, certain topics are likely to come up in conversation. One favorite: everything that’s wrong with the History Channel’s Vikings TV series (2013–2020). This popular series has admittedly lured many recruits into our nerd/macho hobby. But you don’t have to study the historical period long to recognize how radically wrong the show got almost everything. Costumes, haircuts, even law and culture, have undergone a comic book makeover.
Another topic for discussion likely to come up is religion. Many Viking reenactors profess themselves heathen (a term they prefer to “pagan”) or Asatru, worshipers of the old Norse gods. When asked why they apostatized, they commonly reply, “Christianity was forced on my ancestors through violence and persecution. I’m reclaiming my true heritage.”
Yet I like to remind people that the Viking Age was in fact the age of conversion in Scandinavia. The History Channel series, to its credit, seems to recognize this fact, dramatizing the clash of faiths, though in Renaissance Faire–style. While the narrative bears almost no resemblance to actual events, they do seem to get some things right in spirit (if only accidentally).
The first Christian character to figure in the series is a West Saxon monk named Athelstan. Athelstan is enslaved by the Viking hero Ragnar Lothbrok during the AD 793 raid on Lindisfarne, a tidal island off the northeast coast of England. This is traditionally considered the beginning of the Viking Age. (The real Ragnar would have been a small boy at the time.) Athelstan, who can speak the Norse language, becomes Ragnar’s friend. Eventually he is freed and converts to heathenism. He then helps Ragnar plan further raids in England (which means plotting the murder and enslavement of his own people). But when he later returns home, he regains his Christian faith. Eventually he dies a martyr, becoming the mystical voice of Ragnar’s aspirations.
The series’ portrayals of the two rival religions are at once fanciful and ill-informed. In this world, the Church has utterly forgotten the existence of the Roman Empire and is willing to commune a known apostate, but also practices crucifixion as a legal penalty. The heathen religion is pretty much whatever the writers want it to be. We in fact know very little about Viking Age religious practices, but here we see funerals resembling (in some respects) Ibn Fadlan’s famous account of Russian Viking practices, and the temple sacrifices at (an oddly mountainous) Upsala, attested by Adam of Bremen, are portrayed in an idealized Haight-Ashbury glamor—we’re supposed to believe that the human victims were free people who went placidly and voluntarily to their fates in an ambience of sunshine, soft music, and gauzy banners.
The conversion of the Vikings at home is dealt with (after a fashion) in the sequel series, Netflix’s Vikings: Valhalla(2022–24). Beginning with the St. Brice’s Day Massacre in England (1002) and fast-forwarding through the next several decades, it focuses on the story of King Harald Sigurdsson (Hardrada) and his “friend” Leif Eriksson (who was actually about 40 years older and probably never met him) in Norway, Russia, and Constantinople.
In the interval since the end of the first series (about AD 878), Christianity has spread widely in Norway—we’re not informed exactly how. Tolerance for the old ways persists only in “Kattegat” (the name of a Danish strait that the writers bestow, for some reason, on the fictional Norwegian hometown of Ragnar, who was actually Danish, and his descendants). There, heathens and Christians live in harmony. But the Christians under “Jarl” (Earl) Olaf Haraldsson (Saint Olaf) are determined to stamp out all heathenism, and so declare war on Kattegat.
(I might mention as an aside, in the TV writers’ defense, that the Christians are not portrayed as negatively as they might have been. And we see bad and bigoted heathens.)
The traditional narrative of the historical conversion of the Scandinavians (“Viking” was never the name of an ethnic group) comes to us mostly from the Icelandic sagas. These stories, which focus on Norway, were recorded by Icelanders centuries after the events and are consequently cited cautiously (if at all) by historians. But the Norwegian story as the sagas tell it goes like this:
First came King Haakon Haraldsson (ca. 920–61), remembered as Haakon the Good. Raised in England as a Christian, he deposed his sanguine brother Erik Bloodaxe in Norway, established himself as a popular ruler, and attempted to evangelize the country. He was strongly opposed by the heathen chieftains, however, and, facing attacks by Erik’s sons, was forced to compromise. He even participated, reluctantly, in a heathen sacrifice. The sagas are ambivalent as to whether he died a Christian. Thereafter, the country slipped back into heathendom.
Later, around 995, a Viking pretender named Olaf Trygvesson appeared. The sagas portray him as a zealous evangelist, employing torture and murder to extort conversions to Christianity. He had a short reign and was killed during an expedition to the Baltic around the year 1000.
Finally, in 1015 as the sagas tell it, the serious mission began with Olaf Haraldsson, a hardened young Viking who’d been a successful mercenary in England. He took up Olaf Trygvesson’s “muscular” mission with greater success, rewarding converts and persecuting everyone who resisted baptism. Eventually, many chieftains transferred loyalty to King Canute the Great of Denmark, who’d recently conquered England, and Olaf was driven from the country in 1028. In 1030 he returned from exile in Russia to meet an overwhelming force of his enemies at a place called Stiklestad. There Olaf was killed. Soon, we are informed, his uncorrupted corpse was performing miracles, and in time he was recognized as a saint. This (according to the sagas) finally completed the conversion of the country.
Anders Winroth, an eminent Swedish historian, is skeptical about this whole narrative. He dismisses it as mainly propaganda—legends invented centuries after the events to please a Christian audience with a taste for the hammering of heathens. “Unlike many other European regions, Scandinavia chose to convert to Christianity and accept European culture,” he writes in his book The Conversion of Scandinavia.
The crucial point, in Winroth’s view, is that Christianity was Europe’s most prestigious religion in the Viking Age. Christian kings constituted the most exclusive club around; membership had its privileges, both economic and political. Scandinavian kings who wished to weld existing petty kingdoms into nations and become players in the international game were eager to convert.
In practical terms, conversion did not mean a change of faith among the general populace. Once the king himself was christened, he’d pressure his chief supporters into following suit (one imagines that some of the saga accounts of compulsion and torture may have occurred at this point in the process). Once that had been accomplished, the new nation could be moved from the “Heathen” to the “Christian” column on the spreadsheets. The common people’s lives and beliefs would scarcely have been affected at that point. As Winroth notes:
The institutional, political conversion was a way for kings to develop states in which they alone held power. They accomplished this by, among other things, monopolizing and controlling religion. Christianity was suitable for this end, as Christian rituals demand special authorized people and buildings, while Scandinavian pre-Christian religion did not.
I might add that kings benefited in two further ways from this change. First, Christian kings enjoyed increased status. Viking kings were elected and held their offices at the pleasure of the Things, the democratic assemblies. Christian kings, on the other hand, were beginning to be considered God’s Anointed, in the tradition of David and Solomon.
Secondly, the Church arrived with a prefabricated bureaucracy in its baggage. Kingdoms were soon divided into dioceses and parishes. Literate bishops, priests, and deacons kept useful records. Such services meant a lot in the establishment of a new political regime.
Winroth’s view is essentially materialist. A more holistic approach was taken by Fridtjov S. Birkeli (1906–83), Lutheran bishop, successively, of Stavanger and Oslo in Norway. Birkeli made a lifelong study of the conversion period, and his book Tolv Vintrer Hadde Kristendommen Vært i Norge (Twelve Winters Had Christianity Been in Norway) was published posthumously. That book has never been translated into English, but Birkeli’s works were employed by Martyn and Hannah Whittock as a source for their English-language text (which I recommend) The Vikings: From Odin to Christ.
In contrast with Winroth’s image of a top-down conversion, Birkeli believed he’d found evidence that—at least in Norway—much of the conversion process occurred at the grassroots level. He points especially to the reign of Haakon the Good, despite the negative saga portrayals.
Oddly enough, Birkeli’s theory bears certain similarities to the Vikings TV series scenario. Both versions place a man named Athelstan at the center, though Birkeli’s Athelstan is not a monk but a king—Athelstan of England (ca. 894–939). According to the sagas, King Athelstan raised King Haakon the Good in fosterage in his court, baptizing him and educating him in the faith. The advantages to England, beset by Viking invasions, of placing a Christian on the Norwegian throne are obvious, and saga reports of Haakon bringing English priests to Norway make political as well as evangelistic sense.
Birkeli points out that the Anglo-Saxon church during this period was still guided by the missionary policies of St. Augustine of Canterbury: “The Anglo-Saxon missionary movement was largely devoid of any thought of compulsion,” he writes. “Only peaceful and spiritual means were employed.” (All Birkeli translations mine.) It’s easy to see how such an approach might have appeared weak and lukewarm to a later, less scrupulous generation of missionaries; even more so to the Icelandic Christians who started writing sagas about the period in the 13th century. The chief motive of those saga writers was to glorify the king who’d come to be venerated as Norway’s patron saint—the ruthless Olaf Haraldsson. If one started out with the assumption that Olaf’s tortures and murders were divinely sanctioned, then Haakon the Good didn’t measure up.
In contrast to Winroth’s insistence that the conversion of the Vikings was purely a formal, upper-class process, Birkeli cites the observations of archaeologists: “When archaeological inquiries seem to indicate a change in burial practices beginning around the middle of the 900s, this appears to strongly suggest that Haakon’s long, peaceful reign corresponded with a peaceful transition from heathen to Christian burial customs.” Distinguishing Christian from heathen graves is an easy job for archaeologists: the heathens buried their dead with grave goods for the journey to the afterlife. Christians generally buried theirs in shrouds and coffins, going to their God, in the words of Job, “naked.”
Why would common folk change the way they buried their dead precisely during the period of Haakon’s reign? Birkeli cites the book Ágrip, one of the earliest written histories of Norway (ca. 1190), which says of Haakon, “In his days many turned to the Christian faith because he was so popular. Some ceased sacrificing even without becoming Christian. He built churches in Norway and placed learned men in them.”
The picture presented by Birkeli is more complex than that of the saga writers on one side or of Winroth on the other, and to me it seems extremely plausible. King Athelstan of England manages to get his foster son installed as king of Norway, with an eye to Christianization. Haakon has good success in much of the country but runs into a brick wall farther north, where the chieftains are obstinately heathen. There he is forced to compromise. But overall, Christianity makes substantial progress during his reign, preparing the soil for the later missions of Olaf Trygvesson and Saint Olaf. Saga writers, in their zeal to celebrate the two Olafs, chose to set Haakon the Good in undeserved shade.
If we regard the Vikings series’ gentle character Athelstan as a stand-in for Haakon the Good, the writers may have stumbled onto something resembling the truth. And an inspiring one.
