Bold seafaring and a ferocious fighting spirit were defining elements of the Age of Vikings, as the Norsemen burst forth from their Scandinavian homelands in the 8th and 9th centuries to plunder, pillage, conquer, and settle from the edges of North America to Constantinople. But though they were infamously ruthless warriors and famously intrepid mariners, the Vikings left their main mark on history through invasions and raids along hapless coasts, and actual warfare at sea by them was relatively rare.
Such clashes did occur, however, and with the berserker intensity one might expect. Such was the case when rival Viking fleets tangled in the Baltic Sea in the year 1000, in an engagement with so many ships involved and such high casualties that, as historian Martina Sprague notes, “It is said to have been the harshest naval battle in Viking history.”
The Battle of Svolder (or Svold) would determine the fate of kingdoms and pit erstwhile allies against each other in a bitter power struggle: Olaf Tryggvason—the ruler renowned for bringing Christianity to Norway—and Svein Forkbeard, the Viking warrior-king of Denmark.
An entry in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle indicates that, just six years earlier, the two had joined forces in the ravaging of England, attacking London in 994 with a fleet of more than 90 Viking longships. Thwarted by the city’s defenses, the combined Norwegian-Danish force had taken to horseback and proceeded to trash the countryside with “burning and raiding and slaughter of men.”
So Olaf and Svein had that common bond of shared rapacity in the quest for English Danegeld. But once Olaf was convinced to convert to Christianity, he proceeded to wield it as a cudgel. He returned to his native Norway, defeated and beheaded its current ruler, and became King Olaf I. And under his brief reign, Odin and Thor and the rest of the old gods were pushed out and the sign of the cross became the law of the land.
Olaf’s rise to power had left a host of enemies in its wake—Svein Forkbeard among them, since the Dane asserted claims to part of Norwegian lands as well. He joined forces with the territory-hungry king of Sweden and the vengeful son of Norway’s former king whom Olaf had overthrown and slain. And they gathered their three fleets, waiting to ambush Olaf as he transited the Baltic.
Though it would be 11 vessels vs. 70, Olaf would not be a pushover, for he sailed in a mighty ship that inspired fear and awe: the Long Serpent—165 feet in length, propelled by 70 oars, manned with 200 stouthearted fighting men. As chronicled in the celebrated saga by Snorri Sturluson, “King Olaf . . . had a great vessel built . . . which was larger than any ship in the country. . . . The ship was both long and broad and high-sided, and strongly timbered . . . and everybody said that never was seen so large and so beautiful a ship of war. . . . The ship was a dragon, . . . the best and most costly ship ever made in Norway.”
Encountering the enemy forces arrayed against him, Olaf’s war-horns sounded, and his ships gathered close, with the nearest ones to Olaf lashing themselves stem and stern to the Long Serpent, hastily creating a floating fortress as volleys of arrows and spears came pelting down. When Svein Forkbeard’s ship drew near, the men in the forecastles of Olaf’s bound-together ships threw grappling chains to ensnare her and proceeded to pour hellfire onto her decks. “The battle was one of the fiercest told of,” Olaf’s saga recounts, “and many were the people slain.”
But the tide inexorably turned; enemy vessels managed to grapple the flanking ships of Olaf’s floating fortress, boarding them and pressing the fight now “with battle-axe and sword.” As they hacked and slashed their way through, they finally managed to cut loose the support ships from the Long Serpent, which now stood alone as the surging forces circled in. “So many weapons were cast into the Serpent, and so thick flew spears and arrows, that the shields could scarcely receive them; for on all sides the Serpent was surrounded by warships.”
Those still living stood cornered on the Long Serpent’s afterdeck, surrounding and protecting their king. But it would prove to be a last stand of no avail: Olaf, facing the grimly inevitable, threw himself into the sea.
So ended the reign of King Olaf I. Norway was divided among the victors, but the Christianity that Olaf had brought to it was there to stay.
Now having wrested dominion over his Norwegian swath, Svein Forkbeard would continue sailing forth from Denmark to campaign in England in the ensuing years. He eventually bested his principal English rival, and on Christmas Day 1013, England’s earls begrudgingly proclaimed him king—making Svein Forkbeard history’s first Viking king of England. But it was to be a short reign: Five weeks later, Svein was killed. (Did he fall off his horse? Succumb to apoplexy? Or was he murdered in his bed? It remains an unsolved mystery.)
And what of Olaf, who had lost Norway in a decisive sea fight? As time passed, some would say that he had been spotted, an old and broken man, years later in the Holy Land. Others clung to the far more likely idea that he had long since perished, drowning beneath the waves roiled by the Battle of Svolder. What is certain is that King Olaf I had exited the course of history and entered the realm of legend—where he lives on to this day.
Sources:
Robert Ferguson, The Vikings: A History (New York: Viking, 2009), 321–22.
Angelo Forte, Richard Oram, and Frederik Pedersen, Viking Empires (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 186–88.
J. A. Giles, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1914), 994 AD entry, 89.
Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, rev. ed. 1984), 126–35.Martina Sprague, Norse Warfare: Unconventional Battle Strategies of the Ancient Vikings (New York: Hippocrene Books, 2007), 255–74.
Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, or the Saga of the Norse Kings, Samuel Laing and Rasmus B. Anderson, trans. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1889), vol. 2, 190–91, 218–26.
