That is why we will celebrate Olav – VG

Nope. A trick question, this.

The world’s most famous Norwegian is Olav Haraldsson. Saint Olav, among friends.

The Viking king who suffered martyrdom on a patch of land in the heart of Trøndelag on 29 July 1030 has put Norway on the map.

Around the world there should be around 400 cities with it connection to St. Olav.

Through churches, chapels, monasteries, hospitals, schools, Olavskunst, Olavsaltere, Olavskildar, as well as sports and cultural events. Historically, the number, including the influence, has probably been even greater.

The saint king’s counterfei, a fresco from ca. 1150, is painted on one of the pillars in the church Emperor Constantine in the 4th century had built over the grotto which, according to tradition, is Birthplace of Jesus.

That Norway’s eternal king – Perpetual King of Norwayas he is called – has been given a place alongside the Virgin Mary and the apostles in Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, is in itself an expression of his international status.

King and saint

There are St Olave’s churches in Scotland, England and Ireland; in Denmark, Finland and Sweden there have been St. Olof churches for more than 900 years, the last ones consecrated as recently as 1962 and 1983. Helsingør even has its own Sankt Olai Parish.

St. Olaf has also given his name to a bunch of churches in the Baltics.

In the middle of the corso in Rome there is St. Olav’s chapel, in the Netherlands et St. Olof’s Chapelin Spanish Covarrubias a relatively newly built Olavskapell. In Texas, St. Olaf Church has been standing since 1886, and in the Midwest and Canada several churches, both Lutheran, Catholic and Anglican, are dedicated to “our” Olav.

In the USA, St. Olaf College in Northfield also has its own position.

Olav’s churches in historical Russia (Novgorod) and the mighty Viborg Cathedralwhich was later wiped out by the Soviet Union when Stalin annexed today’s Leningrad Oblast, it is 216 years old St. Olav’s Church in West Bengal’s Serampore in India among the more exotic traces of the Norwegian saint king.

Olav II Haraldsson is the only one – next to the Sicilian Saint Lucia – who is honored as a saint both by Roman Catholics, the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches – and indeed my kamilavka, also in the Protestant Anglican and Evangelical Lutheran denominations.

In the last 24 hours, many people in Norway, consciously or not, have marked Olsok. The Catholic feast day that never disappeared from the Norwegian primstaff, not even after the Reformation.

It is not known whether the date was coincidental. But symbolically enough, the Danish king Christian III chose Olavsdagen 1536 – 29 July – to sign a so-called hand attachment which determined that Norway would cease to be or be called a kingdom.

The most popular of all feast days, according to tradition, was changed with the stroke of a pen early national day to an expression of the opposite: the cessation of the nation.

Deeper soundstage

Olavsvaka – olsok – has a deeper resonance in our history than any other day. Without olsok, no 17 May. Without 1030, neither 1814 nor 1905 would have made sense as decisive years.

In 2030, we will mark the thousand-year anniversary of the Battle of Stiklestad. A celebration many seem to think we should refrain from.

Norwegians would not have been Norwegians if someone had not allowed themselves to be offended by a national anniversary.

When the headline is Christianity, nation-building and – huttetu! – identity, the problem is reasonably predictable. How/why celebrate the deeds of a religious fundamentalist in a secular, multicultural and globalized society?

A “mass murderer, sadist and tyrant”, according to SV deputy leader Torgeir Knag Fylkesnes, who also has said to NRK that “the church has established a wrong image of the battle at Stiklestad”. He believes “we should focus less on Olav the Holy’s role, and rather get a less church-related and more historical perspective on the battle”.

I wonder.

In the newspaper Our country recently warned the leader of the Human-Ethical Association (HEF) against a “too Christian” 2030 celebration, and requested Minister for Children and Families Kjersti Toppe (Sp) – who is the minister responsible for the national jubilee – to ensure a broad celebration of the “diversity of cultural heritage”, not just the Christian one.

Was not canonized

Both Fylkesnes and the HEF leader have a few points, viewed in isolation, about a firm warrior king with antisocial behavior measured by the values ​​of our time, and that culturally today’s Norway is the result of more development features than Christianity and the church.

It nevertheless borders on weak self-confidence, almost comical, when in this way one expresses fear that the thousand-year marking of Saint Olav’s Christian works may give Christianity too much attention.

Much can be said about both the sanctity of the warrior king, about the actual purpose of the Stiklestad battle, who led the enemy against whom, and the underlying motives for canonizing Olav Haraldsson. Some even make a point of the fact that St. Olav was never canonized.

No, he didn’t become that, because canonization as such was something the Pope only started with in a later century. In the millennium, such was delegated to bishops, like the English one Grimkjellking Olav’s court bishop.

This is not the point anyway. For the historians agree, however, that Norway was not collectively Christianized when the king plunged at Stiklestad.

The battle of 1030 marks the completion of a process that had been going on ever since Olav Tryggvason’s timeand the canonization in 1031 was probably as much political as religious.

It in no way detracts from what is essential, which is the paradigm shift. The change in mentality in Norway was absolute. There was never any backlash.

This is submitted for the celebration in 2030. Not the fallible Viking.

Olav as a symbol

The humanity that came with Christianity was a new idea; the view that man had intrinsic value. It broke with the old order that put the family before the individual, the honor before the individual.

Humanism was a Christian virtue, something many anti-religious movements seem to forget in their eagerness to appropriate the term themselves and present it as the opposite of Christianity.

And although this too was a long and persistent process, and one can again ask how much of the credit should be attributed to Olav, he played just as much a decisive role in getting Christian law adopted in the early 1020s.

He was, albeit harshly, the guarantor of moving society towards a better jurisprudence under the influence of Christian humanism.

As Professor Ståle Kleiberg wrote in a olsok chronicle in Adressa a couple of years ago, it is “a decisive point in the story about Olav that he has one foot in both old and new times. Then it becomes pointless to criticize him for not being a saint from birth”.

We do not know how fervent his faith was. Whether he saw Christianity as a necessary EEA agreement to adapt to a Europe where the church had forbidden Christians to trade with pagans.

It is nevertheless not unreasonable, in light of the history of impact, to see Olav the Saint and the events of 29 July almost a thousand years ago as the symbol of the birth of the nation-state and Norway’s spiritual, political, cultural and legal connection to Europe.

We can safely celebrate that in 2030 – without anyone having to fear losing themselves.

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