The Ashes of Olaf
A tale of kings and crosses, set in the blood-soaked North
The Seer’s Fire
The old man’s eyes were milk-white, the color of a dead man’s skin, though he swore he had seen too much to ever be truly blind. He squatted in a seal-hide tent on the Scilly Isles, beside a fire that smelled of fish oil and ash. When Olaf came ashore—tall and broad and cruel-eyed—the fire danced. The blind man did not rise. He only spoke.
“You were born in blood,” he rasped. “You’ll die in it.”
Olaf snorted. His sword still dripped from a raid on the mainland. “So do most men.”
“But you will rise again,” the seer said, “as fire rises from ash. A king. A Christian. A death worthy of songs.”
The Viking prince laughed then, but quietly. The wind carried that laugh into the sea, where it sank like so many ships.
Olaf Tryggvason, Son of the Sea
The boy was born of a murdered king and a fleeing queen, and both his name and his fate were forged in exile. Pirates took him on the Baltic and sold him like cattle. A whore’s child, some whispered. A wraith. But others said the gods marked him, that Odin had placed a raven’s feather beneath his tongue.
In Novgorod, he killed his foster father’s murderer with an axe in the marketplace. The blood splashed across the bread of a merchant’s stall, and the crowd parted like sea foam. His queen paid wergild for the dead man, but the boy smiled through it all.
By twelve, he had taken to the oars. By twenty, he had burned more monasteries than he could count. In England, he slew for coin. In Ireland, he slew for sport. In Normandy, he met his doom—not by sword, but by story.
There, monks told him of Charlemagne.
A king who crushed tribes and crowned Christ with steel. A warlord baptized in blood. A man like Olaf.
It was not holiness that swayed him. It was power.
He was baptized beneath a Norman cross, but the water steamed as it touched his skin.
The Sword that Preaches
When Olaf returned to Norway, it was not with scrolls or sermons. He returned with ships. He returned with fire.
Haakon the king had tried gentler things: Christian monks with clean hands and weak words. But Haakon was dead now—overthrown, forgotten, and his bones gnawed by wolves somewhere in the north. Olaf crowned himself with steel and flame.
Temples burned.
Chieftains knelt or bled.
Some kissed the cross by candlelight; others kissed it with the iron edge of Olaf’s blade pressed to their throats. At night, they still called on Thor and Freyja, but by day they marched behind banners marked with the crucifix. The priests who came with Olaf looked the other way.
“He does God’s work,” one muttered. “Just… more directly.”
Blood made the sign of the cross that year, and Norway shivered beneath it.
The Hammer of Justice
Olaf was not content to rule like his forebears, in name only. He shattered the jarls’ hold on law. He made decrees and, worse, enforced them. Murderers were no longer fined; they were hung. Raiders were not exiled; they were drowned. Even lords were made to answer before him.
“He acts as though he were God,” the clansmen muttered. “Or worse—a saint.”
But the poor began to call him Rettferdig, the Just. He ended the bride-stealing. He forbade infant sacrifice. He built churches where cairns once stood and bade the men of the north bow not to blood, but to law.
That was his greatest heresy.
Knives in the Dark
Justice is a king’s glory, and a king’s death. The jarls met beneath smoke-thick roofs, in halls that stank of goat fat and mead, and spoke treason in whispers. King Canute of Denmark—clever, cold, and Christian in name only—sent gifts and flatteries and promises.
“He lets us rule ourselves,” they said. “He smiles when we burn churches. Olaf sends priests and punishments.”
And so the knife was drawn.
Olaf was driven into the east, into exile again. Once more the sea swallowed him. Once more he wandered the courts of foreign kings. Jaroslav of Novgorod gave him gold, asked him to stay, offered him rank.
But Olaf was no longer the wild boy who had raided Canterbury. He had changed. The priest’s water had sunk into his bones.
“No,” he said. “Norway is broken. And I must go back.”
The Martyr-King
His return was not a triumph. No cities opened their gates. No armies rallied to his banner. He came like a ghost—through forests and fjords, with a few hundred loyal men and the resolve of one who no longer feared death.
On the morning of the battle at Stiklestad, Olaf confessed his sins aloud. He named them like enemies. Bastard sons. Harsh justice. Old pride. He asked no forgiveness from men.
“My blood will be the ink God writes this kingdom with,” he said.
And then the horns sounded.
They say he fought like a bear—bloody, roaring, unbroken. That he laughed as the spears came. That he threw aside his sword at the end, and raised his hands like a priest at Mass.
A spear pierced his belly. A blade gashed his throat. And still he stood, as though some unseen force held him upright.
Then he fell. And the ground drank him.
Ashes and Fire
They buried him like a dog—shallow, without stone or song. But within a year, the flowers bloomed where he had bled. The blind saw. The lame danced. The spring that bubbled by his grave was sweet and pure.
His enemies whispered of ghosts. His people spoke of visions. The Pope named him saint. The jarls named him king again—but too late.
From his blood, Norway was made.
They had killed the king. But they could not kill the cross.