The sea battle, traditionally dated to September 1000, in which Olaf Tryggvason was overwhelmed by the fleets of Denmark, Sweden and Jarl Eric Hákonarson and vanished overboard from the Long Serpent.
The Battle of Svolder was a naval battle fought, by the traditional dating, in September 1000, in which King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway was ambushed on his way home from the southern Baltic. The allied fleet was led by Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark, Olof Skötkonung of Sweden and the Norwegian exile Eric Hákonarson, son of the jarl Olaf had displaced. Olaf's ships were taken one by one, and the king leapt into the sea from his great ship, the Long Serpent, and was never seen again.
Almost everything about the battle comes from writers who lived long after it. Even its place is disputed: the sagas put it beside an island called Svǫld off the Wendish coast, which modern scholars have looked for near Rügen, while Adam of Bremen, writing in the 1070s, puts it in the Øresund. What is secure is the outcome: Olaf's death and the division of Norway among his enemies.
Olaf Tryggvason returned to Norway in 995 after years as a Viking leader in England and the Baltic, and took the kingdom when the Trøndelag rose against Jarl Hákon Sigurdsson, who by the saga account was killed in hiding by his own slave. In five years Olaf forced Christianity on the coastal districts of Norway and, in the sagas' telling, pressed it on the Norse settlements of Orkney, Iceland and Greenland. He made enemies of the families who had held power under Hákon, above all Hákon's sons Eric and Sweyn, who fled to Sweden, and of Sweyn Forkbeard, who had been Hákon's overlord and claimed authority over Norway.
The sagas give the war a personal cause. Olaf had married Thyri, Sweyn Forkbeard's sister, who had fled a marriage arranged with the Wendish king Burislav, and in 1000 he sailed to Wendland to recover her lands there. On the way home, the story goes, Sigvaldi, jarl of the Jomsvikings, persuaded him to press ahead with a small part of his fleet and led him into the waiting allied ships. Adam of Bremen, hostile to Olaf, knows nothing of Thyri or Sigvaldi; he presents the war as an alliance of the Danish and Swedish kings against a ruler he describes as a practitioner of augury.
No numbers survive from anyone in a position to know them. In the sagas Olaf had only eleven ships with him when he was caught, against dozens for the allies, figures designed to show a king betrayed and outnumbered. The saga writers were more interested in ships than in men. The Long Serpent (Ormr inn langi) is described as the largest warship in Norway, built in the Trøndelag with thirty-four rowing positions a side and crewed by Olaf's picked men; his other named ships were the Short Serpent and the Crane. Eric Hákonarson's ship, the Iron Beard (Járnbarði), had its bow and stern armoured with iron plates.
In Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, Olaf's ships were lashed together with the Long Serpent in the centre, and the Danes and Swedes attacked first and were beaten off with heavy losses. Eric Hákonarson then laid the Iron Beard alongside the outermost ship and worked inward, clearing each ship of its defenders, cutting it loose and moving on to the next, until only the Long Serpent was left. The skald Skúli Þorsteinsson, who fought aboard Eric's ship, made verses about the fight, and a memorial poem for Olaf by his own skald, Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld, survives in part. These poems are the nearest thing to contemporary evidence, and they confirm Eric's central part in the victory.
The saga's best-remembered scene comes at the end. Olaf's archer Einar Þambarskelfir shot at Eric, and his bowstring broke with a crack; asked what had broken, he answered, 'Norway, from your hands, king.' When the Long Serpent was boarded, Olaf and his marshal Kolbjörn jumped overboard. Kolbjörn was pulled from the water alive, and the king was not. Stories soon circulated that Olaf had swum to a Wendish ship and ended his days as a monk in the East, and Oddr Snorrason's saga of about 1190 reports them while leaving the question open.
The victors divided Norway. Eric Hákonarson and his brother Sweyn ruled most of it as jarls under Danish overlordship, Olof Skötkonung received a share of the kingdom, and Sweyn Forkbeard was acknowledged as overlord of Viken around the Oslofjord. The jarls did not undo Olaf's conversions but did not continue them either, and Christianity in Norway made little further progress until another Olaf, Olaf Haraldsson, won the kingdom in 1015–16.
Eric himself left Norway around 1015 to join Cnut the Great's conquest of England, and became earl of Northumbria. The rule of the jarls ended when Olaf Haraldsson defeated Eric's brother, Jarl Sweyn Hákonarson, at Nesjar in 1016. Olaf Tryggvason's reputation, meanwhile, grew in the opposite direction: to twelfth-century Icelandic clergy he was the king who had brought Christianity to their island, and his last fight became the model of a heroic Christian death.
Svolder shows how a Viking-Age battle became literature in stages. The skaldic verses give fragments: a sea fight in the south, Eric's victory, Olaf's disappearance. Theodoricus Monachus and the Ágrip, around 1180–90, add the setting; the sagas of Olaf by Oddr Snorrason and Gunnlaugr Leifsson add the plot, including Sigvaldi's treachery; and Snorri's Heimskringla, around 1230, gives the scenes their final shape, from the lashed ships to Einar's bowstring and the leap from the Long Serpent. Each stage makes the story more coherent and less verifiable.
The saga version has proved the more durable. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 'The Saga of King Olaf' (1863) carried Einar's broken bowstring to English-speaking readers, and in Norway, where Olaf became a hero of the independence movement, Trondheim raised a column with his statue in its market square in 1921.