Knútr and the Cult of St Óláfr: Poetry and Patronage in Eleventh-Century Norway and England

An anecdote in the Flateyjarbok version of Olafs saga helga tells how Knutr inn riki learned of the burgeoning sanctity of his old adversary Olafr Haraldsson (Sigurður Nordal and others 1944–45, II, 488; also printed in Johnsen and Jon Helgason, 1941, II, 832): Þorir hundr ferr til Englands ok segir Knuti konungi allt, hversu farit hafði. Konungr varð mjok oglaðr við þessa sogu. Þorir spurði, hverju þat gegndi. Konungr svarar: ‘Ek þottumst þat vita, at annarrhvarr okkar mundi heilagr vera, ok hafða ek mer þat aetlat. Þo skal ek nu leggja fe fyrstr til skrins Olafs konungs hans ovina ok trua fyrstr helgi hans, ok eigi skal ek koma i Noreg, með þvi er Olafr er heilagr.’ (Þorir hundr goes to England and tells King Knutr everything that had happened. The king became very unhappy at this narrative. Þorir asked what the reason for this was. The king answers: ‘I had expected that one of us would become a saint, and had intended that for myself. Nonetheless I shall now be the first of his enemies to give money to the shrine of King Olafr, and the first to believe in his sanctity, and I shall not enter Norway for as long as Olafr is a saint.’) Even though it is late and comic, this anecdote contains a recognition of two important points: first, that Olafr’s sanctity posed a problem for Knutr, and second, that the best way of dealing with it was in fact to acquiesce and positively promote Olafr’s cult. In this article I want to examine the genesis of Olafr’s cult, and the important early poem Glaelognskviða, from a Knutr-centred rather than Olafr-centred perspective; as will be seen, this is more or less equivalent to taking a view from England rather than a view from Norway. In short, the question to be asked is: what was the attitude of Knutr and his dynasty towards the cult of Olafr? In attempting to answer it, I shall place skaldic verse alongside Anglo-Saxon history, in the belief that the two are mutually illuminating; the investigation will also, I hope, cast light on various aspects of Anglo-Scandinavian elite culture in the second quarter of the eleventh century. In what follows, I shall look firstly at the context of Glaelognskviða, secondly at its content, and thirdly for confirmation elsewhere of what it implies about Knutr and the cult of St Olafr.