Vikings, Saints, and Pilgrimage

Abstract

This chapter gives an account of the emergence of pilgrimage in Norway and its intersections with medieval warfare, trade, and travel. Coastal Norway was the main travel and access route before modern travel. Viking raiders encountered Christianity in the British Isles, and Christian communities spread first along the coast. Eventually, baptismal covenants came to replace the increasingly brittle bonds of Viking raiders to their leaders and a different form of social contract, as well as a different faith, is introduced. St. Olav plays a central role in this shift toward greater political and religious unity, though his own overreach eventually resulted in his death, though not in the defeat of the project of unification under one Christian law and crown. The cult around his relics begins shortly after and renders Nidaros/Trondheim a central location in the sacred geography of Norway. During the Reformation, however, pilgrimage and the cult of saints became widely repressed in Norway, and shrines are either destroyed or relics moved to unknown locations.