The North Star/Chapter 39
XXXIX
THE BAPTISM OF OLAF THE SAINT
True to his promise, King Olaf visited, with Bishop Sigurd and his court, the home of Sigurd Syr in Ringerike. Sigurd Syr, who was overlord of the province, was a kinsman of Olaf. He was of the race of Harold Fairhaired, and he might have disputed with Olaf to be king; save that Sigurd loved better to stay at peace in his own province than to rule over all Norway. The special reason for Olaf’s visit to his kinsman was to be present, and to act as sponsor for the little step-son of Sigurd. The king was to give the boy his own name, and, as he said, to let him be “another Olaf.” Sigurd and Aasta, his wife, were to be baptized at the same time.
“Poor little lad!” King Olaf said to Bishop Sigurd, as they sat in the guest-room at the home of Sigurd Syr. “He hath indeed seen a troublous childhood. I will call him ‘Olaf,’ and who knows but he may take my place?—for his father stands as close as I do to the throne of Norway. The little lad’s father, Harold the Greenlander, forgot his faith to his wife, Aasta, in his ambition to wed the rich and powerful Queen Sigrid, King Erik’s widow. He went wooing Sigrid with other suitors, and the lady so scorned them all, as unworthy of her, that in her wrath she set fire to the hall where her many suitors slept.
“‘I’ll teach little kings the risk of seeking to wed me,’ she said when the shrieks of the burning men reached her. My lord Bishop, it was a right hard lesson, and they could not forget it, for they died in the learning of it. Harold was well chastised for his desertion of his wife, and she, poor woman, waiting for his return with this little lad but a few months old. Then, after a space, Aasta married my kinsman Sigurd Syr, though to be sure Harold was also of the race of Harold Fairhaired, and this little lad stands near to the crown of Norway. Sigurd Syr’s grand-sire was Sigurd the Giant, the son of Snefrid, that wife of Harold Fairhaired who the sagas say was a sorceress. She was a Finn, and when Harold first saw her, she gave him to drink a horn of mead that so bewitched him, he was in Snefrid’s power until she died. Even after she died, her beautiful corpse did not decay for months, and Harold shut himself up with the dead for a long space.”
“But, my King,” said the gentle bishop, “ these were the days and the doings of heathen kings. A Christian monarch should not be ruled by witches and wicked women. But see! Here come the little lad and his father and mother to be baptized.”
The king arose, and held the hand of the little Olaf, while the ceremony was performed. The proud mother looked admiringly at the great man for whom her boy was named and said:
“I would I could see him such a king as thou art.”
“May he be as noble a man as thy lord,” replied Olaf.
“Nay! nay!” protested the ambitious woman, “my lord hath led a peaceful, deedless life. I would my son had a life as full of deeds of daring as thine, that his way was a glorious even if it was but a short path.”
They feasted the king for some days, and Sigurd Syr gathered together all the shire kings of the Oplands, who were descended from Harold Fairhaired; and secured their allegiance to King Olaf, and their promise of assistance in the work that lay so close to the viking’s heart, the conversion of all Norway to the Christian faith.
If King Olaf, when he stood at the baptism of Aasta’s little lad, and gave him his own name, could have looked down the future for a score of years, he would have seen the boy Olaf in the just, wise Christain king, Olaf Haroldsson, whom the Norse sagas love to sing of under the title of “Olaf the Saint.” Or even, looking closer, could Olaf have seen how, a few years later, the haughty Queen Sigrid, of whom he spoke to Bishop Sigurd, would bring disaster to himself in revenge for his scorn of her, and his impetuous blow upon her royal countenance.