Stiklestad

Where it sits. Stiklestad is a farming settlement in Verdal municipality in Trøndelag, central Norway, about 85 kilometres northeast of Trondheim and six kilometres inland from the town of Verdalsøra on the Trondheimsfjord. The ground is gently rolling arable land on the northern side of the Verdalselva river, with the Skarnsund and the fjord to the west and forested ridges rising toward the Swedish border to the east. There is nothing obviously monumental about it: fields, a stone church, a low modern museum complex and an outdoor amphitheatre cut into a slope. Its standing in Norwegian history is entirely disproportionate to what is visible.

The battle of 29 July 1030. Olav Haraldsson had been king of Norway for roughly thirteen years when Cnut the Great, ruler of England and Denmark, bought and pressured the Norwegian magnates into deposing him in 1028. Olav fled east to Kievan Rus and returned in the summer of 1030 with a force gathered in Sweden, intending to retake the country. He was met at Stiklestad by an army of chieftains and farmers led by Kalv Arnesson, Tore Hund of Bjarkøy and Hårek of Tjøtta, and he was killed. Snorri Sturluson, writing around 1230, describes three wounds — a spear thrust below the mail, an axe blow to the leg and a sword stroke to the neck — and places Olav's death against a stone. Among the survivors was Olav's half-brother Harald Sigurdsson, then about fifteen, who was wounded, escaped east, served in the Byzantine emperor's Varangian Guard, returned to rule Norway as Harald Hardrada, and died at Stamford Bridge in 1066. Stiklestad and the end of the Viking Age are, in that sense, one continuous line.

What the sources actually support. It is worth being careful here, because Stiklestad is a national story as much as a historical event. The death of Olav is attested in contemporary skaldic verse, including the memorial poem composed by his court poet Sigvatr Þórðarson within a few years, so the killing itself is on firm ground. Almost everything else — the size of the armies, the speeches, the named wounds, the choreography of the fight — comes from saga writing two centuries later, and historians treat it as literary reconstruction. Snorri also records a darkening of the sun during the battle; the solar eclipse visible in Norway that year fell on 31 August, not 29 July, which is one of the best-known chronological problems in Norse historiography. No battlefield archaeology has confirmed the location, and what is commemorated is a tradition of the site rather than an excavated one.

A saint, and a cathedral 85 kilometres away. Olav's body was taken to Nidaros and buried by the river. Reports of miracles followed within months, Bishop Grimkell declared him a saint on 3 August 1031, and the cult spread across northern Europe with unusual speed — churches dedicated to St Olav were founded in England, Denmark, Sweden, the Baltic and beyond. The shrine at Nidaros became the principal pilgrim destination of the north, and Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim exists because of what happened in this field. Stiklestad Church, a stone building of around 1180, was raised on the spot where Olav was said to have died, and local tradition holds that the stone he leaned against was built into its fabric. The church remains in parish use, with a Baroque interior and a restoration carried out for the 900th anniversary in 1930.

Drama on the ground rather than on a set. Since 1954 the site has staged Spelet om Heilag Olav, the Saint Olav Drama, written by Olav Gullvåg with music by Paul Okkenhaug, performed each year in the open-air amphitheatre in the days around Olsok, the feast of St Olav on 29 July. The cast runs to several hundred and is overwhelmingly local and amateur, with riders and horses, and it is among the largest outdoor historical productions in Europe. The comparison with screen treatments of the Viking Age is instructive. The television series that gave the period its current popular look — Vikings and its sequel, covering the ninth to eleventh centuries — were filmed in Ireland, at Ashford Studios in County Wicklow and in the surrounding countryside, with halls and harbours built by production designers. Stiklestad's version is performed by the descendants of the farming district it describes, on the field the tradition names, once a year.

What else is on the site. Stiklestad Nasjonale Kultursenter combines the museum, the amphitheatre and an outdoor collection of relocated timber farm buildings from Verdal, giving a picture of the agricultural society that produced both sides of the battle. The exhibition covers the eleventh-century politics, the growth of the Olav cult and, more uncomfortably, the way Olav's memory was appropriated during the German occupation, when the collaborationist Nasjonal Samling party staged gatherings here — an episode the centre addresses rather than avoids. The St Olav Ways pilgrim routes pass close by, including the long route in from Sweden.

Getting there. The E6 runs past Verdal, about an hour and a quarter from Trondheim by car; regional trains on the Trønderbanen stop at Verdal station, five kilometres away, with local buses onward. The church and grounds are freely accessible; the museum and drama are ticketed, and the summer performance sells out well in advance.