0 thoughts on “The Friday Fight: Stiklestad”

  1. July 28, 1030, though there’s some confusion on the date. The saga says there was an eclipse that day, but the eclipse didn’t happen then. It happened shortly after. Unless the date is wrong.

    Because it’s so close to my birthday, I’ve always felt some relationship to the battle. I hope to write about it someday, if my plan for the Erling books works out.

    They do an annual Stiklestad pageant in Trondheim every year (Liv Ullman had one of her early acting jobs as one of the stars). I hope to get to it one of these years.

  2. By the way, that’s a nice picture. The one I’ve been using with my PowerPoint presentation is the same thing, but in black & white.

    The colors red and gold have traditionally been associated with St. Olaf. I did not know that when I adopted red and gold as “my own colors” when I started reenacting (though Vikings didn’t have heraldry as such). I just happen to like the combination.

    Then I learned that I wasn’t the first. The Norwegian Nazi Party had used red and gold too, in their efforts to link their movement to the Viking past.

  3. Natural selection. Since brave kings tended to die off young, only the cowards were able to reproduce themselves. Hence Prince Charles.

  4. I was going to use a painting I saw this week of Olaf I (Olaf Tryggvason), but today I noticed it wasn’t a fight. It was a coronation or blessing. Lots of armor and weapons, but no fighting.

  5. You got me curious about the eclipse, so I ran a simulation of the sky in Stiklestad, Norway, in 1030, and discovered that a total solar eclipse occurred in the early afternoon of August 31, 1030. Of course that would be the “New Calendar” date.

  6. Very cool. I suppose the “leap” from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar would have accounted for part of that one-month gap.

    What I imagine actually happened was that, with time, people remembered the eclipse and thought of it in connection with Olaf’s death. In time the two events were conflated.

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