Enjoyed a minor writer’s pleasure today, as I worked on the new Erling book.

I went over this one scene I’d added during the last revision. I always feel uncertain about inserted scenes, worrying that the graft might not take (even though most of the time I insert them precisely because I feel something’s missing at that point).

But it did work. Quite well, actually. Not only dramatically, but emotionally. The scene moved me, in fact. Which is always a surprise, like playing a practical joke on yourself.

The scene centered on King Olaf Haraldsson – Saint Olaf. Who is, in the great scheme of the series, the villain. In spite of the fact that he’s the patron saint of my second favorite country, the man was a totalitarian. Also a heretic, in my view, because I consider the use of violence in evangelism heretical. So I approached this project prepared to give him a waxed mustache and a black top hat.

But a funny thing happened as I wrote. I started getting under his skin. The first breakthrough came some years back, when I was talking about Olav’s life with a (longsuffering) friend.

I told him about a story from the Icelandic Flatey Book, not included in Heimskringla (the usual source). Flatey Book explains how Olaf was named after an ancestor, a great king called Olaf Geirstad-Elf, believed to have had supernatural powers. In the old heathen religion, naming a child after a recently dead relation was thought to cause a sort of reincarnation. The new baby was believed to be, in some sense, that ancestor reborn. (Yes, they also believed in Valhalla. And they believed the ancestor slept in his grave mound. Consistency played no part in their theology.) So Olaf was raised believing that he was really a wizard who’d lived before. His foster father Rani even dug into Olaf Geirstad-Elf’s grave mound and removed the ancient family sword, Besing, which was then given to young Olaf.

But Olaf sailed abroad as a Viking, saw a bit of the world, and chose to be baptized a Christian. We’re never told what he thought of his supposed reincarnation, in light of his new faith.

But there’s a story in Flatey Book about how he rode his horse one day past his ancestor’s grave mound. And suddenly a terror came over him. He turned his horse around and galloped off, giving orders that no one should stray near that mound again.

As I told that story to my friend, I suddenly felt I had an insight into Olaf’s psychology. He’d had a traumatic experience there at the grave mound. It instilled in him a terror of the old religion, a fear that he’d be sucked back into the power of a horrific ancestral curse. This helped explain his whole approach to Christianization.

I don’t think I’ll ever be an Olaf booster. His actions are too repellant.

But I think I’m beginning to sympathize with him. A little.

Which leads me to the inevitable thought…

After a thousand years dead, this S.O.B. is charming me! No wonder they made him patron saint!