At [the center of the naval battle at Svolder] stood Tryggvason’s great warship, the Long Serpent, one of the most famous vessels in saga literature. Enemy ships closed in from all sides, capturing Norwegian ships one by one until only Olaf’s flagship remained.From there, the king is said to have fought on the deck of his ship while his fleet was destroyed around him. But aggressors had the upper hand. Most accounts agree on the basic ending. Olaf disappeared into the sea.“Everybody thinks that he jumped overboard and drowned because he was wearing full armour,” Hollway says.This remains the view accepted by most historians. But not all.
When I saw the headline -- "He Was One of the Greatest Viking Warlords and His Death Is Still a Mystery" -- I thought the article was going to be about Sven Forkbeard. We know when Sven died, in England at the very height of his powers, but we have conflicting sources about how. Some say he'd been hiding a long illness, others that he fell off a horse. Either or both could be true.
Olaf Tryggvason's death, by contrast, is clearly recorded in the Heimskringla. Snorri has quite specific details about the whole thing, a matter on which he seems well-informed. Some of the Heimskringla shades into legendaria -- Odin is mentioned towards the beginning as a founder of the kingly line in Norway -- but that is mostly confined to the early books. By the time of Tryggvason, Snorri is writing solidly about history.
Kolbjorn the marshal, who had on clothes and arms like the kings, and was a remarkably stout and handsome man, went up to king on the quarter-deck. The battle was still going on fiercely even in the forehold. But as many of the earl's men had now got into the Serpent as could find room, and his ships lay all round her, and few were the people left in the Serpent for defence against so great a force; and in a short time most of the Serpent's men fell, brave and stout though they were. King Olaf and Kolbjorn the marshal both sprang overboard, each on his own side of the ship; but the earl's men had laid out boats around the Serpent, and killed those who leaped overboard. Now when the king had sprung overboard, they tried to seize him with their hands, and bring him to Earl Eirik; but King Olaf threw his shield over his head, and sank beneath the waters. Kolbjorn held his shield behind him to protect himself from the spears cast at him from the ships which lay round the Serpent, and he fell so upon his shield that it came under him, so that he could not sink so quickly. He was thus taken and brought into a boat, and they supposed he was the king. He was brought before the earl; and when the earl saw it was Kolbjorn, and not the king, he gave him his life. At the same moment all of King Olaf's men who were in life sprang overboard from the Serpent; and Thorkel Nefia, the king's brother, was the last of all the men who sprang overboard. It is thus told concerning the king by Halfred:—
"The Serpent and the Crane
Lay wrecks upon the main.
On his sword he cast a glance,—
With it he saw no chance.
To his marshal, who of yore
Many a war-chance had come o'er,
He spoke a word—then drew in breath,
And sprang to his deep-sea death."
The following chapter gives eyewitness reports of his death. It describes a rumor that spread at the time that the king might have slipped out his mail-coat underwater -- try that sometime, if you have access to a hauberk of mail! Be sure you have a friend to pull you back out again, because you won't be able to do it -- and somehow escaped, but it also a poem scolding people for raising such stories that was written by one of Olaf's own skalds.
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