Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1968, Page 17
INTRODUCTION
The Christianization of the Northlands took place in the following
order:
Denmark (to which the southernmost part of present Sweden then
belonged) in the second half of the lOth century.
Norway (comprising, beside Norway proper, the islands to the west,
populated by Norsemen, viz. the Orkneys, Shetland, the Faroes, Iceland,
and Greenland) about the year 1000 and a little later (the said islands
by King Olaf Tryggvason, 995-1000, and Norway proper by King Olaf
Haraldsson the Saint, 1015-30).x
Sweden about the middle of the 12th century (after several local at-
tempts from missionaries in the preceding century, both from west and
south).
But Christianity did not come from the same direction or source in
all these three cases.
It came to Denmark from the south, from Germany; and the Danish
church lay directly under the archbishops of Hamburg—Bremen, until it
got an Archbishop’s See of its own in Lund (1104). Through its arch-
bishops the Danish church, from the beginning, belonged to the Roman
Catholic Church, with the Pope as its supreme governor.
To Norway, however, Christianity came from the west, from England,
through its two missionary kings and the bishops and priests who
accompanied them. Certainly, the old English church had become Roman
Catholic in the 7th century; on the other hånd, the Irish church kept
1. An abortive attempt at christianizing Norway had been made by King Hakon
the Good (935-61), the foster -son of King Aethelstan; the clergymen which he
fetched from England, were slain or compelled to flee.
Olaf Tryggvason had somewhat better luck in Norway, in that he converted
the Coastal districts, which, however, after his death, to a great extent relapsed
into their former paganism, until the other Olaf succeeded in completing the work.
(See Konrad Maurer, Die Bekehrung des Norwegischen Stammes zum Christen-
thume, 1855-56.)
XV