Originally from England, Saint Sigfrid is credited in late medieval king-lists and hagiography with performing the baptism of the first steadfastly Christian monarch of Sweden, Olof Skötkonung.

[12] Subsequently, archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, as Anskar's successors, and on the basis of papal documents which are now considered of varying degrees of authenticity, regarded themselves as likewise charged with the evangelization of the Far North.

[15] At the time, the Swedish Kingdom comprised Svealand in the north and Götaland in the south, in addition to provinces bordering Norway, and various offshore islands including Gotland.

[18] However, the Swedish Kingdom, as a whole, long remained a conservative bastion of traditional Nordic polytheism, defending itself against Christian missions by a law forbidding forcible conversion.

[21] Sigfrid's career, therefore, belonged to a period when neither of these goals had yet been achieved, but his success, fame, and influence on younger missionaries nevertheless sufficed to earn him recognition as the primary 'Apostle of Sweden'.

[25] On the former occasion he entrusted a protégé called Osmund to the schools of Bremen for his education; on the latter, he brought good news to the Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen about the success of his most recent missions in Sweden.

[26] Statements about the life of Saint Sigfrid that can be regarded as unimpeachable are hard to discover, either in medieval primary sources or in modern reference books; scholars agree in declaring that very little can safely be said about him.

[32] Rather less challenging to modern sceptical attitudes are traditions that, soon after his first arrival in Sweden, Saint Sigfrid was granted land for the church by the newly baptized King Olavus at Husaby (in Västergötland, not far from Skara),[33] and also two more estates, called Hoff and Tiurby, in the vicinity of the future city of Växjö, this time in judicial compensation for the murder of three of his nephews, who had been assisting him in his mission.

This is not only because the hagiographical context in which they are presented is easy to dismiss as a tissue of lying tales: the reports themselves appear to conflict with the account of Swedish church-history supplied by Adam of Bremen, a much earlier and seemingly more reliable authority.

[44] For chronological reasons, Saint Sigfrid of Sweden cannot possibly be identifiable with Sigefrid, a monk of Glastonbury whose work as a missionary-bishop to Norway belonged to the days of England's King Edgar (regnal dates 959-975).

[48] It is possible basis that Sigeferð of Lindsey could have been elected to that office in the late Spring of 1002, following the death of Archbishop Ealdwulf, but because of a call to evangelize Sweden, resigned before enthronement, whereupon Wulfstan, Bishop of London, took his place at York.

Unsurprisingly, he foregrounds the missions dispatched by the archbishops of that province, who regarded themselves as the rightful heirs of St. Anskar, claiming to have been given sole responsibility for the evangelization of the Far North in papal documents of varying degrees of authenticity.

[51] According to Adam's account, the only diocese founded in the Swedish Kingdom in the first half of the 11th century was that of Skara, in Götaland, endowed by Olof Skötkonung in his later years, with Thurgot, a nominee of Archbishop Unwan of Hamburg-Bremen, as its first bishop.

[54] The date (not supplied by Adam) at which the Diocese of Skara was founded seems to have been c. 1020, if we may judge from traditions about near-contemporary events as recounted in the Saint Olaf Saga of Snorri Sturluson.

Nor was his protégé and apparent successor, Osmund, who, by claiming papal authorization for his assuming of an archiepiscopal role in Sweden in the mid-1050s, incurred charges of insubordination and ingratitude towards the archdiocese which had provided him with his education.

[64] But his information about the processes whereby Norway and Sweden were evangelized was impressionistic, patchy, and sometimes out of date, having been obtained at second-hand from well-travelled visitors to Bremen, rather than from personal travel and fact-finding.

His most distinguished informant was Svein Estrithsen, King of Denmark, who had spent his soldiering days in the service of Anund Jakob, son and heir of Olof Skötkonung.

[65] Svein Estrithsen had great respect for the missionaries working among the 'barbarians' in the remoter parts of the area which the Hamburg-Bremen archbishopric considered its province, pointing out once to Archbishop Adalbert that they had a distinct advantage over clergy from Bremen, in coming from a cultural background which gave them an affinity and a shared language with their prospective converts.

[70] The spread of the fashion for (mainly Christian) rune-stones northward from Denmark provides evidence of intensive missionary activity, particularly in Götaland in the first quarter of the eleventh century.

But the death of Olof Skötkonung,[78] soon enough followed by the recall of Thurgot, Bishop of Skara, to Bremen, altered the church-political situation in Sweden in ways which could have encouraged Sigfrid, as early as the mid-1020s, to base himself once more exclusively in his old mission field.

So, possibly, Sigfrid was still based in Norway at the time of Olaf Haraldsson's defeat by Cnut of Denmark and Anund Jakob of Sweden at the battle of the Holy River (1027).

[81] By c. 1030, he could look back on great successes specifically in his Swedish mission-field, which he was able to report to Archbishop Libentius when—in company with two fellow-bishops, Odinkar the Younger from Denmark and Rodolf from Norway—he made a courteous visit to Bremen at the time of Bishop Thurgot's funeral.

However, the refusal of Bishop-elect Gottskalk to take up residence in Götaland brought about a prolonged crisis of leadership in the newly founded diocese of Skara, and there is some evidence that Sigfrid, presumably basing himself at Husaby, was the first to step into the breach.

By that time, rune-specialists believe that in Västergötland, though not yet further north in the Swedish Kingdom, the older custom of erecting wayside runic memorials to the dead had largely been abandoned in favour of churchyard burials.

[87] To the information conveyed by Sigefrid's Vita I, that he died and was buried in Växjö,[88] the late-medieval author of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta adds an anecdote about Bishop 'Sigurd', set in 'a town called Värend'.

The only reasonably safe chronological finding deducible from extant evidence is that Sigfrid lived on at or near Växjö in retirement for a considerable number of years after his attendance, in c.1030, at the funeral in Bremen of Bishop Thurgot.

[92] These two saints were prominent among the missionaries of English origin who carried on Sigfrid's work in Svealand in the period which followed the expulsion of Bishop Osmund (most probably in 1057) and the subsequent failure in c. 1060 of Archbishop Adalbert's attempt to set up a new diocesan see at Sigtuna.

As Papal Legate to Scandinavia in 1150, Nicholas Breakspear, the future Pope Hadrian IV, was prominent in furthering the latter part of the process that led to the eventual settlement.