St. Olav's shrine

For nearly five centuries the shrine was of major religious importance to Norway and the other Nordic countries, and also to other parts of Northern Europe.

Part of the St. Olav altar frontal in Nidaros Cathedral (ca 1320) depicts Translatio Olavi, when Bishop Grimkjell on 3 August 1031 finds the body intact, sweet-scented and with hair and nails having grown since the King died.

The high choir (the octagon) of Nidaros Cathedral, where the saint King was resting behind the altar, was known as Cor Norvegiae – Norway’s heart.

Since the 9th century Norway’s kings had been approved at Øretinget, the old ting wall at the Nidelven estuary, in today’s Trondheim.

Under King Harald Hardråde (1015–1066) the unification of Norway was fulfilled, and Trondheim’s status also as the political capital confirmed.

Erik Valkendorf (1465–1522), archbishop of Nidaros 1510 – 1522, allegedly bought a costly jewel which was fixed to one end of St. Olav’s Shrine.

Rumours have circulated on the shrine’s fate after the reformation, one is that it was lost in an unconfirmed shipwreck off Agdenes in the Trondheim Fjord on its way to Copenhagen.

Archaeologist Øystein Ekroll at Nidaros Cathedral’s Restoration Works has collected what is known about the shrine’s fate in an article.

At his castle Steinvikholm off Skatval further east in the Trondheim Fjord, the archbishop had left a military force equipped to withstand protracted siege.

At the castle he had also left behind the country’s most valuable relics, among them St. Olav’s Shrine, which had been moved there from Nidaros Cathedral some months before.

The archbishop fled to Lier in the Netherlands, today in Belgium, since 1523 the exile town for his allied King Christian II of Denmark-Norway.

A receipt from the King’s treasurer Jochum Bech to Christoffer Huitfelt, governor of Trøndelag and responsible for the transport to Copenhagen, is dated 9 September 1540.

From the shrine holding St. Olav’s shirts came 2.6 kilos of gilded silver and a number of enamelled gold plates.

Only the innermost wooden coffin, with St. Olav’s remains, was left at Steinvikholm when Danish soldiers had smashed the two outer shrines and taken the silver and other valuables to Copenhagen in 1540.

Twenty-four years after the shrine had been left behind at Steinvikholm, the Nordic Seven-Year War led to Swedish occupation of the area in the spring of 1564.

Already on 8 June that same year, after Swedish forces had been driven back, the coffin with St. Olav’s body was brought "in great procession" from Fløan to Nidaros Cathedral, and lowered into a brick grave inside the church.

Of the three descriptions, only the first one – former pupil at Nidaros Cathedral School and later Presiding Magistrate Jon Simonsson's from 1521, written down by Lutheran Vicar Peder Claussøn Friis in the 1570s – notes that the King’s face is bearded.

Olav Engelbrektsson’s description of 1536: The year after the return from Fløan to the cathedral, in 1565, the wooden coffin was taken out of the brick grave.

These remains were mentioned by Steinar Bjerkestrand, director at the Nidaros Cathedral Restoration Workshop in an interview on the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation's regional programmes (NRK-Trøndelag) on 5 April 2013.

In 2003 Øystein Ekroll wrote that a possible location for St. Olav’s grave, if the King is still resting in the cathedral, may be under 17th-century burials in one of the three octagon chapels.

The georadar examinations had confirmed the location of a grave under the floor north of the southern octagon chapel, where written sources say King Magnus the Good, Olav Haraldsson's son, had been buried.

[6] Examinations confirm that the relic is the left calf bone of a male who died in a time span covering 1030, and who had been in battle.

This may indicate that the relic is genuine, as St. Olav's body was never buried but was kept swaddled in cloths in its shrine for centuries, initially in St. Clemen's Church and then in Nidaros Cathedral.

In the calf bone in St. Olav Cathedral in Oslo, remains of mitochondrial DNA, inherited only from the mother, were found.

An obvious next step would be to compare this with possible similar DNA traces in the remains of Olav Haraldsson's half-brother on the mother's side, King Harald Hardråde.