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A very happy St Olaf's Day to all my Norwegian followers! Here is being killed in the battle of Stiklestad, where on this day 989 years ago he was crippled by an axe blow, skewered through with a spear & finished off by having his neck hacked open to the vertebrae. 
Meanwhile, above the battlefield, it is said, the sky itself began to bleed.
Olav Haraldsson was very much a Viking idea of a saint. As king of Norway, he passed a rumbustious decade browbeating his various rivals & committing spectacular atrocities, all supposedly in the name of Christ. His eyes, it is said, were "as hard as a serpent's".
Perhaps England's most famous church dedicated to St Olaf is in the City of London. One of the few medieval churchs to survive the Great Fire, it is where Pepys was buried & King Haakon VII of Norway worshipped during WW2
Fittingly for a church dedicated to a Viking, St Olave's is also where an Inuit brought back to London in 1576 after Martin Frobisher's abortive attempt to find the Northwest Passage was buried.
I didn't know this about Tooley Street! #StOlaf
