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firm among all men’. In so doing, though, he constrained the lordly liberties allowed to provincial magnates when they had been subject only to the client jarls of absent overlords in other lands and thus might already be seen to have sown the seeds of his own downfall.
    The saga points specifically to Olaf’s prohibition of plunder-raiding within the country and his punishment of powerful chieftains’ sons who had customarily engaged in viking cruises around fjord and coastland as the principal causes of discontent with his kingship, but there were other sources of resentment too, not least his draconian response to almost every instance of apostasy or disloyalty. All of these factors were to offer ample scope for the destabilisation of Olaf’s sovereignty when the ambition of the mighty Cnut was eventually drawn back from his English conquest to Scandinavia. Sometime around the year 1024, he despatched emissaries to Norway with the proposal that Olaf would be allowed to govern the kingdom as his jarl if he first came to England and there paid homage to Cnut as his lord. Whether or not Olaf was reminded of that ominously prophetic warning given him by his stepfather on his return to Norway some ten years before, his response to Cnut’s emissaries, as recorded in Sigvat’s verse, was emphatically rendered in the negative. Cnut had thus little option but to come north in arms, which raised the prospect of his reclaiming overlordship of Norway and then turning to Sweden as the next object of his ambition, so there was every urgent reason for Olaf and Onund to form the alliance that was agreed when they met on the border at Konungahella to plan their own pre-emptive attack upon Denmark.
    Olaf’s fleet of sixty ships sailed south to plunder the Danish island of Zealand while Onund brought a larger force against Skaane (in what is now southern Sweden), but Cnut was soon, if not already, sailing north from England with a large fleet which he brought into Limfjord along the northern coast of Jutland where it was reinforced by Danish warships. Under the shadow of that impressive naval muster ranged out in the Kattegat, Olaf promptly withdrew his forces from Zealand to join Onund in harrying the coastland of Skaane until Cnut’s fleet came in pursuit and they withdrew to take refuge in the Holy River which flows into the sea on the eastward coast of Skaane. It was there that the chase finally came to battle in circumstances left surrounded with doubt and confusion by the historical record.
    Even the date of the battle of Holy River is in dispute, although the majority of modern historians assign it to the year 1026, and yet its course still remains shrouded in mystery. The saga’s claim that Olaf built and then broke a dam on the river to engulf Cnut’s fleet when it had been lured into the trap has been convincingly dismissed as just one of ‘many tales told of Olaf’s ruses at sea and this one is no more credible than the others’. 1 Although in view of the customary conduct of Scandinavian sea-fighting at the time – where vessels functioned as fighting-platforms upon which contending warriors engaged in close combat, clearing the enemy decks by the sword until victory was decided by a process of attrition – there may be an item of more convincing evidence in the next saga episode. This passage tells of Cnut’s own warship beset on all sides by Norwegian and Swedish vessels, and yet built ‘so high in the hull, as if it had been a fortress, with so numerous a selected crew aboard, well-armed and accomplished, that it was too difficult to assail’. Soon afterwards, Olaf and Onund ‘cast their ships loose from Cnut’s ship and the fleets separated’.
    From this reference alone might be inferred the plausible scenario of Cnut’s freshly mustered warfleet outnumbering those of Olaf and Onund, whose crews would already have been wearied by a raiding