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Updated: June 1, 2025
Like the Protestant clergymen Queen Elizabeth despatched to convert Ireland, he was bundled over to Iceland principally because he was too disreputable to be allowed to live in Norway. The old Chronicler gives a very quaint description of him. "Thangbrand," he says, "was a passionate, ungovernable person, and a great man-slayer; but a good scholar, and clever.
Taking advantage of so good a hit, the Treasury "whips" immediately called for a division; and the Christian religion was adopted by a large majority. The first Christian missionaries who came to Iceland seem to have had a rather peculiar manner of enforcing the truths of the Gospel. Their leader was a person of the name of Thangbrand.
Among them was a certain Bishop Sigurd, a man of grave and gentle spirit, most learned and eloquent, who stood at Olaf's right hand during the whole five years of his reign. Now Bishop Sine, of Canterbury, had presented Thangbrand with a very costly and curiously wrought shield. It was made of burnished bronze, inlaid with gold and precious stones, and it bore the image of the crucified Christ.
Too ample, too prolix, too crowded with detail, they cannot indeed vie in art with the epics of Greece; but in their pictures of life, simple and heroic, they fall beneath no literature in the world, save the Iliad and the Odyssey alone. There lived a man in the south, before Thangbrand, Wilibald's son, preached the White Christ in Iceland.
He brought his ship to Swanfirth, and stayed with Side-Hall all the winter at Wash-river, and set forth the faith to people both with fair words and harsh punishments. Thangbrand slew two men who went most against him.
So also Charlemagne, at an earlier period, had dealt with the Saxons at the Main Bridge, when his ultimatum was 'Christianity or death'. So also the first missionary to Iceland who met, indeed, with a sorry reception was followed about by a stout champion named Thangbrand, who, whenever there was what we should now call a missionary meeting, challenged any impugner of the new doctrines to mortal combat on the spot.
Heathenism at least constrained to be silent and outwardly conformable. Tryggveson, next turned his attention to Iceland, sent one Thangbrand, priest from Saxony, of wonderful qualities, military as well as theological, to try and convert Iceland.
Thangbrand made a few converts; for Olaf had already many estimable Iceland friends, whom he liked much, and was much liked by; and conversion was the ready road to his favor. Thangbrand converted Hall and one or two other leading men; but in general he was reckoned quarrelsome and blusterous rather than eloquent and piously convincing.
The king said, "This is chosen both wisely and as beseems a great man." The king gave Kjartan a whole set of new clothes, all cut out of scarlet cloth, and they suited him well; for people said that King Olaf and Kjartan were of an even height when they went under measure. King Olaf sent the court priest, named Thangbrand, to Iceland.
In brief, after about a year, Thangbrand returned to Norway and King Olaf, declaring the Icelanders to be a perverse, satirical, and inconvertible people, having himself, the record says, been "the death of three men there." King Olaf was in high rage at this result; but was persuaded by the Icelanders about him to try farther, and by a milder instrument.
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