The Cup He Drank

The steam comes up off the cauldron and the whole hall watches the king's face. The horse has been killed. The broth is boiling with the meat in it, the way the old rite demands, and the cup is coming down the benches toward the high seat. Hákon sits where his father sat. Every man in the room knows he was raised Christian across the sea, and every man is waiting to see whether the king of Norway will eat from the pagan pot or shame them all in their own hall.

He does not want to. You can feel across a thousand years that he does not want to.

Hákon was called the Good. He was a son of Harald Fairhair, sent as a boy to be fostered in England at the court of a Christian king, and he came home to Norway a believer, or something close to it. He wanted his country to follow. But his power sat on the old chieftains, and the old chieftains sat on the old gods, and they meant to see their king honor the way it had always been done.

It started small, the year before, at a feast at Lade. They handed him the cup and watched. He made the sign of the cross over it. And one of his own earls, a man named Sigurd, covered for him fast, called out that the king was making the hammer-sign of Thor over the drink, so nobody would have to name what everyone had seen. That is how it begins. Not with a battle. With a friend explaining your faith away for you so the room can stay comfortable, and you letting him.

The next winter it came back around, at the great midwinter sacrifice at Mære, and there was no covering it this time. They wanted the king to eat.

He refused the horse meat. They pushed. He refused the broth. They pushed harder, his own men, the men whose swords held his throne, until it came down to this: gape over the steam of the pot, at least. Breathe it in. Do that much.

Heimskringla says he wrapped a cloth around the handle before he would touch it, so his hand would not meet the thing directly. A small dodge. A man trying to obey and not obey in the same motion.

And in the end he ate. A few bites of the liver, the sagas say. Enough to satisfy the room. Enough to keep the peace at his own table. The Christian king of Norway ate the sacrifice to his own gods because the men closest to him leaned on him hard enough, and he wanted their respect more than he wanted to hold the line.

He built no lasting church. He won no country for Christ. And when he died of a wound not long after, his own poets wrote him a song, the Hákonarmál, and in it they carried him not to heaven but to the hall of Odin, welcomed by the old gods as one of their own.

That is how the age remembered its Christian king. Pagan. Buried in verse in a god's hall he had spent his life half-trying to leave.

This is where it stops being about a dead king.

There was another young man, a long way from that hall, who was handed the king's food and would not take it.

"But Daniel made up his mind that he would not defile himself with the king's choice food or with the wine which he drank."

Daniel 1:8, NASB 1995

Made up his mind.

Before the plate came. Before the pressure came. He had already decided in the quiet what he would do in the crowd.

That is the whole difference between the boy and the king. Not courage in the moment. A decision made before the moment, carried in like a loaded thing.

Brother, you do not lose your house in one decision.

You lose it one cup at a time.

Nobody hands you a horse-broth and a room full of chieftains. It is smaller than that and it is worse, because it is so small you can tell yourself it does not count. The joke you laugh at instead of killing it. The opinion you keep to yourself at that table. The way you get quiet about God around certain men, not because you deny Him, but because you want to still be one of the guys when the cup comes around.

You have a table like that. Every man does. A place where you go along. Where you gape over the steam so nobody makes it weird.

And here is the part that should sting, because it stung Hákon into the ground. The men you go quiet for are not going to hold your house together when it comes apart. They are not going to answer for your kids. They are not going to be standing there at the end. You are trading the one thing that lasts for the respect of men who will forget your name a year after your funeral, same as they wrote a king into the wrong god's hall the season after he died.

Hákon could not hold the line at his own table. It cost him his witness and, if the poets got to write your ending, it costs more than that.

Here is the one thing. Not five. One.

Name the table. The one place you go quiet. You already know which one it is.

Then decide, right now, in the quiet, before the cup comes around again, what you will say next time. Not a speech. One honest sentence you will not swallow. Make up your mind now, like the boy did, so that when the room leans on you, the decision is already made and you are only carrying it in.

He took the mark. He never took the knee. Brother, don't die half-signed.

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Previous: The Mark That Cost Him Nothing. Next: The Hammer and the Cross.

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Source note. The cup at Lade, where the earl Sigurd passed off the king's sign of the cross as Thor's hammer, and the harder ordeal the next winter at the midwinter sacrifice at Mære, with the cloth on the kettle handle and the bites of horse-liver, are told in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, in the saga of Hákon the Good, written in thirteenth-century Iceland. The praise-poem Hákonarmál, which sends the Christian king to Odin's hall, is older and is quoted by Snorri. As with the whole series, the men who preserved this were Christians describing their own past.