It's one of the few known instances of actual King Sacrifice in the literature.

Dómaldi took the inheritance after his father Visbur, and ruled the land. In his day, a great famine and hunger engirded the Swedish thede (people). Then the Swedes offered great sacrifice at Uppsala. The first autumn they sacrificed oxen, but the following season was no better. The next autumn they held a man-sacrifice, but the next season was even worse. The third autumn a great many Swedes came to Uppsala when the sacrifices were to be offered. Then the chieftains took rede with one another, and agreed both that the famine was due to Dómaldi their king, and that they should sacrifice him that very year: take him out, kill him, and redden the altars with his blood.

And that is what they did.

So wrote Icelander Snorri Sturluson in his Ynglingasaga (1225).

Snorri's account implies a perpetrated violence, but in Swedish painter Carl Larsson's monumental 1915 canvas, Midvinterblot (“Midwinter Sacrifice”), the death of King Dómaldi becomes a moving act of willing self-sacrifice.

In this controversial painting, a festive crowd has gathered before the great stave-temple of Uppsala. Lurs blare, women dance, warriors march. Through the open doorway, we see the great golden statue of the Thunderer standing in a chariot drawn by golden goats. Before the temple the high góði stands with hammer raised to hallow the sacrifice. In the foreground, facing away from the viewer, stands the red-cloaked sacrificer, who holds the bright blade, ready but hidden, behind his back.

But the center of the painting is Dómaldi himself, his head thrown back, standing (like Þórr) on the sledge on which he has been drawn in procession to the temple.

Young, vigorous, bearded and redly beautiful, he is depicted in the act of shedding the red fox-skin cloak which is his only covering. Beneath it, in the Midwinter cold, he offers himself stripped for sacrifice, naked and ready. It is the ultimate act of royal kenosis: the voluntary self-emptying of one who willingly gives his life for the people.

Although in the language of the time, such a gesture might have been described (and contextualized) as “Christ-like” (and indeed Dómaldi, with his beard, long hair, and kenotic nudity bears a strong resemblance to traditional representations of Christ), the painting ignited a fire-storm of controversy, and was roundly rejected for its shocking (if implied) violence and “animality” both by critics and by Stockholm's National Museum, for which Larsson had specifically created the painting. Broken by the rejection, Larsson died in 1919. After languishing in storage for many years, the painting was eventually acquired by a Japanese collector.

The changing sensibilities of the late 20^th century, however, created an environment more receptive to the painting, and in 1997 it was finally acquired by Sweden's National Museum.

Midvinterblot is now displayed in the arch for which its painter intended it, and continues to be one of the museum's main attractions.

It is said that following the death of King Dómaldi, and throughout the reign of Dómarr, his son and successor, the land was so filled with peace, and harvests so rich and abundant, that there was nothing more to tell.

For a penetrating study of the history and making of “Sweden's most famous painting,” see:

Michael Moynihan (2007). "Carl Larsson's Greatest Sacrifice" in Buckley and Moynihan (eds.), TYR vol. 3. Ultra Press, Atlanta.

For an exhaustive photographic study of the painting itself:

Georg Sessler and Görel Cavalli-Björkman (2003). Midwinter Sacrifice. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

For a haunting novel based loosely on Midvinterblot:

Marcus Sedgwick (2013). Midwinterblood. Macmillan, New York.