The Danes are coming - or, Adventures in medievalism, part 7

 

Every now and again I find myself baffled at how the past is used as a vessel to promote something in the present. Even though I have been exposed to some very curious and strange applications and abuses of the past, the wide variety in a given period's reception history never ceases to amaze me. My most recent encounter with baffling use of the past occurred in Odense, Denmark, just as I was making my way from the tram to the main building of the campus of the University of Southern Denmark. The incident concerned a sticker promoting some sport team or other - confusingly, this is not specified on the sticker, so it must be aimed at an audience already familiar with the iconography used on the sticker. As seen below, the sticker does speak for itself in a certain way, but also merits some further unpacking. 

The use of viking iconography - however anachronistic - to imbue a sports team with the aura of plunderers and rapists from the increasingly distant past is a familiar phenomenon. The Norwegian football team Viking and the American football team Minnesota Vikings are only some that join this unspecified Danish team in their employment of modern ideas about the Norse raiders. The purpose is usually the same, namely to make the players appear tough and unconquerable, because that is how modern popular culture has taught us to think of the vikings. The combination of stylised longships, the colours of the Danish flag Dannebrog - first used in the early thirteenth century - and the horned helmets of nineteenth-century artistic imagination telescopes history into a unified whole, which suggests the idea that this sports team stands in a direct genealogical relationship to the violent marauders of the past. 

This iconography plays into familiar references, and the use of these symbols and figures might simply be to bolster the self-image and have a bit of fun with well-known tropes. But self-images tend to reveal deeply held convictions - and also delusions - and such self-representations as seen in this stickers therefore should be taken seriously as a good way of measuring how our contemporaries understand - or rather, misunderstands - the past. Only by understanding this misunderstanding can we also map its effect in our own here-and-now. 

Reading-spots, part 9

 

This month, I have been living in Odense for a work-related assignment, which has given me a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with one of my most beloved city, and to revisit places which were immensely important to me in the course of my five very formative years in Denmark. By my own admission, I am a ridiculously nostalgic individual, and I treasure those things that enable me to relive periods of great joy or comfort. When done right, this kind of nostalgia-seeking enterprise is phenomenally rewarding, and can serve as a balm for the soul. 

One goal for my current quest to reconnect with positive aspects of my Danish past was to visit the bakery where I used to buy my daily bread. When I lived here, this bakery - Folkebo's bageri - was only a couple of hundred meters from my doorstep. This time, however, it was slightly more cumbersome as I live close to the train station and my daily commute goes in a parallel direction, making it difficult to combine duty and pleasure as part of one and the same trip. Luckily, one Sunday morning I decided to have a typical Danish breakfast in my old haunt. 

The bakery was largely the same as when I used to live here, except that they had reduced the number of tables in favour of another glass case for baked goods. Luckily, I found a chair and spent an hour enjoying some of the favourite flavours of my Danish past. As I was sitting here, I was brought back to one particular period that has been seared into my memory like few other bakery-related episodes in my life. It was early in 2019, the beginning of what was to be my last term in Denmark. I was in a rather rough shape, being unemployed and having no immediate prospects. For some reason I no longer recall, I began to wake up unreasonably early in the dark of one January week, and I got into the habit of stopping by the bakery for a cup of tea, something to eat, and a bit of time for reading before cycling on to the university campus, where the kindness of my friends and colleagues allowed me to pass my time as part of my old scholarly community. It was a week of glorious mornings, where the wider troubles of this stage in my life were pushed away, and I found a pocket of calm while reading at a table in the bakery's café as the world was becoming lighter outside. Eventually, I began to wake up later in the day again and the routine stopped, but the memory of that week became a treasured gem.  

My current lot is fortunately happier than it was during this particular episode, and my life has accumulated a lot of different experiences since then. I am in many ways a different man than I was then, but this joyous hour on a Sunday morning in October also served as a reminder that I am not that far removed from the person I once was - at least in some respects.

New publication: Sanctus Suithunus

 

As mentioned in my previous blogpost, I am currently working as a co-editor for the online encyclopedia Medieval Nordic Literature in Latin, hosted by the University of Bergen. The encyclopedia was first published in 2012, but there are still several articles missing, and as part of my work I have also worked on some contributions of my own. Today, I have published the second of these contributions, namely an article titled 'Sanctus Suithunus', which contains an overview of two liturgical offices in honour of Saint Swithun of Winchester. 

Swithun became the patron saint of Stavanger diocese in the twelfth century, and his cult was important both in that diocese and in other parts of Norway. Relatively few surviving sources provide insight into the history of the cult, but these two liturgical offices are important and useful starting-points for addressing some of the basic questions concerning the standing of Saint Swithun in medieval Norway. 

New publication: Arnfastus Monachus

For the past six months, I have worked as a co-editor of the online encyclopedia Medieval Nordic Literature in Latin, hosted by the University of Bergen. This is an encyclopedia containing articles about authors writing in Latin and anonymous texts in Latin composed before c.1530. It was founded in 2008 and last updated in 2012, and is currently being updated as part of the project CODICUM, a collaboration between several Nordic universities.  

The updating process does not only consist of editing existing articles, but also writing new ones that have so far been missing. I have been working on one of these missing articles over the past few months, and thanks to some archival research earlier today, I have now been able to complete it and have it published on the website. The article in question is on the monk Arnfast - or Arnfastus Monachus - who is only known as the author of a hagiographical poem on the miracles related to Saint Knud Rex, the patron saint of Odense. The article covers a range of details concerning the poem, providing an overview of what little we know, and a discussion of some of the conclusions we might draw from the work itself.    

Saint Michael in Lübeck

 

Today is the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel, famous in medieval art as a fighter against the Devil and as a weigher of souls. Often, these two roles converge in medieval iconography, such as in the woodcut presented below, where the soul-weighing archangel is lifting his sword to strike at a devil who is climbing into one of the scales. When a person had died, their sins and good deeds were weighed in Saint Michael's scales, and if the good deeds outweighed the sins the person would go to Heaven - if not, they were headed in the opposite direction. In the woodcut below, the good deeds weigh more heavily than the sins, so a devil is climbing into the scale containing the sins of the departed soul in order to weigh it down and ensure that he can take the soul with him to Hell. 

The woodcut is from the first folio of Das Leuent der Heiligen, a collection of saints' legends and other stories pertaining to the Christian year, printed by Lucas Brandis in 1478. Such stories were popular in late-medieval Europe, both owing to the increased literacy rates and because more people could afford books. Brandis' edition appears not to have been a great success as only one edition of the collection is known, and as both the book and the woodcuts were bought by the printer Steffen Arndes who subsequently re-issued the work in 1488 and in several later editions. 

Lucas Brandis, Der Heiligen Leben 

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek -- 2 Inc.s.a. 780, f.1r

A list of published articles

Recently, the website academia.edu updated its terms and conditions to include a clause that would allow the website to utilise all uploaded files and images - including profile pictures - to train AI generators and generate content. This is a serious escalation from an earlier update, in which the website used uploaded papers to generate podcasts. While the previous update could be blocked, the new and much more comprehensive update would allow predatory companies unrestrained access to material that has been carefully and painstakingly composed in order to contribute to the open scholarly discussion through which society moves towards a better understanding of itself and its past. It is completely unacceptable to me that scholarship - just like art and entertainment - should be utilised to generate texts and images that are simulacra of reality but that do not serve any purpose beyond the enrichment of a technological elite. Consequently, I have deleted my profile at academia.edu. Although the website has since walked back on its grotesque overreach of power, I do not wish to return to a place that was once useful for an emerging scholar, but has now become unreliable and less trustworthy than ever. 

There might be other alternatives, but in today's Internet there is always a chance that other platforms will morph into something equally predatory. Therefore, I have put together this list of articles that I have written over the years, with links to those that are available online and in open access. Should you be interested in any of the articles that are not online, please contact me and I will happily send a pdf of the text in question. These articles were written to be accessible, to be read, to be used, and to be part of a wider exchange. They were not written to assist the degradation of knowledge that is currently unfolding through the AI boom. 

List of articles

“Typologies of the medieval cultural border”, in Revista Roda da Fortuna – Electronic Journal about Antiquity and the Middle Ages, vol. 6, no. 1, 2017: 25-54. ISSN: 2014-7430  

“The North in the Latin History Writing ofTwelfth-Century Norway”, in Dolly Jørgensen and Virginia Langum (eds.), Visions of North in Premodern Europe, CURSOR 31, Turnhout, Brepols, 2018: 101-21      

“Reformulating the sanctity of Olaf Haraldsson – Archbishop Eystein Erlendson and the ecclesiastical image of Saint Olaf”, in Andreas Bihrer and Fiona Fritz (eds.), Heiligkeiten: Konstruktionen, Funktionen Und Transfer Von Heiligkeitskonzepten Im Europaischen Fruh- Und Hochmittelalter, published in the series Beiträge zur Hagiographie, edited by Dieter R. Bauer, Klaus Herbers, Volker Honemann and Hedwig Röckelein, Steiner Verlag, 2019: 45-71

“Strategies for Constructing an Institutional Identity – Three Case Studies from the Liturgical Office of Saint Edmund Martyr”, in Katharine Handel (ed.), Authors, narratives, and Audiences in Medieval Saints’ Lives, Open Library of the Humanities, Cambridge, 2019: 1-31

“The Odense literature and the liturgy of St Cnut Rex”, in Steffen Hope, Mikael Manøe Bjerregaard, Anne Hedeager Krag and Mads Runge (eds.), Life and Cult of Cnut the Holy - The first royal saint of Denmark, Odense Bys Museer, published in the series Kulturhistoriske studier i centralitet, vol. 4, 2019: 100-17         

“Spor etter folkeleg kult – aspekt ved helgendyrkinga av Sankt Knud Rex i dansk mellomalder”, in Magne Njåstad and Randi Bjørshol Wærdahl (eds.), Helgener i nord – nye studier i nordisk helgenkult, Novus Forlag, Oslo, 2020: 61-80         

“Thirteenth-century Ivory Crozier from Greenland from the Perspective of Economic History”, in Sullivan, Alice (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Global Middle Ages, ARC Humanities Press, 2021

“Byzantine history in the legend of Saint Olaf of Norway”, in Anna Lampadaridi, Vincent Déroche and Christian Høgel (eds.) L’historiecomme elle se présentait dans l’hagiographie, published in the series Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia, Uppsala, Uppsala University Press, 2022: 31-59        

“Symbolic crucifixion and royal sainthood – two examples from Benedictine saint-biography, c.987-c.1120”, in Barbara Crostini and Anthony Lappin (eds.), Crucified Saints from Late Antiquity to the Modern Age, published in the series Sanctorum, Scritture, pratiche, immagini, Viella, 2022: 197-22

“Interaksjon med forteljingar som levd religion? – Ei forsøksstudie med utgangspunkt i randmerknader frå Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 15”, in Scandia: Tidskrift för historisk forskning, Vol 88, No. 2 (2022): 241-62                  

“Helgenerne i Skive. Deres udvalg i kontekst”, in Louise Nyholm Kallestrup and Per Seesko-Tønnesen (eds), Dansk senmiddelalder, reformationstid og renæssance. Spiritualitet, materialitet og mennesker. Et festskrift til Lars Bisgaard, Odense, Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2023: 149-165           

“Urban medievalism in modern-day Odense – thecase of Saint Knud Rex”, in Gustavs Strenga and Cordelia Heß (eds.), Doing memory of medieval saints and heroes in the Baltic Sea Region, De Gruyter, 2024: 113-44            

 

“Saintsand elites on the periphery: an introduction”, co-authored with Grzegorz Pac and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, in Grzegorz Pac, Steffen Hope and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (eds.), The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central and Northern Europe until 1300, Turnhout, Brepols, 2024: 4-42          

 

“Non-native Saints: Introduction”, co-authored with Grzegorz Pac and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, in Grzegorz Pac, Steffen Hope and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (eds.), The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central and Northern Europe until 1300, Turnhout, Brepols, 2024: 51-55

“Native Saints: Introduction”, co-authored with Grzegorz Pac and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, in Grzegorz Pac, Steffen Hope and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (eds.), The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central and Northern Europe until 1300, Turnhout, Brepols, 2024: 211-15          

“The Cult of Saints and the Legitimization of Ecclesiastical and SecularElites on the Periphery: Conclusions”, co-authored with Grzegorz Pac and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, in Grzegorz Pac, Steffen Hope and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (eds.), The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central and Northern Europe until 1300, Turnhout, Brepols, 2024: 439-48

“Legitimizing episcopal power in twelfth-century Denmark through the cult of saints”, in Grzegorz Pac, Steffen Hope and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (eds.), The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central and Northern Europe until 1300, Turnhout, Brepols, 2024: 311-30       

“Holy bishops, papal canonisation and legitimisation of power inthirteenth-century Poland and Norway: the cases of Eystein Erlendsson ofNidaros and Stanislaus of Kraków”, co-authored with Grzegorz Pac, in Acta Poloniae Historica, special issue on ‘Languages of Power and Legitimacy on the Periphery: Poland and Norway, 1000-1300’, edited by Grzegorz Pac, Wojtek Jezierski and Hans Jacob Orning (vol. 129), 2024: 143-84 

“The functions of religion and science in utopian thinking in the MiddleAges and the Early Modern Period”, in Belgrade Philosophical Annual 37.02,2024: 123-38

“Sacral Strongholds in the Twelfth century: Aristocracy, Nunneries, and Parish Churches”, co-authored with Anna Dryblak, in Legitimization of Elites in Poland and Norway in the High Middle Ages: Comparative Studies, ed. by Wojtek Jezierski, Grzegorz Pac and Hans Jacob Orning (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 165-204    

“Patron Saints and the Legitimization of Bishoprics until c.1200”, co-authored with Grzegorz Pac, in Legitimization of Elites in Poland and Norway in the High Middle Ages: Comparative Studies, ed. by Wojtek Jezierski, Grzegorz Pac and Hans Jacob Orning (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 205-49        

“Coinage, the cult of saints, and the legitimization of elites in eleventh- andtwelfth-century Poland and Norway”, co-authored with Mateusz Bogucki and Svein Harald Gullbekk, in Legitimization of Elites in Poland and Norway in the High Middle Ages: Comparative Studies, ed. by Wojtek Jezierski, Grzegorz Pac and Hans Jacob Orning (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 289-319                              

“The Younger Passio Kanuti – a reassessment of its historical context, its author, and its purpose”, in Royal Blood - The Passion of St Cnut, Kingand Martyr, Translation and perspectives, ed. by Mikael Manøe Bjerregaard, Kirstine Haase, and Steffen Hope (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2025), pp. 19-33  

“A comparative overview of Passio II and Gesta Swenomagni” in Royal Blood - The Passion of St Cnut, King and Martyr, Translation and perspectives, ed. by Mikael Manøe Bjerregaard, Kirstine Haase, and Steffen Hope (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2025), pp. 76-94

 

Reading-spots, part 8

 

Earlier this month, I was in Trondheim for a conference and also to perform a kind of personal pilgrimage. I went to university there, and spent seven formative years in the city, and there are numerous places where my own past comes closer and where I notice this release of pain and joy that we call nostalgia, which is memory filtered through our later knowledge of what has been lost and of what might have been.  

Last time I was in Trondheim for several consecutive days was in November 2018, a time in my life when everything seemed uncertain and where I knew I was barrelling towards the end of an era. In some ways, my latest return to Trondheim was marked by several of the same aspects, such as uncertainty, and a sense of loss. But it was also a joyous return, as I met loved ones and walked familiar streets, and as I saw that some of the old places where I left part of my past were still standing. One such place was Baklandet Skydsstation, a cafe housed in the premises of an old house - mainly from the nineteenth century - which has served as a house for manufacture of different kinds throughout its history. It is a quiet and lovely place, with the right kind of old-fashioned atmosphere, namely one that does not feel constructed or contrived.  

In many ways, the quiet, very Norwegian surrounds provided a notable contrast to the book I was then reading, Myriam Moscosa's wonderful novel León de Lidia (Lion of Lydia), which is a reflection on the history of her family and the collective memory of Ladino Jews who migrated from Bulgaria to Mexico in the wake of World War II, a memory that captures a lot of the fissures and faultlines of the twentieth century. Yet as I was there to reconnect with my own past, it also felt like very apposite reading. 

Perhaps a more notable and incontrovertible contrast was provided by the writing which I set out to do after I had finished eating. As I moved to a smaller table in a corner, I sat down to outline a new structure for a co-authored article that deals with the role of violence in medieval and early-modern utopian thinking. The topic is horrifyingly relevant in today's world, but in that particular corner of both the world and of the building in particular, the contrast between subject-matter and place was particularly notable.