An order of service - a poem by Geoffrey Hill

As I'm heading north for a conference this week, I think it is a suitable way to end the blogging of the month of November with a poem by Geoffrey Hill, whose imagery plays with the frozen landscapes that might be awaiting.

An order of service

(From King Log, 1968)

He was the surveyor of his own ice-world,
Meticulous at the chosen extreme,
Though what he surveyed may have been nothing.

Let a man sacrifice himself, concede
His morality and be done with it;
There is no end to that sublime appeal.

In such a light dismiss the unappealing
Blank of his gaze, hopelessly vigilant,
Dazzled by renunciation's glare.

Working with liturgical manuscripts, part 14 - a puzzle in progress

Last week my colleague Jakob Povl Holck and I were on an excursion to the library of Roskilde to investigate a manuscript fragment that was used to bind a volume by the Danish astronomer Tyco Brahe. I had seen pictures of the fragment before, but I was eager to get a chance to have a closer look and to get a better sense of how the book was bound and how the fragment had been folded in the process. I was also eager to look for details not easily caught by a camera, such as small letters hidden where the fragment folds around the edge of the book - letters that might seem inconsequential, but which can sometimes yield just enough information to take an identification of the text from likely to certain.

We were hosted by two of the librarians who generously and kindly let us examine the fragments in all the ways we deemed necessary. Unfortunately, we quickly found that the tight binding of the book discouraged too much poking and prying in order to get to the details hidden in the inner folds, and neither could we open the book without great care so as not to crack the vellum. As a consequence, although I did get a much better sense of the fragment and its text, I returned from Roskilde with an imperfect understanding of how the manuscript folio had once appeared in its undismembered state. Such an understanding is crucial in order to understand the order of the text and thus understand the fragment as part of a lost unit.

Karen Brahes bibliotek, J.1

Karen Brahes bibliotek, J.1

Karen Brahes bibliotek, J.1

 

Since I had been unable to photograph the book in such a way that both the cover - and thus most of the fragment - could be seen in its entirety, I had to resort to a very old-fashioned way to understand the coherence of the fragment, namely by sort out the individual pieces and put them together like a puzzle. This I did by printing some of the pictures we had taken, then cutting away or folding most of the background. The most challenging part was the inside of the covers, where the left and right folds belonged to the opposite side of the folio as the centre, and therefore had to be separated and then moved about. The end result looked like this.

Reconstruction, based on pictures by myself and Jakob Povl Holck

In the present blogpost I do not wish to say much more about the details of this fragment, as that is a work in progress and there is much that remains to be ascertained. Here, it mainly serves as a little glimpse into the combination of digital and analogue labour that is required in order to research manuscript fragments while ensuring that they are not mangled in the process.

Two chants for Saint Cecilia

Today, November 22, is the feast of Saint Cecilia, a saint whose historicity is doubtful - a matter treated more extensively here - but who was nonetheless one of the virgin martyrs universally venerated in the medieval period. On the occasion of this day, I'm presenting to you a fragment on which I have been working together with my colleague Jakob Povl Holck at Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek.

The fragment is from a late-medieval liturgical manuscript, quite probably a breviary, and because of the bigger size of the original manuscript folios relative to the book which they now cover, a lot of the original text is now lost. We have only identified two chants for the feast of Saint Cecilia - two other texts on the other folio from the feast of Saint Martin are tentatively identified as well.

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA 47
Photograph by Jakob Povl Holck

The two chants that have survived in fragmentary form have tentatively been identified as one versicle and one responsory. The texts of these chants, in reconstructed form, are as follows.

Versicle

 [Angelus domino descendit de celo et lumen r]efulsit in habitaculo

The angel of the Lord came down from Heaven at light shone in the house

(This text is taken from Acts 12:7)

Responsory

[D]omine ihesu christe pastor bo[ne se]minator casti consi[lii susc]ipe seminum fructus quos [in cecilia se]minasti. Cecilia famula [tua] quasi ouis tibi argumento[sa deseruit]

Lord Jesus Christ, good shepherd, sower of chaste counsel, receive the seed of the fruit which you have sowed in your handmaiden Cecilia, who thus serves as rich proof for your flock



This little text is interesting for its play on the biblical images of Christ as gardener of the vineyard and shepherd, and its paradoxical invocation of chastity and germination. It is typical of texts for the virgin saints, and a fascinating example of how paradox is used in Christian literature to enhance its imagery.

Saint Olaf in Sweden, part 1 - Granhult

This summer I attended a conference in Sweden, organised in Växsjö in Småland which is about a two-hour train-ride north of Copenhagen and in the heartland of some of the books by Astrid Lindgren. This is a landscape of pine forests, parcels of rock-strewn open land, marshes and lakes, with scattered farms and homesteads that suddenly appear as you drive through the area. Historically, the region has been somewhat poor due to the soil being difficult to cultivate on account of the many stones and rocks and thick-set forests, and it is for this reason that the region of Småland was the area of Sweden from which most people emigrated to America in the nineteenth century.

Despite the difficulties of the landscape itself, the area around Växsjö contains an impressive number of medieval churches. This has in part to do with Växsjö being one of the oldest bishoprics of medieval Sweden, which dates to the first half of the eleventh century. Its first bishop was the Saint Sigfrid, a monk of Glastonbury who was most likely sent by King Ethelred to help Olaf Tryggvason (d.1000) to Christianise Norway. From there he went to Sweden, and according to his - not uncontested - legend it was he who baptised the Swedish king Olof Skötkonung (Tax-king) (r.995-1022). Sigfrid became venerated as a saint and is the patron of Växsjö. He figures in the municipal coat-of-arms.  

Saint Olaf in Granhult Church

Another important saint in medieval Sweden was Saint Olaf of Norway, who had been king of Norway from 1016-28 and who was killed at Stiklestad in 1030 in an attempt to regain the Norwegian kingship. From the mid-eleventh century onwards, Saint Olaf was an increasingly popular saint, and in medieval Sweden there was a strong liturgical tradition.

As a part of the conference, we had an excursion in which we travelled through Småland and visited four of its surviving medieval churches, all of which are impressively well preserved and very beautiful. In the present blogpost, I'm focussing on the last of the churches we visited, which was the church of Granhult (meaning small wood of spruce).

Granhult Church

Granhult Church was built in the 1220s and the timbers and woodwork of the nave has been dated and proven to be of the original structure. The sacristy and the porch are both post-medieval additions.

It is a beautiful little space, and the interior walls are covered in floreate decorations from the eighteenth century. As we were entering, I noticed a figure seated in a canopied niche on high up on the western wall, and it did not take long to recognise the typical late-medieval depiction of Saint Olaf of Norway. I was not the least bit surprised, as he had made appearances in the last two of the three churches we had already visited, and because I knew - as mentioned above - that his cult was important in medieval Sweden.

As we can make out from the picture above, the niche in which Olaf is seated is relatively high from the ground floor. During the divine service the congregation would have its back to him, but as they turned to leave they would all see his protective gaze and absorb his iconography, to which I will return shortly. From the present church space, however, it is difficult to say just how the medieval experience of the church would have been. Its white painted walls deocrated in once brights colours are a feature of the modern era, and although a lot of light enters through the windows it is difficult to say how that light would have illuminated the possibly dark medieval walls. In the winter, the light would naturally have come from candles, but even in the summer we might expect that the figure of Saint Olaf appeared with somewhat less brightness than it does today, if only on account of the colours surrounding him.

Saint Olaf and the dragon

The seated figure of Saint Olaf is a typical represenation of him from the later Middle Ages. The wooden figure is most likely fifteenth century, and was possibly made in Sweden or else in Lübeck from where a high number of late-medieval sculpture was shipped to Scandinavia. The figure shows Olaf enthroned with a full beard and a crown. In his right hand he holds a battle axe which is modelled more on the late-medieval halberd than the battle axe of eleventh-century Norway. This axe is Olaf's emblem, and is variously - and sometimes confusedly - identified as the axe with which he was wounded on Stiklestad - he was wounded by a spear, a sword and an axe according to some versions of the legend. In his left hand he holds what is now a broken royal orb. In its original state, this orb would most likely have been divided into three parts, signifying the three continents of the known world, since the orb symbolised the earth's sphere - and yes, they knew that the earth was spherical in shape in the Middle Ages.

Underneath his feet we see a dragon with a human head carrying a crown. As can be seen, the dragon's crown is of a similar colour to that of Saint Olaf, but the dragon's face is not beareded. This figure, known as an underlier, is typical in the iconography of Saint Olaf, but its interpretation is disputed. The Norwegian art historian Harry Fett (d.1962) argued that the dragon had the face of Saint Olaf and represented his former pagan self. However, in an MA thesis from 2010 from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Å drepe dragen (To kill the dragon), it was established that the face of the dragon does not always resemble the face of Saint Olaf. This is borne out in the figure from Granhult.

There exist other interpretations as well, such as the dragon symbolising the devil, Saint Olaf's enemies, the secular kingship which he spurned according to his Latin vita, but no consensus has been agreed upon. In my opinion, there is probably no consensus to be had, as it is likely that even in the Middle Ages the symbolism of this iconographic feature was open to various interpretations, and indeed was interpreted differently, which is why we see so many variations of it. It is also likely that the iconography changed over time.

The Saint Olaf of Granhult is a beautiful treasure from the medieval period, at once typical and specific to the church in question, situated in a thirteenth-century church in the middle of the Swedish forests.