A Danish hell

Halloween is approaching, and even though I - as a Norwegian having grown up in the late '80s and early '90s - have no proper emotional connection to this season, I nonetheless appreciate how many of my fellow medievalists take the opportunity to share medieval depictions of the horrible and uncanny. So as an excuse to share this image, I present to you in this season of horror a heavily restored early sixteenth-century hellmouth from Sanderum Church near Odense in Denmark, one of the many masterful and wondrous details of this church interior.

An autumnal view

This term I'm working in Växjö, Sweden, my first residence in Sweden and my first encounter with the Swedish autumn. There is much that resembles home, save for the notable absence of mountains, and I have been very fortunate in that my apartment has a balcony with a vista showcasing some of the beautiful colours of the season. While the temperatures usually do not allow me to enjoy this balcony as much as I would do in the summer, it nonetheless allows me some wonderful sights, such as the one in the picture below, which is a very good representation of my first Swedish autumn.

Panteísmo - a poem by Juana de Ibarbourou

This autumn I happened to become acquainted with the poetry of Uruguayan poet Juana de Ibarbourou (1895-1979). It was all a matter of chance, and it does not in any way speak of a great knowledge on my part of the poetry of Latin America. I was simply looking through a list of poets from Uruguay that my current university would have access to in its inter-library loan system, and this was part of my ongoing quest to read one book from every country in the world (a quest inspired by the project A year of reading the world by journalist Ann Morgan).

The Swedish university libraries do not carry a lot of Uruguayan poetry, and most of what is available has been produced by male poets. In general, I try my best to read works by women when entering into the literary heritage of a country that to me is new and largely unknown. I was therefore lucky to get my hands on a volume containing two of her collections, which I have been reading for the past two months.

In the course of my reading, I found that her verses struck a chord with me. Juana de Ibarbourou wrote about encounters with the natural world, about the kinship with forests, fields and countryside that resonated with my own upbringing in a rural district of the Norwegian fjords. And I was struck by how much of what she conveyed through her intense verses, depicting an antipodean world which I have never visited, easily translated into familiar vistas of my home tucked away somewhere in the Northern hemisphere. I became enamoured of her verses, and I kept reading until there was nothing more to be read in that volume I had borrowed.

At present, I do not know whether Juana de Ibarbourou's poetry is accessible in English translations, and whether they are accessible in complete editions of her collections. But in this blogpost, I present a preliminary translation of one of her poems that particularly caught my attention, and this is an attempt partly to improve my own Spanish through translation, and partly to present a sample of Juana de Ibarbourou's poetry to new readers. The poem in question is a sonnet from her collection Las lenguas de diamante (The tongues of diamond), published in 1919.


Panteísmo

Siento un acre placer en tenderme en la tierra,
Con el sol matutino tibio como una cama.
Bajo mi cuerpo, ¡cuánta vida su vientre encierra! 
¡Quién sabe qué diamante esconde aquí su llama!

¡Quién sabe qué tesoro, dentro de una mirada,
Surgirá de este mismo lugar done reposo,
Si será el oro vivo de una era sembrada,
O la viva esmeralda de algún árbol frondoso!

¡Quien sabe qué estupenda y dorada simiente 
Ha de brotar ahora bajo mi cuerpo ardiente!
Futuro pebetero que espacerá a los vientos,

En las noches de estío, claras y rumurosas,
El calor de mi carne hecho aroma de rosas,
Fraganica de azucenas y olor de pensamientos.



Pantheism

I feel a bitter pleasure in lying down on the earth
With the morning sun warm as a bed.
Underneath my body, how much life is enclosed in its entrails!
Who knows what diamond hides here its flame!

Who knows what treasure, within a myriad,
Will rise up from this same spot where I now rest,
Whether it will be the living gold sown in a bygone age
Or the living emerald of a leafy tree!

Who knows what stupendous and golden seed
Is now sprouting beneath my burning body!
A future thurible that will spread to the winds

In the clear and noisy summer nights,
The heat of my flesh now given the scent of roses,
Fragrance of lilies, and the smell of thoughts.

Canaan's grapes in Denmark

And speaking to them and to all the multitude, they shewed them the fruits of the land
- Numbers, 13:27


In the Book of Numbers, chapter 13, Moses sends twelve spies into Canaan, one from each of the twelve tribes of Israel, to examine the quality of the promised land. The spies return with reports of a land of abundant riches, of milk and honey, of inhabitants of immense stature, and as proof they bring with them a cluster of grapes so large that two men have to carry the grapes between them.

In Christian art of the Middle Ages, the enormous cluster of grapes became a symbol of the bounty of God that the faithful eventually will receive. The scene of the two men carrying their burden of promise became an element of the pictorial narratives with which churches were often decorated in medieval Christendom. Consequently, this scene became part of a universal visual code that allowed men and women of all estates of any society of Latin Christendom to absorb Biblical history, and in this way people of Scandinavia, of Spain, of Dalmatia, of Germany could access the same iconography. In this blogpost, I wish to show you two such examples from parish churches in medieval Denmark - more specifically, the island of Fyn. The two examples are not only from two different churches, but also two different centuries, thus showing the stability of this iconography in medieval Christian art. And before I commence, I wish to thank my dear friend Dr Rosa Rodríguez Porto, whose insight into medieval art was what taught me about this scene in the first place.   

From the choir of Sanderum Church

The first example of this scene comes from Sanderum Church, about which I have written briefly in a previous blogpost. The church itself was built in the latter half of the twelfth century, a time when several parish churches were built on Fyn, and which might serve as a testament to the wealth of the diocese, whose centre was Odense. The scene of the grapes can be found on the northern wall of the choir, where several scenes from the Old Testament are depicted. These scenes are from a thirteenth-century wall-painting programme that is likely to have once covered the entire interior with scenes from the Old Testament and the New Testament, and possibly also scenes from the stories of certain saints. However, the only part that remains of this thirteenth-century decoration is the northern wall of the choir. Even this part is incomplete, since rebuilding in the later Middle Ages, a time when Sanderum most likely belonged to the Bendedictine convent of nuns at Dalum Monastery, altered several parts of the structure, both of the choir and the nave. But the two men bearing that large cluster of grapes have since then been rediscovered after a long period behind white paint, and can still serve to remind us of how this episode was transmitted to the local parishioners.   

Bellinge Church

The second example is from the church of Bellinge, a church that by the first quarter of the fourteenth century definitely belonged to Dalum Monastery, and whose oldest, and now almost completely lost, structure is in the late romanesque style. The interior of this church was covered by a wall-painting programme in 1496, in which scenes from the Bible can be found along the walls of the nave, in the vaulting, and in the choir, as well as a large depiction of St George killing the dragon. The scene of the two spies returning with their bounty of grapes can be found in the second of the two vaults of the nave, and can be seen from the choir when facing towards the congregation. This means that it would not have been seen by the parishioners in the course of the service itself, though they would likely see it when looking up after receiving the Eucharist - if they did so by walking up to the altar. 

There are most likely several more depictions of this scene throughout the medieval churches of Fyn. Many of them have been lost to us, either by the application of layers of white paint, or by rebuilding that have necessitated the removal of the crucial part of the wall. I hope to see more examples of these two spies in future visits to Danish parish churches, and I shall look for them eagerly.