Two voyages centuries apart - unexpected connections in academic research

Research into medieval history often opens up strange and unexpected pathways, and many of these pathways lead into the modern world, highlighting the unbroken continuity of time and disabusing us of the insufficiencies of periodisation. As a medievalist, I enjoy exploring these various ways in which any given research topic also has a reception history that yields knowledge about a time much closer to my own than that of the individuals and institutions of my research. One such case that delighted me this week was that of two voyages centuries apart, the legendary voyage of Saint Olaf, king of Norway (d.1030), and the historic voyage of Lev Trotsky in 1917.

Olaf encounter the trolls of Norway

Dingtuna Church, Albertus Pictor, c.1500 

(courtesy of this website)

The voyage of Saint Olaf is an episode in the corpus of stories told about the saint-king throughout medieval Northern Europe. According to the various accounts, Olaf races his half-brother Harald Hardråde (d.1066) in a ship, and it became a popular theme of church art in late-medieval Sweden, as seen in the example by Albertus Pictor above. The roots of this story might lie in Olaf's return to Norway in 1016 to claim the Norwegian kingship, after having spent years as a mercenary in Normandy and England. But this possible kernel of historical truth became a fantastical tale that was expanded by various villages which claimed that Saint Olaf's voyage had passed through the area.

But what does this have to do with Lev Trotsky? In March 1917, Trotsky had left New York where he had been living for a period of time, and began to make his way back to Europe on a Norwegian steamer. Trotsky was a person of interest to the American and British intelligence services, and was detained in Halifax for a short while, but he was eventually allowed to continue his voyage. The ship that had brought Trotsky from New York to Halifax was SS Kristianiafjord, one of the steamers of the Scandinavian-American line that connected Europe and America, but since this crossing had been interrupted Trotsky had to find a new ship. This ship is what connects him with Saint Olaf, because the steamer on which he travelled from Halifax to Oslo was SS Hellig Olav, named after the man whose legendary voyage to Norway had such a tremendous impact on the cultural history of Scandinavia. So they travelled, Olaf and Lev Trotsky, each in their own vessel, centuries apart.

Now, you may ask what we are to do with this information, how can this contribute to a greater understanding of either Saint Olaf or Lev Trotsky. The simple answer is that this information is of very little consequence to our understanding of either. This is an amusing coincidence that does not yield any information beyond itself. However, the fact that a steamer was named after Olaf is an example of the reception history of the saint-king into the modern era, and gives us at least a somewhat more nuanced understanding of how the myriad ways in which Saint Olaf has set his mark on Norwegian culture. 

Plan of the steamer Hellig Olav of the Scandinavian-American Line

Courtesy of this website

For information about Trotsky's voyage, see Nigel West, Historical Dictionary of World War I Intelligence, p. 223.

Article - The Odense literature and the liturgy of St Cnut Rex

Last month I announced the publication of a collection of articles, Life and Cult of Cnut the Holy, edited by a few colleagues and myself. The entire publication is available in Open Access, and I am very satisfied with the articles it contains.

Today, I was also given a pdf of my own article in the collection, and in case it might be practical to access the individual article rather than the entire collection, I have made this available here: https://www.academia.edu/41775817/The_Odense_literature_and_the_liturgy_of_St_Cnut_Rex.

Working with liturgical manuscripts, part 15 - a little teaser

Two years ago I was employed to participate in a pilot project dedicated to researching fragments of medieval manuscripts at the university library of the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. My job was primarily to identify those liturgical fragments that had been discovered in the books once belonging to Herlufsholm School, an institution founded in the town of Næstved on Sjælland in 1565.

One of the books presented a particularly challenging case, namely Herlufsholm 534.11. As can be seen below, the spine has been strengthened by six strips of parchment - one of which had fallen off - as well as a loose fragment strip that is currently attached to the binding (not pictured). My colleague and I could identify this as having belonged to a liturgical manuscript thanks to the notation, but this was as sure as we could be about anything when we began our inquiries. 

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek, Herlufsholm 534.11

The main problem was that with the exception of the two fragments at either end of the spine (about which I have written here and here), the manuscript had been cut vertically. On the one hand, this has provided us with a better sense of the original folio layout and the length of the texts. On the other hand, it meant that the individual fragments contained many incomplete words. This is a major issue when it comes to identifying such chant texts, because identification is often done by searching liturgical databases, such as the Cantus database. In order to use these search engines, it is important to have at least one complete word, and preferably more than a conjunction or preposition, in order to avoid wading through large quantities of material. And because Latin words have various endings depending on their grammatical clause, it makes a huge difference to be able to ascertain whether a word ends in the nominative or the accusative clause, for instance. In the case of the fragments of Herlufsholm 534.11, this grammatical information was often absent, either because the beginning or the end of the word had been cut off, or because of smudges or wear had made some letters illegible.

I have been working on these fragments on and off since this pilot project, always returning in the hope of teasing out some more information, and hoping that with some time away from the matter my eyes will be able to detect new details. Thankfully, this method has paid off. In the past month, I have twice returned to my images of the fragments as a way to distract my brain from various tasks, and this has yielded some breakthroughs that has changed my understanding of the fragments, and allowed me to fill in some important gaps. The second of these revelations came only two days ago.

Presently, I'm still systematising the information that has been gleaned from the recent revelations, and consequently there are still many things I'm leaving unsaid until I'm able to present my findings in a more coherent way. This blogpost is more as a way to express my excitement, and to provide an idea of why these particular fragments have been so challenging. I therefore hope the reader will forgive me for being a bit coy about the details.

But in order to illustrate the significance of the recent breakthroughs, I present you with the picture below. This shows the upper part of one of the fragments, showing the side that faces inward against the spine. The text on this side of the fragment is now completely lost to us, and all that remains are these letters, letters so difficult to read that I had since the very beginning of my work discarded all hope of teasing out their meaning. However, thanks to this week's revelation, I have been able to compare it with texts from some of the other fragments, and I now know that the text below reads "potuque dignas", and that it comes from a sequence for the feast of Easter Wednesday (Cantus ID: ah53050). In the microcosm of these fragments and my research on them, this is terribly exciting, and I hope to be able to share more details anon.

Spine fragment 5 

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek, Herlufsholm 534.11

The three kings at Sotosalbos

Today is the feast of Epiphany that commemorates the visit of the wise men to the Christ-child, as recounted in the Gospel of Matthew. From at least the third century, the number of wise men, magi, or kings was commonly set to three, and this is the standard representation throughout the Middle Ages. Images of the three kings were ubiquitous in medieval Christian art, since they were an important feature in the story of the life and time of Christ. For this year's feast, I'm presenting to you one of these medieval representations, which I encountered last year on a capital in the thirteenth-century Church of Saint Michael in Sotosalbos, Spain.