Stone fragments from medieval Oslo

A couple of weeks ago, some colleagues and I took a guided tour at Akershus Fortress, a castle complex that was begun sometime at the turn of the thirteenth century, and that received most of its current shape in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We had requested a tour that focussed on the medieval parts of the castle, and the guide did an excellent job showcasing the surviving and often hidden remnants from the Middle Ages.

For me, however, the highlight was not any of the gatehouses or rooms whose foundations were put in place from the late 1300s onwards, but rather a collection of medieval remnants that had originally nothing to do with the fortress and became a part of the castle complex sometime around 1600. These remnants are now embedded into a defensive outer wall that was built to provide a bulwark against artillery fire on the north-northeastern side of the fortress. In the Middle Ages, no such walls had been needed as the nascent gunpowder technology had not reached the point where it posed a threat from that angle, since the terrain on that side is difficult for unwieldy artillery. With the evolution of military technology, however, the defensive needs changed, and a wall was put together with stones gathered from the then-defunct medieval stone churches and mendicant houses in Oslo's old city, and also probably from the ruins of the monastery of Hovedøya, a Cistercian house founded in 1147. Today, only the excavated foundations of the buildings in the old town remain, while somewhat more of the Cistercian abbey can be seen at Hovedøya. 

The guided tour at Akershus Fortress came only a few days after another guided tour to the aforementioned ruins in the old town, and during that tour we had really come face to face with the colossal absence of what had once been beautifully carved and decorated religious houses. At the castle, we saw some of these disjecta membra embedded into the mortar in angles that often were contrary to their original purpose, with slightly curved arches bending downwards or capitals aslant and askew. Despite the sorry state of these stone fragments, it was nonetheless immensely thrilling to be able to catch a glimpse of the kind of decorations, as well as their quality, that had once been part of far more intricate and impressive religious complexes in medieval Oslo. Due to their current state and placement, it is impossible to say anything certain about their origins and date, but several of them seemed typical of twelfth- and thirteenth-century masonry, typical of the patterns and shapes popular in those centuries. It is comforting, in a very strange way, that we have these witnesses to medieval Oslo available, as they provide a very faint outline of the now-lost totality of the medieval city's religious architecture.   

The Dynna Stone - or, Finding women in history

The Museum of Cultural History in Oslo is currently hosting an exhibition called Vikingr, which serves essentially as a way to satiate the public hunger for things related to Viking history while the Viking ship museum is being expanded and the ships and other grave goods are in storage. The exhibition contains a number of fascinating items, ranging from coins from a hoard, the only surviving Viking era helmet - obviously without horns - and some very well-preserved swords.  

One of my favourite items in the exhibition is a standing stone containing a runic inscription and carved images. The stone is called the Dynna stone, named after Dynna in Oppland north of Oslo where it was found. As is so often the case with rune stones, the Dynna stone was raised to commemorate the building of a bridge, an act that in today's parlance would be called a public good, and which carried great importance in a decentralised rural community where travel over great distances was both cumbersome and dangerous. The carvings have been dated to c.1040-c.1050, and it is one of the oldest recorded Christian monuments in Norway. Its Christian context can be seen in the depiction of the three magi, the star of Bethlehem and the Christ-child.    

The Dynna stone
Kulturhistorisk Museum C9909

My favourite aspect of the Dynna stone, however, is neither its inscription nor its sumptuous pictorial decorations, but the patron whose act of bridge-building was being commemorated. The text of the stone, written in alliterative verse, records that the bridge was built by Gunvor in memory of her daughter, Astrid, who was the handiest maid in Hadeland (which is an area of Oppland). To the best of my knowledge, the scant surviving source material from eleventh-century Norway does not provide any further attestations of either Gunvor or Astrid, but from this stone alone we nonetheless manage to catch a very important glimpse of their places in history. Gunvor must have been a wealthy woman belonging to the elite of Hadeland, since she had the resources to pay for both the building of the bridge as well as the carving of the stone. Gunvor herself is unlikely to have participated in either the building or the carving, not because she was a woman but because she belonged to the elite and was the patron rather than the executioner of these works. Gunvor's role as patron tells us that women in mid-eleventh-century Norway could attain a position in their local community that enabled them to direct local resources and local manpower to such endeavours that we might call public. Moreover, the imagery on the stone tells us that Christianity had spread into this inland community, and that women could be familiar with its iconography and also have internalised the faith and its symbols in such a way that this pictorial language served to frame a memorial for a beloved daughter. In short, the stone is an excellent example of the agency of women in a time period that is often seen today as being completely dominated by men. 

Aside from being a monument to the agency of women, the Dynna stone also points to an important aspect of understanding women's place in history. Traditionally, history has been seen as large-scale politics and the story of battles and great men. Most historians that I know, men as well as women, have increasingly moved away from this vision of the past, but in the public mind this old-fashioned view of history, perhaps especially the Viking Age, retains an unrelenting grip on the imagination. And it is true that if we only consult the most widely available sources, such as chronicles or sagas composed and written in male-dominated milieux of royal or episcopal courts, we will encounter a preponderance of male figures. However, monuments such as the Dynna stone also reminds us that women were not silent, inactive bystanders to the volatile vicissitudes of men, they were also agents in their own right, and the society of eleventh-century Norway clearly had the required space for that agency. There is nothing to suggest that Gunvor's patronage was abnormal or controversial, and we should expect that numerous women in the past had much more agency than the silence of sources will allow us to note. 

The Dynna stone is, therefore, a reminder of a methodological challenge for us as historians. We are hostages to the survival of sources, and also to our ability to read those sources that survive. The absence of female voices in the surviving material is partly a consequence of the male-centered milieux of source production, but also a matter of historical chance. If we take such sources as the Dynna stone as being common rather than abnormal, we broaden our understanding of the potential for women's agency in the past. 

To put it in a different way, when setting out to find women in history, the traces they have left might be scant, but those traces open up for a much wider understanding that can be extracted from the material context. In the case of the Dynna stone, the material context that preserves the names of Gunvor and Astrid have opened up for those interpretations about status and agency mentioned above. Similarly, women whose historical existences survive only as names on charters, letters, inscriptions and lists can be understood in the context of those sources, and we then have to think about all the things that needed to be in place for their names to appear in such contexts. 

In thinking about how to find women in history when so much of the source material is silent about them, I have drawn great inspiration in particular from two Spanish historians, whom I want to mention here as a way of recognition and thanks. First of all, Isabel Mellén, whose book Tierra de damas is an excellent reflection on women as patrons of Romanesque churches in Northern Spain, and who has done an excellent job in reflecting upon, and communicating, the various ways to overcome the silences of the sources. Secondly, the historian Ainoa Castro, whose ERC project 'The Secret Life of Writing: People, Script and Ideas in the Iberian Peninsula (c. 900-1200)' serves to highlight the agency of donours and witnesses, men as well as women, in charters and letters from Spain and Portugal. These are sources that to the modern audience are practically unknown, because these are not the kind of texts that are being translated or taught in schools. I am grateful to both Isabel and Ainoa for how their work has shaped my thinking.       

Like the charters and letters of high-medieval Iberia or the Romanesque churches of Northern Spain, the Dynna stone serves to open up our understanding of women's agency in history, not as something exceptional but as something completely and utterly, utterly ordinary. And as historians we often come to appreciate the ordinary far more than the extraordinary. 

Commemorating Gunvor's building of a bridge in mid-eleventh century Norway

Snapshots from a time of crisis - various displays of solidarity with Ukraine in Norwegian public outlets

 
In my previous blogpost, I talked about a small token of solidarity with Ukraine that I encountered in the centre of Oslo. In this blogpost, I present a range of other examples of solidarity that I have encountered in the course of my work days. When I became aware of how various Norwegian public institutions declared their solidarity with Ukrainians by employing the colours of the flag, or the flag itself, I started to record some of these instances.

Public displays of solidarity can often become very problematic, especially when they are displayed by businesses or companies that are trying to present themselves as socially conscious and kind-hearted. Such efforts are in most, perhaps all, cases very cynical marketing that I have no interest in taking seriously.

When it comes to public institutions, however, things are fortunately different. While there might still be a degree of social capital involved in the decisions to take public standpoints on an issue, the point remains that these institutions do not automatically or directly earn any form of income from these displays, and these institutions represent the Norwegian people. Consequently, I believe it is very important and valuable that representatives of the people provide such public displays, especially because these institutions are probably encountered more easily by Ukrainians, be they refugees or not, and the signal that is being sent is therefore more solid, more valuable, and have a more constructive impact. Granted, these tokens need to be backed up with actions, and as Ukrainian refugees are arriving in Oslo, I hope that our system and our society will welcome them and make them feel safe, although I am painfully aware that we have a very bad history of not doing right by refugees from across the world.  

The Ukrainian flag shown on monitors in the reading room of Oslo University Library
(March 01)

A display of books related to Ukraine in the reception hall of Oslo University Library
(March 01, morning)

A display of books related to Ukraine in the reception hall of Oslo University Library
(March 01, afternoon)

The Ukrainian flag as the background for Store Norske Leksikon (the great Norwegian encyclopedia) on February 28. Store Norske Leksikon is a free, public and professionally maintained encyclopedia. This is one of those cases where there is absolutely no money in showing solidarity, and it is moreover very forceful in that this is a page accessible to absolutely everyone, and it is a cornerstone in our democratic structure.

The Ukrainian colours in the title of Universitas, the student newspaper of Oslo University 
(March 07)

The Ukrainian flag against a black background, a picture made by Jagnik Gorasija, used as the background of Store Norske Leksikon on March 02. The text at the bottom of the picture linked to the encyclopedia's entry about Ukraine. 

Further down on the front page of Store Norske Leksikon on March 02 were recommended articles, one about the history about Ukraine, one about the war itself, which was called the Ukraine conflict. 

Even further down on the front page of Store Norske Leksikon on March 02, which displayed three categories of articles. On the left, an overview of the previous day's most read articles, namely oligarchy, oligarch, Ukraine, and Nato. The middle category is called "read unusually much" and the one on the right is called "read sadly little". The middle category includes an article about the Putin critic Boris Nemtsov, and the entries for the terms "skirmish" and "combatant". The category of sadly neglected articles does not contain any entries related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

The Ukrainain colours used at the top of the website ukenr.no (March 07), which is a calendar containing the number of the weeks of the year.

The profile image of Oslo University's Twitter account, March 14. 

These are just a selection of displays, and I continue to record them as I encounter them. At the very least I hope that these displays of solidarity will serve as reminders to do good. And I also desperately hope that we will start doing this for refugees and crisis-stricken people everywhere, not just in Europe. 

A small token of solidarity with Ukraine in the heart of Oslo

 
Today I was standing outside the National theatre in Oslo, waiting for two friends who are visiting this weekend. I was very pleased to notice that someone had draped a sash in the colours of the Ukrainian flag across the statue of one of the most beloved and important actors in Norwegian history, Per Aabel (1902-99). The statue is located in the area between the theatre and the metro station, and it is an easily noticeable sight for those who walk through this part of the city. Aabel is here shown in his role as Jean de France, the title character of one of Ludvig Holberg's comedies, and in this sense the expression of solidarity with Ukraine is displayed on an object that encapsulates centuries of Norwegian theatre history. 

Such displays of solidarity are found throughout Oslo, and I aim to present a selection of some of them in a future blogpost. But this case acquired a more specific importance to me, which is why I have decided to treat it in a separate post. 

As I was waiting, I sat down on a stone plinth next to the statue and started reading, sometimes moving out of the way when I noticed that people were taking pictures of the statue and its Ukrainian sash. A group of foreigners addressed me, asking about the statue and the building, and followed up with a few other questions about the city, making me an impromptu tour guide. When I had pointed them in the direction of the royal residence, they thanked me and as they were leaving they told me they were refugees from Ukraine. I welcomed them to the country and waved goodbye. Later on, I came to notice that there were several other small groups of people in the city who also appeared to be Ukrainian refugees.  

The brief encounter with the group of Ukrainians made me very thankful to whomever placed the sash on the statue of Per Aabel, which is easy to notice and placed in a central thoroughfare. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues and the sheer human misery is increasing every day, it is often easy to get the feeling that various displays of solidarity are pointless and unimportant. The wearing of Ukrainian colours or placing the Ukrainian flag on screens or posters might seem like worthless exercises done more for the sake of those who display these symbols than those who are affected by the war. But for the group of Ukrainians I chanced to meet, I got the sense that this tiny token of solidarity, of knowledge about the situation, served as a form of welcome to people who are uprooted from their homes and forced to shelter in a foreign country. Such displays of solidarity are of course not enough in order to help the situation improving, but they are not unimportant.