New publication: Byzantine history in the legend of Saint Olaf of Norway

 
Today, a collection of articles was published where I was fortunate enough to contribute with a publication. The book in question is based on a conference on Byzantine history in hagiography, arranged in Paris in December 2017. I was invited to give a presentation, and since I am not a byzantinist I decided to talk about a miracle story that appears in Miracula Olavi, a collection of miracles pertaining to Saint Olaf of Norway, collected in the end of the twelfth century. According to the miracle account, Saint Olaf appeared to a group of Varangians - the Byzantine imperial body guard - in a battle against the nomadic Pechenegs and caused Byzantine victory. This story is found in many different versions in Latin and Old Norse texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and I provided an overview of the various versions and their developments. 

The book is titled L'histoire comme elle se présentait dans l'hagiographie byzantine et médiévale, and is edited by Anna Lampadaridi, Christian Høgel, and Vincent Deroche. It is available in open access on this website. My own contribution is titled "Byzantine history in the legend of Saint Olaf of Norway". 

I am very happy to be included in this collection, because the conference was very interesting and the volume is full of interesting materials. It has also been one of the most rewarding texts I have ever written, and definitely text I have had the most fun writing, because I was venturing so far out of my expertise that I had to learn a lot of new things, and to seek help from a number of colleagues. And I was lucky enough to get very expert and patient aid from the editors, without whom I would have delivered a product of much lower quality. 

Signs of our times - details from a week in Warsaw

During my stay in Warsaw this week, I saw numerous displays of Polish solidarity with the Ukrainians in the ongoing invasion. These ubiquitous displays served as hard-hitting reminders of how sheltered my life has been, and this is the closest I have physically been to a war zone. Despite the gravity of the situation, there was something heartening about these shows of solidarity, but they also opened up for some reflections about how to decode these impressions. For instance, I was told that with the continuous economic pressure, the material support that Ukrainian refugees in Poland need is dwindling, so even though these various displays of solidarity capture both public and private initiative, I was also reminded that to show solidarity is easy enough, but such shows do not always capture the more complicated truth of everyday life. Moreover, once I had first allowed myself to be impressed with the signs of Polish-Ukrainian kinship, I reflected on how little I actually know about the life on the ground in countries so close to an ongoing war, and how some of these signs were very good indicators of grassroot feelings. While the flags of the two countries flying at the gates of the humanities campus of Warsaw University is clearly a decision by the university leadership, some drawings hung on the wall of a pub in a Warsaw suburb Friday evening represent a much more visceral emotional strain. 

There was something good about these displays and especially in their great variety which better served to capture the attitudes of the Polish people. Yet I also could not help reflecting, time and again, on the dissonance between display and action, and how little I know about the actual support. Displays of solidarity are sometimes grandiose because they are meant to create pathos and stir people to the right actions, but sometimes they serve as window-dressing, as distractions and disguises. During my week in Warsaw, I was constantly reminded of my lack of knowledge, of my lack of a solid foundation for correctly interpreting these signs of our times. And aside from teaching me a lot about current sentiments in Poland, these signs also reminded me to be careful and slow when analysing a situation, and not to get carried away by enthusiasm when it first sets in. Put differently, the very public nature of some of these displays alerted me to my deep-rooted scepticism of public uniformity, which is a great hindrance for the nuance that everyday complexities contain.

Some of the displays of Ukrainian flags were certainly heartwarming - the paper ones containing the words "solidarity with Ukraine" that colleagues at the history department had placed in the window, the sticker in a taxi, the drawings in the pub - all these rang true to me and seemed to reflect genuine emotions, although I have no right to speculate about the exact pitch of those emotions. The display of the Ukrainian flag at a car sellers conference at the hotel where I stayed had a very different tone to it, and it was difficult not to sense the impulse of capitalist adaptation to exigencies.     

In all, it has been an educational week in more ways than one, but the most important consequence for me has been the exercise in nuanced thinking that these impressions have opened up for me.  

The gates to the humanities campus of Warsaw University

The history department

A window in the history department building

The elevator of the history department

A pub in a Warsaw suburb

A view from the common room - some brief reflections on a week in Warsaw

 


One of the benefits of the project where I am currently working is that the collaboration across borders allows for some long-awaited travel. This week I was in Warsaw to work on an article that I am co-authoring with a friend and colleague, as well as to meet up with a few other colleagues at the university. Looking back, I realise it was quite a varied week with a lot of different tasks that required my attention and energy, but in the midst of the work itself, I was mostly focussed on the work pertaining to the article, namely the writing, the planning, the organising, the discussions, and the copious notes we took along the way, all carried out in daily meetings of varying length. Granted, since this article work was something that we dealt with each day, it is no wonder that it is at the heart of my recollections. However, there is also another reason why I think of this week mostly in terms of that particular workload.

On Monday, I went to the Warsaw University campus for the humanities together with another friend and colleague from Oslo who is also a part of the project. My co-author met us and showed us around in the department, and guided us into the department's own library, and to the library's common room which is often used as a workplace. Here, in this relatively small room with a very high ceiling tucked away in the bowels of the classicist department building - carefully rebuilt after World War II - the three of us sat down to our different tasks, the two of us writing and discussing together, the third working on his own. We sat like this for various periods throughout the week, sometimes talking through details of content and structure, sometimes quietly tending to our own immediate tasks. 

The view from the common room's high windows, the noticeable scents of spring - for instance by some wafts of flowering chestnut - and the sense of calm that pervaded the entire room infused these sessions with a sense of community that is the lifeblood of academia. This was not a grand, overpowering feeling, nothing bombastic or pathos-filled, but a simple description of what the three of us were quietly building in that common room, and what the entire project is building in the many different nodes of collaboration that comprise it. It was a reminder, a very useful reminder, that as an academic I am dependent on what community I manage to partake in and maintain, and when academia works as it should, it fosters these communities. While academia is in a very bad state in general - no matter which country or tradition you are talking about - it is also helpful to be reminded that despite the frailty of our general academic framework, we are at times able to create pockets of communal work. And it was a great relief to have that experience. 

A glimpse of the Oslo spring

 



Today is May 17, Norway's national day which celebrates the first Norwegian constitution of 1814. As I have spent most of the past decade abroad, I have rarely had any opportunity or cause to celebrate, as it has often been a work day, and I have come a bit out of sync with the Norwegian calendar. Five years ago, for instance, I was surprised when my Danish boss at the time congratulated me, and I thought he was over a month late for my birthday. As he remarked, I was, and continue to be, a very bad Norwegian. 

This year, I have my first May 17 in Oslo, but I have not been participating since I am worried about COVID-19 and tend to avoid large crowds. The celebration has, therefore, been very minimalist, and predominantly consisted of some ice cream. But as I took an afternoon walk, I did come across something that in a way represents Oslo in the spring, and Oslo on May 17, perfectly, namely a manhole cover depicting the city's coat-of-arms. The image shows Oslo's patron saint, Hallvard, who was killed in 1043 when he tried to save a young woman from being assaulted by three men. A millstone was bound to his neck and he was thrown into a lake, but when he resurfaced he was recognised as a saint.

To see this familiar image against the unfamiliar green background of un-petalled birdcherry flowers served as a lovely reminder of the time of the year and the place where I am, as it encapsulated an Oslo spring very elegantly and in a quietly eloquent fashion.