Trondheim without worms - echoes of a lost legend of Saint Olaf?

In medieval art, Saint Olaf of Norway is commonly depicted standing on top of a figure. The nature of this figure appears to have changed over time, although I myself have not mapped the evolution of this iconography, and I should emphasise that there might be several parallel iconographical traditions. In any case, very often we see that in images from the thirteenth century, the figure in question is a human being, the interpretation of which is uncertain. Later on - I hesitate to be precise - the figure takes the shape of a serpent or a dragon, very often with a crowned human head. It is very common in medieval art to see saints standing on such figures, presumably because of Psalm 90:13 in the Vulgate, where God is verbally depicted as trampling lions and dragons underfoot. Consequently, the shift in Olaf's iconography might be part of a wider trend, or perhaps a more localised offshoot that came to take on a life of its own in Northern Europe. The interpretation of this human-headed serpent has been subject to much debate, and I will not enter into here. However, I was reminded of this iconography while I was reading passage from a text written in the seventeenth century, and which might represent some sort of echo of a lost legend of Saint Olaf, or perhaps rather a confusion that ultimately has its root in this late-medieval iconography.   

Saint Olaf stepping on the beast 

Image from the right-hand door of a winged altarpiece, Bygland Church (after 1470) 
Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, C6113

The text in question is the utopian novel La Terre Australe Connue (1676) by Gabriel de Foigny, which David Fausett has translated into English as The Southern Land, Known. Foigny, a Franciscan-turned-Protestant who published the book while living in exile in Switzerland. The novel records the life and travels of Nicholas Sadeur, a hermaphrodite who ends up in a utopian society called Australia in the Southern Land, which in this case refers to the hypothetical southern continent - Terra Australis - which came to give its name to modern-day Australia. As most of the novel's fascinating content is superfluous to the subject at hand here, I will refrain from most of the details. However, in the opening of one of its chapters, there is a claim which becomes very interesting in light of the debate about the iconography of Saint Olaf. When reflecting on the marvellous properties of various landscapes and regions, Foigny - through his narrator Sadeur, mentions that "in Norway's Trondheim worms are unknown". At the time of writing, I have not checked what kind of worm is meant here, whether the serpent-like animal, or the earthworm. It is likely that the worm in question is a more formidable beast than the earthworm, yet later in the novel a note about the positive consequences of the absence of insects might suggest that the more humble creature is meant here. 

Whichever animal Foigny had in mind when writing this passage, it is a claim that I have not encountered elsewhere. The claim is not to be found in Latin medieval chronicles from Norway, even though these books do mention various marvellous properties of various Norwegian locations. It is possible that the claim appears in Olaus Magnus' Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (History of the Northern peoples) from 1555, which was printed in Rome and - due to being in Latin - would have been accessible to a man like Foigny, but such a connection remains to be verified. At the present, I remain at a loss to explain the inclusion of Trondheim in this list of marvellous topographies. What is possible, however, is that there is a connection with the legends of Saint Olaf, and that the absence of worms in Trondheim is based on some now-lost miracle story.    

From David Fausett's translation of Gabriel de Foigny's La Terre Australe Connue (The Southern Land, Known)

During the Middle Ages, several miracle stories were told about Saint Olaf. The earliest of them are likely to have emerged among the Norse mercenaries who had followed the living king into battle, and became some of the most effective disseminators of his cult. Sometime around 1180, a number of these stories were collected and recorded in Latin in a text now known as Miracula Olavi, the miracles of Olaf. This work contains a broad range of miracles that God is said to have brought about in order to prove Olaf's holiness, and the selection includes both old and contemporary stories. However, it is important to note that this collection was never complete, and that several stories are likely to have emerged after this particular text was compiled. Miracula Olavi does not mention any worms or serpents, so even in the unlikely event that Foigny would have had access to this text, it would not have provided the basis for this idea. Other stories might have circulated, however, and it is possible that there once existed a story about how Olaf had liberated Trondheim - which was the centre of his cult and the place of his shrine until the Danish-Norwegian Reformation of 1536/37 - from worms. Such a claim might be based on the beast frequently seen under Olaf's feet in late-medieval art. There might have been some inspiration from the story of Saint Patrick in Ireland, who was believed to have chased the serpents out of the island - a story available to Norwegians in the thirteenth-century book Konungs Skuggsjá (The King's Mirror), which contains a description of the marvellous properties of Ireland. Similarly, a story of how Saint Hild of Whitby chased away the snakes - a legend believed to have been confirmed by the ammonite fossils often found in that region - is also likely to have been available to late-medieval Norwegians. These various elements, as well as others that I have not thought about, might have mixed in the Norwegian mind and produced a story about how Trondheim had been liberated from worms by Saint Olaf. 

Now, Gabriel de Foigny does not mention Saint Olaf, just as he does not mention Saint Patrick when he mentions the absence of spiders and worms in the forests of Ireland. Consequently, if there is a lost story in the distant background of this claim, it was also lost to Foigny. It is very likely that he had never heard about Saint Olaf, a saint whose cult never gained any strong following outside of the Nordic Sphere, eleventh-century England, and the late-medieval Baltic theatre. Some echoes might have arrived, however, possibly in the form of Catholic exiles from Norway, historical figures about whom we know practically nothing, yet of whose existence we can be certain. Such a surmise is hypothetical, however, and I must emphasise that I do not suggest that such a tenuous transmission of stories actually did appear. Yet the possibility remains - the possibility that some warped version of such a legend did reach Foigny, albeit a version evacuated of its explanatory content, a version where the cause - divine intervention on behalf of Saint Olaf - was divorced from the effect, namely the absence of worms in Trondheim.   

Other explanations also exist. The absence of worms - if these are earthworms - might be based on the perceived coldness of the land, the cultural trope of a frozen North willingly believed by someone who had not ventured into that North themselves. Ultimately, however, we do not know, and most likely we will never know. Such a lack of certainty does not give licence to completely free and unbridled speculation. On the other hand, the lack of certainty does force us to reflect on the intangible yet forceful nature of stories - their ability to subsist on very little and to be transported far and wide, even if not always in their original form. 

Mechanisms of patriarchy - medieval and modern iterations

And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair. 
- John Donne, 'Song: Go and catch a falling star' 

You clearly were not listening to my topic sentence: Get your women in line 
- Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory S05E08
 


Last September, the Spanish tech journalist Marta Peirano wrote a brilliant column about the phenomenon of pornographic deepfakes. This abomination of modern technology consists of making artificial pornographic images through so-called Artificial Intelligence. What makes this phenomenon particularly damaging is that this technology allows people to create such images of whomever they wish, and whomever they whish to publicly shame. In an age of social media and the virtual lack of any real and effective control of content dissemination, such artificially made images can be used to damage the life of any woman, and any girl. Marta Peirano noted that this technology is a form of patriarchal propaganda, one that serves to keep women and girl in a state of fear and uncertainty, and one that can be used to destroy reputations and lives through public shaming. In practice, it matters little that these images are fake, because the images will appear to provide evidence for all kinds of charges laid at the feet of these women and these girls. The column has stayed with me ever since, and with the growing sophistication of Artificial Intelligence, this particular mechanism of patriarchy has become increasingly relevant. It is a tragic and repulsive reminder that so many men - as well as some women - will happily use the historically entrenched misogyny of our own times to ruin the lives and reputations of women and girls. An important part of this tragedy is that these pornographic deepfakes are built on a long-standing asymmetry in the gender roles of contemporary societies, where women are more easily hurt and damaged by charges of promiscuity than are men. Deepfakes also exploit the very public nature of such charges, in that they make public spaces - in this case mainly online spaces - unpleasant or even downright dangerous for women. It is about the control of women and girls, and about reminding them that they are second-rate human beings in the eyes of those that shame them.   

The issue of such mechanisms of patriarchy came resurfaced in my mind the other day as I read a modern Norwegian translation of the saga called Möttuls saga, which means The saga of the cloak, which in the Nynorsk form of modern Norwegian is called Soga om kappa. The story is an Old Norse translation of an Old French fablieau known both as Le lai du cort mantel and Le mantel mautaillié. The translation was commissioned by the Norwegian king Håkon IV (r.1217-63), during whose reign a lot of chivalric stories and other aspects of French courtly culture were transmitted and adapted to the Norwegian context. The eponymous cloak is said to have been woven by four elven women and fashioned in such an exquisite way that the seams can not be detected, and it is impossible to say how it has been made.

The cloak has one main property. It will fit perfectly to a chaste woman, but if any woman has been unfaithful or unchaste, it will either become too short or too large. The cloak is brought to the court of King Arthur by an envoy, and the envoy makes the king promise to have all the women at court try on the magical cloak. When the king learns of the cloak's magical property, he regrets his promise but feels obliged to stick to his word. As a consequence, all the women at court - except one young maiden - are shown in a public display to be either unchaste or unfaithful. The episode brings great shame on both the women and their paramours, but, of course, mainly on the women. Moreover, and just as unsurprising, the men are not asked to do a similar test. 

The saga of the cloak shows a mechanism that is essentially similar to the modern pornographic deepfakes, in that its sole purpose is to publicly shame women who do not conform to a particular ideal, or - in other words - refuse to submit to the rules of patriarchy. Such mechanisms exist in all patriarchies - and I do believe it is more accurate to use the plural form than the singular - and their functions are all the same, only the forms change. To compare such mechanisms across times and across culture serves as a reminder that misogyny and the control of women are two aspects of modern society that both have deep roots and also continue to sprout new buds. Modern popular culture is full of these mechanisms, and, perhaps more importantly, full of characters or ideas that serve to normalise and perpetuate them. 

Modern misogyny and patriarchy often hide behind notions of the past being much worse, which in turn cultivates a sense that the modern atrocities are somehow less problematic. This is a very stupid idea, but it is very common and therefore the strategy works. When we start to recognising these mechanisms and their various forms, however, it might serve as an awakening to some of us, and serve as a first step towards refusing to perpetuate such mechanisms and realise the absolute horror of the life-destroying potential of Artificial Intelligence wielded in the name of patriarchy.    

Utopia, technology, and the nebulous borderlands of truth

 

In the past few months, I have tried to keep up with the ongoing discourse concerning the phenomenon inaccurately labelled ‘Artificial Intelligence’, and its potential for warping our sense of reality and further obscuring the already-nebulous boundaries between reality and fantasy. Whenever I have come across an article or news report related to this issue, I have bookmarked it in a folder in my browser, hoping against historically attested practice that I will some day return to these texts and have some intelligent thoughts about them. The folder in which I put these bookmarks is labelled ‘Utopia’, and the folder was created as a way to collect materials related to my current teaching. I thought it fitting at the time, but did not take the time to articulate why I thought so, and so I continued to use this folder while the justification for using this particular folder continued to grow in the back of my mind. In this blogpost, I will try to formulate some of the ideas that have crystallized in the course of this week.            

The connection between Artificial Intelligence and utopian thinking seemed at first intuitive, obvious, and so I did not bother to formulate it properly. However, as I am now reading David Fausett’s 1993 monograph on utopian literature in the seventeenth century – Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopians of the Great Southern Land – a few aspects have become much clearer to me. Fausett makes a compelling point about how utopian literature of the 1600s came to employ textual elements belonging to news reports, pamphlets and broadsides, causing readers to often confuse texts of prose fiction with texts claiming to present factual content. Naturally, the motif of authenticating elements has a long history in fiction, perhaps best illustrated by the topos of the found manuscript (as in Don Quijote), or the now-lost written report translated from another language (as in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain). What was new about this obfuscation of the boundaries between true reports and novels in the seventeenth century, was the changing media landscape. As knowledge of the wider world expanded through journeys of exploration and the growing networks of trade that brought European powers into contact with cultures across the globe, increased literacy and a broadening market for literature gave rise to a greater circulation of information about the distant regions of the world. Since there was an expectation of new encounters and new discoveries, audiences were better disposed to accept fantastical tales as either true or at least based on true events. The knowledge that there was new information to be had, conditioned readers and listeners to blunt their scepticism and become more receptive to the claims of authenticity utilized by authors of utopian fiction.  

 

The confusion about truth and fiction in seventeenth-century Europe is not unique to that time or that place, and it is not an indication of people being stupid or less critical in their thinking. The more I research historical matters, the more convinced I am that humanity has neither become more intelligent nor more stupid as time as passed, only that intelligence and stupidity have played out in different ways and through different means. What is crucial about the confusion described by David Fausett is that the confusion came about through developments in mass media. The confusion, I believe, was a consequence of rapid technological development that did not fit with the slow maturation and the incremental adaptation to novelty that humanity as a species requires in order to understand things. It is this contrast between humanity’s need for slowness and the rapidity of technological innovation that highlights the utopian aspect of the contemporary discourse on Artificial Intelligence.  

 

Those who champion the virtues of Artificial Intelligence and the use of AI in writing, journalism, research and so on, are themselves proponents of a utopian vision, one in which humanity has released themselves of the drudgery of knowing and thinking to the machines. Not all these champions view the future in this framework, but even the more restrained and reasonable among the AI enthusiasts still tend to demonstrate attitudes towards art, critical thinking and factual knowledge that lean very strongly in this direction.  This utopian attitude towards technology is nothing new. One of the hallmarks of utopian thinking is exactly the high levels of technology that are available in utopian societies. Perhaps the most famous example of this idea is Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), which lists a long range of technological advances, including artificial meat and laboratories for all kinds of different research. The motif goes further back in the history of utopian thinking, however. In the Middle Ages – a period not widely accepted as one of utopian thinking, yet nonetheless rife with examples of it – the idea of technologically advanced societies in faraway places appear in several texts. In the Letter of Prester John, a hoax from the 1160s that purported to describe the realms of a Christian ruler in distant India, the technological marvels of this imaginary kingdom are expounded in great detail. Similarly, the Alexander tradition – a collection of texts claiming to narrate the life and deeds of Alexander the Great – contains several descriptions of technological marvels, such as Alexander’s submersible for exploring the depths of the ocean. Other medieval texts that were less fantastical and which had a stronger claim to truth, similarly spent much detail in recording the technological marvels of distant, exotic places. Liutprand of Cremona (d.972), in his chronicle Antapodosis, describes a mechanical throne in the court of the Byzantine emperor. William of Rubruck, who travelled to the court of the Mongol khan in Karakorum in the 1250s and wrote an account of his experiences, tells about a fountain of marvellous ingenuity, built by a French smith who had lived among the Mongols for some time. Similarly, Marco Polo’s famous account of Kubilai Khan’s empire contains a number of examples of advanced technology. There is, in other words, a long-standing expectation that utopian societies – whether they are ideal or just simply better than the point of comparison – are technologically advanced. The presumption is perhaps strengthened by changes in the media landscape, and the idea that technological improvement is the same as social improvement is easily accepted when one is condition to connect technology and utopian thinking, and also when one is living through a changing media landscape that one does not have the time to properly adjust to.    

 

That technological change requires adjustment on the part of the humans affected by that change is perhaps a fairly straightforward claim. Often, this adjustment has been a core aspect of the enthusiasm and the justification surrounding technological change. There is talk about transhumanism, of technology allowing humans to transcend their humanity, of technology ushering in a new era in the evolution of the human species. Technology is often seen as the key to unlock Utopia, and in our contemporary discourse that technology is Artificial Intelligence. Yet the utopian aspect of technological change is two-sided. On the one hand, it is absolutely indisputable that technological change has allowed a vast number of people opportunities for a better life than they would otherwise have. The best argument for our current level of technology is that it allows those who are handicapped in one way or the other to reduce that handicap, to open up new opportunities for living that would have been impossible without the technology in question. On the other hand, technology can be used to either oppress or numb the critical faculties of people, and when that technology is controlled by someone with authoritarian tendencies, the technology in question can easily be used to obscure the distinction between reality and fantasy, between truth and fiction, between veracity and lies. The potential for abusing technology is strengthened when technology means changing how we receive information. Changes in the media landscape means that we, humans, need to reflect on how we can use our faculties to convert the information given to us through this changing landscape into knowledge. We need to learn how to distinguish between claims and facts, between lies and truth. If we do not reflect on this challenge, if we forfeit this process of critical reflection, or if we outsource it to those who control the changing technology, we become less able to understand the basis of truth and the signs of duplicity.            

 

With the current proliferation of AI programmes that can create images and texts by stealing from existing works of art and existing texts, we are becoming less well-equipped to ascertain what is true and what is false. This blurring and warping of the already nebulous borderlands between truth and falsehood can be, and is already, weaponized by various individuals and groups with authoritarian motives. The utopian scenarios presented by these would-be dictators and hobby-authoritarians might seem appealing, but we do well to remember that several works of utopian fiction have already highlighted the inherent risk of abuse in utopian societies. One example is Gabriel de Foigny’s La Terre Austral Connue (The Southern Land, Known, translated by David Fausett), where the novel’s narrator lives thirty-five years among the Australians, a people of highly advanced technology. However, these technologically advanced people, who consider themselves and their society perfect, tolerate no other form of human life than that of their own. Since Foigny’s Australians are giant hermaphrodites, this intolerance means that they commit genocide on their non-giant, non-hermaphrodite neighbours, and use their advanced technology to obliterate the very ground on which their neighbours sought to establish a living. In the novel, the Australians have also employed their combination of technology and force in numbers to establish an ecosystem that is devoid of insects. Such a manoeuvre stems from an idea of gardens as locus of perfection, where insects are seen as noisy intruders, and fits perfectly well within a branch of utopian thinking that equates perfection with homogeneity. While the realistic consequences of this insect-less world are not touched upon by Foigny, our twenty-first century perspective – an era of mass-disappearance of bees and other insects, and where the consequences of extensive and often unbridled use of pesticide have made themselves clear – notifies us of the impending ramifications of technologically crafted homogeneity in Foigny’s Australia.  

 

Utopian thinking and utopian literature often rely on a blurring of the border between truth and fiction, between the possible and the impossible, in order to make rhetorical points, or in order to push an agenda or proffer suggestions for how to improve society. On other occasions, utopian thinking and utopian literature showcase how illusory the perfection of utopian society actually is. Thomas More’s Utopia is a slave society, relying on prisoners of war to do the most basic tasks of a functioning commonwealth. Tommaso Campanella’s city of the sun in distant Taprobane is a eugenicist society where the individuals are governed to such an extreme degree that the leaders decide which individuals should have children together. And Foigny’s narrator, the hermaphrodite Sadeur, returns from Australia completely disillusioned with a society that believes itself to be perfect, and allows that perfection to justify horrible acts.         

 

In our contemporary discourse, the utopian implications of Artificial Intelligence tends to dominate. Yet utopian societies can often be illusory, and more often than not they are deeply authoritarian. One way of perpetuating authoritarian government is to confuse people’s perception of reality, whether it is through mass delusion or through a blurring of fact and fiction. Nowadays, the media landscape is changing too rapidly for us to easily adjust to the new ways of ascertaining truth and discovering lies. In such a confusion, utopian solutions might appear more realistic than they actually are. Indeed, these utopian solutions are based on the perpetuation of a tool – Artificial Intelligence – that is programmed to create an alternate reality from stolen fragments from the real world. The question we need to ask at every juncture when AI is lauded as the key to the future is as follows: Whose utopia is being heralded by AI’s warping of reality? The answer is most likely going to be very unpleasant.  

        

Podcast appearance: Bishop Grimkell, and Anno 1024

Earlier this year, I was invited to participate in an episode of the podcast Anno 1024, a podcast dedicated to topics pertaining to the millennium anniversary of the so-called Moster thing, or Moster assembly, in Western Norway. The episode is available here (in Norwegian only).

The anniversary is based on the texts of two law collections which were written down sometime in the second half of the twelfth century. These collections are known as the Gulathing law code and the Frostathing law code. They are named after the two major law provinces of eleventh and twelfth century Norway. Gulathing - or the Gula assembly - covered most of the western seaboard of Southern Norway, from Sunnmøre to Agder, as well as various parts of the central valleys of the interior. Frostathing - or the Frosta assembly - covered the western seaboard from Romsdal and northwards, eventually also including Hålogaland, as well as parts of the hinterland of the Trondheim fjord. 

In the law codes, we read that the Christian law was introduced by King Olaf Haraldsson - the later Saint Olaf - and Bishop Grimkell at the Moster assembly, which has traditionally been dated to 1024. There is an ongoing debate about whether this claim is actually true, and whether there was an assembly at Moster, and also whether this was the starting point for introducing Christian legislation in Norway. It is clear that King Olaf did collaborate with ecclesiastics to strengthen royal control over the Norwegian juridical infrastructure of the time, and also to strengthen his legitimacy among the people. However, whether the introduction of Christian rules can be dated as precisely to one assembly, and whether there was an effort to reform the laws in the way described by the twelfth-century texts of the law codes, is highly uncertain. 

These are some of the questions that are discussed in the episode. While the host, Torgeir Landro, and I agree on the main issues, there are also other scholars who interpret the material differently.