A saint against lightning - Saint Olaf and the bell at Moster Old Church

 

Today is the feast of Saint Olaf, the patron saint of Norway, who died at the Battle of Stiklestad north of Trondheim in 1030. He was declared holy on August 3 1031 by Bishop Grimkell. The bishop had the king's body translated to the Church of Saint Clement, and at this point in time the authority of a bishop - the only bishop in Norway - was sufficient to proclaim someone's sainthood. The cult of Saint Olaf became a defining feature of medieval Norway, and also spread throughout the North Atlantic and Baltic regions. 

Since the cult of Saint Olaf was in practice ubiquitous in medieval Norway, there are several sources that testify to the veneration of the saint-king - and even more sources that we should presume lost in the passage of time. One of the surviving sources is the oldest of the two bells in Moster Old Church in Southwestern Norway. The church dates to the mid-twelfth century, and is located in the village where twelfth-century tradition claims that Saint Olaf and Bishop Grimkell introduced Christian laws to Norway at the Moster assembly in 1024. The historicity of this tradition is dubious. It is not certain that there was an assembly at Moster in 1024, and it is even more uncertain whether the Christian laws were introduced at such an assembly. When the Norwegian provincial laws were recorded in writing in the second half of the twelfth century, the text of Gulathing law - in whose law province Moster is situated - established this tradition and made it part of the Church's formulation of Norway's history, a formulation in which the course of Norwegian history was guided by divine will and in accordance with a typological pattern found in the Bible. 

Whatever the historicity of the Moster assembly, we do know that Moster was an important village in both the eleventh and the twelfth centuries, as is partly evidenced by the fact that its church was built in stone, a costly and cumbersome material. Sometime in the thirteenth century, a bell was cast for the church, and it is currently located in the church loft. The bell testifies to the veneration of Saint Olaf, as it contains an etching of the saint-king enthroned and holding the axe which had become his main attribute already in the eleventh century. The bell also contains a prayer to the Virgin Mary, perhaps the only saint to gain greater importance in the Norwegian cult of saints than the king. The etching is difficult to see in the pictures below, but it follows an established iconographic pattern and bears resemblance to both wooden sculptures and manuscript illuminations of the period.  

While we cannot say this for certain, it is likely that the figure of the saint and the prayer to the Virgin were both intended - or at least became interpreted over time - as a way to ward off lightning. It is also likely that the figure of the saint-king should be seen as a testament to how the Gulathing tradition - where Moster was the starting-point of the Norwegian Christianisation process - was received in the local community, and we might imagine that the people of Moster in the thirteenth century saw this historical episode as a keystone in their own identity. 

Moster Old Church, April 2024

Covered in a protective net due to restoration works

New publications, part 2 - The Younger Passio Kanuti – a reassessment of its historical context, its author, and its purpose

 

As mentioned in my previous blogpost, I am deligted to announce the publication of a volume containing an edition and translation of an anonymous hagiography about Saint Knud Rex of Denmark (d.1086 in Odense), as well as a handful of academic articles. The volume, published by Museum Odense, is in open access and can be downloaded here. I was fortunate enough to be included among the editors of the book, and I am very happy to have worked on a volume that provides a important contributions to scholarship. 

In the previous blogpost, I wrote as a co-editor. In the present blogpost, however, I write as an author of two of the contributions in the volume, especially the article 'The Younger Passio Kanuti – a reassessment of its historical context, its author, and its purpose'. In this article I examine the anonymous hagiography in order to provide a reasonable assessment of its date and the reason why it was composed. The Younger Passio Kanuti is largely a copy of the earlier Gesta Swenomagni by Aelnoth of Canterbury, composed at Saint Knud's cult centre in Odense in the 1110s. The anonymous text nonethless contains original material and, perhaps just as importantly, rearranges the content of Aelnoth's vita in such a way that we cannot dismiss it as a mere copy. In my article, I therefore examine the internal evidence provided by the text to assess the likely chronological frame of the Younger Passio Kanuti, and also to suggest where it was intended to be used.  

The volume also contains a second contribution of mine, which is a comparative overview of the content of both Aelnoth's Gesta Swenomagni and the Younger Passio Kanuti. While containing some analytical commentary, this article is mainly inteded as an aid to understanding the analysis of the anonymous text and to demonstrate how the anonymous author used and engaged with his primary source. 

Both these contributions were gerat fun to write, because they represent the cumination of several years  of research on the cult of Saint Knud Rex, and they also help to provide a starting-point for future scholarship on both this cult in particular and on the cult of saints in medieval Denmark more generally.    

New publications, part 1 - Royal Blood - The Passion of St Cnut, King and Martyr

 

For the past two years, I have been collaborating with some colleagues in Odense, Denmark, on the publication of a new edition and translation of a medieval Danish hagiography. The text in question is an anonymous vita of Saint Knud Rex of Denmark, who was killed in Odense in 1086 following an insurrection. Knud Rex was one of the most important native saints of medieval Denmark, and his cult resulted in a lot of early texts that have been the subject of much scholarship in our own times. However, the anonymous Passio Sancti Kanuti regis et martiris - a title shared by an earlier and much better known vita - has been largely neglected since it was published in Martin Clarentius Gertz' landmark edition on Danish hagiographical material, Vitae Sanctorum Danorum. 

I was invited along on this project by my Danish colleagues, and the work resulted in a volume that contains both a translation and an edition of the text - both executed by Francis Young - and a selection of articles on both the anonymous vita and topics related to the cult of Saint Knud Rex. The volume is now published in open access, and can be downloaded from the website of Museum Odense. I am very thankful to my colleague that I am credited as co-editor, because I should emphasise that my actual contribution to the volume have not been as significant as the bibliographical information of the volume suggests. 

The publication is a valuable contribution to scholarship, both on the cult of Saint Knud Rex and the history of medieval Denmark more broadly, as it has already allowed us to rethink some of the aspects of the cult's history, and also some aspects of Danish medieval ecclesiastical history.  

As I am very proud to see this volume published, I will wrote more about my own contributions to this book in the next blogpost. 

Knutsok - harvest season and the feast of Saint Knud Rex

 

Today is July 10, which is the feast-day of Saint Knud Rex, a Danish king who was killed in 1086. His cult was formally established in 1095 when his bones were translated to a new burial place after being tested in the fire. The feast of Saint Knud Rex was celebrated throughout medieval Denmark, and also reached Norway within a few decades. Although the cult of Saint Knud in medieval Norway is still insufficiently mapped, we know that the feast was important enough to be mentioned as a day of rest in the law of the Gulathing province - one of the four juridical units of twelfth-century Norway. This lawcode was written down around 1160 in the Norwegian vernacular, in which the feast of Saint Knud was known as 'knutsok', meaning 'knutsvaka' or 'the vigil of Knud'.  

July 10 was marked on late-medieval runic calendars with a rake or a scythe to signal the beginning of harvest season. This was when the Julian calendar was still in use, and so this date came slightly earlier in the agrarian cycle than it does today. Even so, the feast of Saint Knud continued to be a marker in the annual round also after the Danish-Norwegian Reformation of 1536/37. Well into the twentieth century, it was customary in my home village of Hyen that July 10 was the date when the cattle and the milkmaids moved to the summer farms - either on the day itself or the weekend nearest that date. (In some cases the milkmaids did not stay at the summer farm but only spent the nights and then returned tot he farms to participate in the harvest in the daytime.) While I never heard my grandparents talk about knutsok when growing up - as opposed to jonsok (Saint John's Eve) or pederstol (cathedra petri) - it is evident that the medieval practice of connecting harvest season with the feast of the saint-king was still alive several centuries after the formal introduction of Protestantism in Norway. 

In our time, the summer farm in my part of the village is mostly used as a recreational space. None of the byres that still stand are used for keeping animals, and the cattle are now mostly moving about freely in certain parts of the valley. The summer farm is a beloved space, and much of my childhood was spent here, learning about the natural cycle in this part of the village. Today, I went to the shieling that belongs to my family. I did this as an homage to the old ways, even though we only stay at the shieling for a few days at a time, and then only for the sheer pleasure of it. A few sheep were grazing in one of the nearby fields, and the scent of pines, ling and bog filled an air rich with moisture. It felt right to maintain this connection - however flimsy, tenuous and construed - with a tradition that is now lost to all but a vague collective memory deciphered by scholars, and it was a pleasant reminder that some things are worth doing if only symbolically.