The Danes are coming - or, Adventures in medievalism, part 7

 

Every now and again I find myself baffled at how the past is used as a vessel to promote something in the present. Even though I have been exposed to some very curious and strange applications and abuses of the past, the wide variety in a given period's reception history never ceases to amaze me. My most recent encounter with baffling use of the past occurred in Odense, Denmark, just as I was making my way from the tram to the main building of the campus of the University of Southern Denmark. The incident concerned a sticker promoting some sport team or other - confusingly, this is not specified on the sticker, so it must be aimed at an audience already familiar with the iconography used on the sticker. As seen below, the sticker does speak for itself in a certain way, but also merits some further unpacking. 

The use of viking iconography - however anachronistic - to imbue a sports team with the aura of plunderers and rapists from the increasingly distant past is a familiar phenomenon. The Norwegian football team Viking and the American football team Minnesota Vikings are only some that join this unspecified Danish team in their employment of modern ideas about the Norse raiders. The purpose is usually the same, namely to make the players appear tough and unconquerable, because that is how modern popular culture has taught us to think of the vikings. The combination of stylised longships, the colours of the Danish flag Dannebrog - first used in the early thirteenth century - and the horned helmets of nineteenth-century artistic imagination telescopes history into a unified whole, which suggests the idea that this sports team stands in a direct genealogical relationship to the violent marauders of the past. 

This iconography plays into familiar references, and the use of these symbols and figures might simply be to bolster the self-image and have a bit of fun with well-known tropes. But self-images tend to reveal deeply held convictions - and also delusions - and such self-representations as seen in this stickers therefore should be taken seriously as a good way of measuring how our contemporaries understand - or rather, misunderstands - the past. Only by understanding this misunderstanding can we also map its effect in our own here-and-now. 

Reading-spots, part 9

 

This month, I have been living in Odense for a work-related assignment, which has given me a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with one of my most beloved city, and to revisit places which were immensely important to me in the course of my five very formative years in Denmark. By my own admission, I am a ridiculously nostalgic individual, and I treasure those things that enable me to relive periods of great joy or comfort. When done right, this kind of nostalgia-seeking enterprise is phenomenally rewarding, and can serve as a balm for the soul. 

One goal for my current quest to reconnect with positive aspects of my Danish past was to visit the bakery where I used to buy my daily bread. When I lived here, this bakery - Folkebo's bageri - was only a couple of hundred meters from my doorstep. This time, however, it was slightly more cumbersome as I live close to the train station and my daily commute goes in a parallel direction, making it difficult to combine duty and pleasure as part of one and the same trip. Luckily, one Sunday morning I decided to have a typical Danish breakfast in my old haunt. 

The bakery was largely the same as when I used to live here, except that they had reduced the number of tables in favour of another glass case for baked goods. Luckily, I found a chair and spent an hour enjoying some of the favourite flavours of my Danish past. As I was sitting here, I was brought back to one particular period that has been seared into my memory like few other bakery-related episodes in my life. It was early in 2019, the beginning of what was to be my last term in Denmark. I was in a rather rough shape, being unemployed and having no immediate prospects. For some reason I no longer recall, I began to wake up unreasonably early in the dark of one January week, and I got into the habit of stopping by the bakery for a cup of tea, something to eat, and a bit of time for reading before cycling on to the university campus, where the kindness of my friends and colleagues allowed me to pass my time as part of my old scholarly community. It was a week of glorious mornings, where the wider troubles of this stage in my life were pushed away, and I found a pocket of calm while reading at a table in the bakery's café as the world was becoming lighter outside. Eventually, I began to wake up later in the day again and the routine stopped, but the memory of that week became a treasured gem.  

My current lot is fortunately happier than it was during this particular episode, and my life has accumulated a lot of different experiences since then. I am in many ways a different man than I was then, but this joyous hour on a Sunday morning in October also served as a reminder that I am not that far removed from the person I once was - at least in some respects.

New publication: Sanctus Suithunus

 

As mentioned in my previous blogpost, I am currently working as a co-editor for the online encyclopedia Medieval Nordic Literature in Latin, hosted by the University of Bergen. The encyclopedia was first published in 2012, but there are still several articles missing, and as part of my work I have also worked on some contributions of my own. Today, I have published the second of these contributions, namely an article titled 'Sanctus Suithunus', which contains an overview of two liturgical offices in honour of Saint Swithun of Winchester. 

Swithun became the patron saint of Stavanger diocese in the twelfth century, and his cult was important both in that diocese and in other parts of Norway. Relatively few surviving sources provide insight into the history of the cult, but these two liturgical offices are important and useful starting-points for addressing some of the basic questions concerning the standing of Saint Swithun in medieval Norway. 

New publication: Arnfastus Monachus

For the past six months, I have worked as a co-editor of the online encyclopedia Medieval Nordic Literature in Latin, hosted by the University of Bergen. This is an encyclopedia containing articles about authors writing in Latin and anonymous texts in Latin composed before c.1530. It was founded in 2008 and last updated in 2012, and is currently being updated as part of the project CODICUM, a collaboration between several Nordic universities.  

The updating process does not only consist of editing existing articles, but also writing new ones that have so far been missing. I have been working on one of these missing articles over the past few months, and thanks to some archival research earlier today, I have now been able to complete it and have it published on the website. The article in question is on the monk Arnfast - or Arnfastus Monachus - who is only known as the author of a hagiographical poem on the miracles related to Saint Knud Rex, the patron saint of Odense. The article covers a range of details concerning the poem, providing an overview of what little we know, and a discussion of some of the conclusions we might draw from the work itself.