The unicorn on the wall - a Bergen mystery

 
On a recent trip to Bergen, I visited Håkonshallen, King Håkon's Hall, which was built on the orders of King Håkon IV of Norway (r.1217-63) following a fire that devastated a large part of Bergen. The hall was finished by 1261, and although it has been heavily restored in the course of the twentieth century, the hall remains one of the greatest examples of secular medieval architecture in Norway. As I was walking by the tall windows and along the many corridors and up and down the many stairs of the hall, I noticed a drawing on one of the walls which immediately caught my attention. The drawing in question clearly shows a unicorn, and it was very pleasing to think that it was a piece of graffiti that had survived the many calamities that have befallen the hall and come down to us through the centuries. However, my critical sense was not lost in tantalizing possibilities of the situation, and I did notice one particular detail that suggests to me that the unicorn is modern rather than medieval. Aside from the lines of the drawing being a bit too white to have survived the disasters of the past, it also looks very similar to one of Bergen's minor yet well known attraction. The attraction in question is a wooden unicorn that hangs on the front of one of the wooden houses at Bryggen, the old quay in Bergen. The figure is iconic, as it is both easy to see as one walks along the quay, and because it has been rendered with great anatomical detail. The two-dimensional unicorn in Håkonshallen, while significantly less well-endowed than its wooden forebear, appears to be a replica of the one in Bryggen, which in turn suggests that the graffiti is of a much more recent date than its placement in the medieval stone building would at first indicate. Despite the disappointment in not finding a medieval unicorn, I am nonetheless quite pleased that the practice of inscribing signs into the stones is a practice that has continued into our own times, a practice that adds additional sediments, however small, to the complex layered history of Håkonshallen.   

The Viking Troll - or, Adventures in medievalism, part 6

 
Being a Norwegian medievalist has made visiting souvenir shops in Norway a very complicated affair. On the one hand, I am always filled with intense embarrassment when I see how my fellow Norwegians market our country to visitors. The mixture of tropes and stock figures for the purpose of earning money and playing on a small register of globally known reference is deeply unpleasant. On the other hand, part of my job is to explore how we in our contemporary world make use of, and think about, the past. Consequently, such souvenir shops are ideal research arenas, because they provide great examples of how we present ourselves to the world, and what ideas about Norway and its past we can expect people from other countries to receive. I therefore do sometimes walk among the grim displays of tat and junk, and I do look closely at the various historical misconceptions brought together in a hodge-podge of confusion and poorly-conceived national pride. Let no-one say I do not suffer for my work. 

Two weeks ago, I was in Bergen and had the opportunity to visit some extraordinary remnants from medieval Norway, things that I hope to blog about later. Several of these remnants served to showcase the complexity and variety of medieval culture, and they also serve to remind the viewer that the Middle Ages cannot be reduced to a handful of stock figures - at least not if the aim is to present a faithful idea of the medieval past. Souvenir shops, and souvenir designers, however, do not use the Middle Ages in ways meant to be accurate, but rather to pander to the preconceptions and expectations of visitors who have been fed a simplistic diet of cultural key words. In order to maximize the effect of these preconceptions - at least so I presume - the various tropes are sometimes blended in ways that have little to with how the ingredients of this blend have had their places and functions in Norwegian cultural history.  

One example of this blend was the Viking troll, which can be seen below. This figure is an incongruous mixture of stereotypical features that are all frequently used in marketing of Norway, its landscapes, and its history. This mixture is also highly anachronistic. We have the troll, which is an old legendary being in Norwegian folklore, but whose depiction here has more to do with nineteenth- and twentieth-century re-imaginings of the troll rather than the more fearsome and downright dangerous visions of earlier generations. There is the Norwegian flag, which was adopted through parliamentary vote in 1821. Then there is the Viking helmet, internationally recognized as such, even though it is fashioned according to the fantasies of nineteenth-century scholars rather than historical reality. In other words, the horns have nothing to do with historical Norse people, but they have everything to do with how we imagine Vikings in our modern times. The helmet also carries the word 'fjord' on it, the quintessential Norwegian word, and perhaps the only one that has gained some sort of international recognition. The sword is presumably part of the Viking attire, and serves to complete the transformation of this lovable troll-boy into a loveable Viking, ready to be an ambassador for Norway, and ready to convince visiting tourists from around the world that they finally get something authentically Norwegian to bring home. What we see, in other words, is a fanciful condensation of elements scattered across the timeline of Norway's history, assembled to bring out the perceived essence of our country and its culture.    

The Viking troll is an interesting case study in cultural stereotypes, and it summarizes how Norway is perceived abroad, as well as how we, or some of us at least, wish to be seen by those outside our country. There is also a calculating logic to this amalgamation. A typically capitalist logic of more being always better, where the customer's attention is drawn to a blend of identifiable ingredients, where each of the individual ingredients is a finished product in and of itself. This is the fried chicken sandwich - where deep fried chicken fillets are used instead of buns - of Norwegian tourism, and just looking at it makes me feel weird. And, as is typical of such blends, the act of blending makes each individual ingredient lose some of their original meanings, as they are decontextualized and then recontextualized to serve different purposes than they originally did. The blending is, however, not my main gripe, but that this blending is purely done in order to boost sales. Had we Norwegians engaged with this blend as part of our self-understanding, I would have been used to it - it would be a kind of cultural evolution or adaptation that aims to serve its own people rather than capering to the tastes of others. In this case, however, we are dealing with the view from outside and those who seek to satisfy and titillate that view. And we see, then, yet again, how medievalism serves to make people reach for a fantasy rather than reality, and how the Middle Ages sell.  

Reading-spots, part 3

 
Nearing the end of my first week in Oslo after two months in the Western Norwegian fjords, I am reflecting on this summer's results in my ever-ongoing quest for finding new places in which to read, to find new reading-spots. While this quest is not limited to my home village of Hyen, it is perhaps especially here that my quest becomes increasingly challenging. Having lived there for the greater part of my life, and returning as often as time and work permit, there are fewer new reading-spots to be found for each passing year. However, as the Norwegian fjords are landscapes of great variety and with numerous nooks and crannies, there are still plenty of places left to find. In this blogpost, I will share one of these places, namely the mountain lake of Langevatnet, which literally translates as 'long lake'. 

Langevatnet is situated on a sort of plateau, although a very hollow plateau, which was carved by the ice millions of years ago. While well above the tree limit, it is not located at the top of the mountain, as the grey and snow-patched rock still rises and curves onwards above this plateau. Even so, it is a strenuous hike, and one that I have not undertaken since I was in my early twenties. Since I had not been there for several years, and since it was a place I came to love in my teens, this summer's hike was a kind of a pilgrimage. As a pilgrim, I was dressed in a hat and carried a stick, and I had brought with me a book of verses that means a lot to me.

When I came to the easternmost end of the lake, I camped in the meagre shadow of a large rock, which can be seen to the left in the picture above. The place afforded me a good shelf on which to sit, and a wonderful view of the lake as it stretched westward. Here, I sat down to read a poem by one of my all-time favourite poets, Raquel Lanseros. I had brought an edition of her collected poems which I had bought in Madrid earlier this year, and I read her poem 'Invocación', Invocation, which is one of my favourite poems, and one from which I find myself reciting whenever I come face to face with something lovely in nature. I selected this poem especially because it has a lot of emotional value for me, and it was one of the first poems I tried to translate from Spanish into Norwegian. (This translation can be found here.) Reading this poem was one of the crowning moments of joy on a trip so full of delight and happiness, and it imbued this reading-spot with a particularly strong sense of belonging.  

Similar blogposts: 

Reading-spots, part 1 

Reading-spots, part 2 

The non-existent manuscript - a brief note on fictional books and bibliomania

Bibliomania manifests in many different ways. One of those ways is to nurture an intense fondness for books that do not exist, save in some fictional universe. Reading about fictional books is a sheer delight to me, partly because I have a great love of the book as a concept and as a manifestation of humanity's creativity and drive towards beauty, and partly because of what the mere existence of such a book implies about the fictional universe in which it exists. To produce a book requires of human skill, necessitates material resources, and can only be done through some sort of infrastructure by which those resources and the skills are brought together. A fictional book, in other words, adds a greater depth to the complexity of a made-up world, just as a real book adds greater depth to the real world. This depth is especially great and wonderful when done with care, and when it serves as a vehicle for displaying the learning and the knowledge of the author of this double fiction of world and book. 

Fictional books are very common in literature. The conceit of having found a lost manuscript from which your own fiction stems, is a playful way of creating a greater degree of verisimilitude in a story. The wonderful and at times wonderfully absurd toying with, and stretching of, the line between fiction and reality in Don Quijote, for instance, is partly done through the claim that the tale comes a manuscript written by Cide Hamete Benengeli. Similarly, Adso of Melk's account of his experiences together with his master William of Baskerville in Umberto Eco's Name of the rose is given a curious and unstable sheen of realism through the prologue of a found and then lost-again manuscript.  

There are many famous fictional books, and I believe it is no exaggeration to suggest that there are even more fictional books that are known to a much more limited number of readers, or that are known only for a shorter period of time and within specific readerships. Some fictional books do transcend the readerships of the real books in which they appear, perhaps because they are discussed and talked about by readers who also write, and thereby become more famous than the real book - the vehicle, as it were, of the fictional book. For instance, the fictional books of the real library of the abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris included by Rabelais in the first book of Pantagruel, has been mentioned by several authors. These mentions mean that there are likely to be readers who will be familiar with the list, and might even know parts or all of it by heart, without actually having read Rabelais. Such famous fictional books are not rare, but there are probably more fictional books which are likely to remain known to a more limited group of readers, or what we might justly call the fandom of a book or a book series. 

What spurred on these reflections on fictional books and my intense delight in them was a recent issue in one of my favourite comic book series, the Italian Western series Tex Willer, which is very popular in Norway. The issue in question - number 708 in Norway, number 748 in Italy - is written by Moreno Burattini and drawn by Michele Rubini. The story deals with the appearance of a blood-sucking monster in Northern Mexico, a chupacabra, or goat-sucker. The title of the issue is 'La mesa della follia', which in Norwegian has been translated roughly as the crag or mountain of horror ('Redselsberget'). This translation, however, is likely to miss one of the points of the original, as 'follia' means madness - as shown by the in-text Spanish name of the mountain as 'mesa del locura', or the mountain of madness. The title is, in other words, a likely nod to H. P. Lovecraft's famous tale. 

The issue is the first of a two-part story, and the it begins with a bag of bones brought to one of the recurring characters of the series, an Egyptian scientist living in Mexico, who is known by the epithet El Morisco. The search of the animal of these mysterious bones leads the scientist to an old abbey, in which he is shown a manuscript who was brought by a traveller. El Morisco analyzes the book, notes that it is written partly in German and partly in Latin, he recognizes alchemical signs, and dates it to the fifteenth century based on abbreviations in the text which, as he says, are typical of that period. The last page of the manuscript, as seen below, shows a drawing of a horrible cat-like beast, with the subtitle 'bestia quae sanguinem sugit', the beast who sucks blood.           

What delights me about this fictional book is partly how it continues a long and wonderful literary game of verisimilitude through the conceit of the found manuscript, and partly how both author and artist are able to create added verisimilitude through details such as the dating of the manuscript based on abbreviations, and on authentic-looking renditions of alchemical signs. Such attention to detail which strikes a chord in a historian such as myself - having worked on late-medieval manuscripts and codicological puzzles - is perhaps especially delightful when we consider the medium, namely a monthly comic book. This statement is not to be taken as as disparaging commentary about monthly comics, I am myself an avid reader of this particular one. Rather, the point is that monthly comic books are often aimed at a month-long readership who will then move on to the next issue, and then the next. While the publishers no doubt expect collectors, and while we should expect that there are several readers who do re-read these issues several times, a comic like Tex Willer is sold in a short-term market where each issue is relatively swiftly replaced with the next. In such a market, attention to detail is no doubt appreciated by many readers, and might even be what attracts several of those readers, but these details are probably not seen as the defining factor of the success of the series. Instead, the success is more likely attributed to the creation of mystery, the gun fights, the heroism of the protagonists, and the setting, the Old West, which still retains such a forceful grip on the European imagination. Because such attention to detail is not necessary, it becomes all the more delightful. This attention to detail comes from some place of love, whether it is a love of literary games, of verisimilitude, of codicology, of authenticity, of the series itself, of creating such nods that only a part of the readership will recognize. And such acts of love that lies in this attention to detail is in itself a form of bibliomania, which in turn adds even more delight to the matter.       

A brief note on artificial intelligence

 

I rarely comment on the generally misnamed phenomenon known as artificial intelligence. Mainly, my silence on the matter stems from a lack of expertise, combined with a plethora of scholars better placed than myself to opine on the issue. I will confess, however, that I am largely sceptical – not so much to the phenomenon itself, but to many of its uses, and a all-too-pervasive notion that artificial intelligence is the answer to a vast range of problems. Currently, however, I am forced by circumstance to keep artificial intelligence in mind, and the circumstance is the chatbot ChatGPT, which is being used by students to generate papers by putting together bits and pieces of whatever is available online, and whatever is judged by the algorithm to be relevant to the topic or to the question at hand. As the chatbot is used, so its range of available material and its sophistication increases, and it is increasingly hard to distinguish a paper written by a student from one generated by this artificial intelligence. And given a combination of high pressure on the students and poor understanding of what purpose such papers actually serve – namely to train to student to become a better writer and thinker – the temptation to use the chatbot is very high.   

To the best of my knowledge, I have been spared the problem of ChatGPT, in that none of the exams and dissertations I have graded this year have been generated by artificial intelligence – at least not that I have been able to detect, although there is that ever-looming risk of being fooled. There was, however, one instance this spring which both gave me severe pause, and highlighted to me why using ChatGPT to generate student papers is, in my opinion, a deeply immoral thing to do.

The case in question was a BA dissertation, one among several which I was tasked with reading and grading. Normally, such a task is relatively swiftly done. We have a set time allotted to read and grade the dissertation, and with some experience it is usually very easy to swiftly determine what grade the text deserves. By looking at issues such as formal requirements, thesis question, structure, and the frames of the discussion, it is possible to arrive at a just and fair grade without too much dithering. One dissertation deviated from this norm, however, and it forced me to spend a lot more time than I was supposed to.  

The story unfolded in May of this year, a time when reports told of ChatGPT improving, but still being at a stage where its prose was far from as undetectable as it has been feared that it will become. I had read samples of exam papers generated by this chatbot, and the quality of the prose was indeed so laughable as to ensure the hypothetical student an easy fail, which I believe to be a suitable punishment for this kind of cheating. It was exactly this unpolished aspect of ChatGPT’s prose and grasp of formal essay requirements that made me hesitate when reading this particular dissertation. Not only was the writing quite rough at times, but there were several footnotes that were notably incomplete – some were simply lacking in formal details, while others were so general as to be impossible to check, at least within the time I had available. Rough writing and bad footnotes are both hallmarks of inexperienced students operating under a lot of stress, and before the golden age of artificial intelligence I would not have paid it much attention but adjusted the grade of the student as I deemed necessary.

The spectre of chatbots made me nonetheless check some footnotes, and I found the first to be quite imprecise, although not completely wrong. Another footnote was completely wrong at first sight, but it turned out that the student had used an older edition of the textbook, and a laborious check allowed me to ascertain that the reference did indeed make sense. A third footnote was even more cumbersome to check, because the work was not digitally available, at least not to me, and so I was preparing to head to the library on the other side of campus to take a third sample and see whether I could determine whether the text had been produced by a human or by a generator. Luckily, I decided to stop by the office to my colleague who had supervised the dissertation, and thanks to a chat about the student, their writing process, and the finished product, I could in the end rest assured that the roughness of the dissertation was the result of inexperience and stress, not cheating. This chat, in other words, saved the grade of the student and avoided an unjust failing on my part.

The main problem in this story was that the chatbot had attained a level which made its writing indistinguishable from poor student writing, and this is a level of quality quite prevalent among student papers. I do not say this to be either cruel or condescending, because I am very aware that this low level of quality very often comes down to factors that are not to be blamed on the students, namely high pressure, lack of training, and various diagnoses that make the first two factors all the more harmful. The uncertainty about he root of rough writing is caused by the rise of chatbot programmes, and this uncertainty puts extra pressure on those of us who are grading essays, exams or dissertations, because you sometimes need to spend much more time than you should in order to arrive at a more solid basis for grading the paper. Moreover, due to the roughness of the prose, chatbots like ChatGPT cast an added shadow of doubt over those students whose prose is similar to that of the text-generator. If the grader does not have enough time to dig into the details, the result might easily be that the inexperienced student is judged unfairly and failed, not because of the roughness of the prose but because that roughness has now become suspicious. Chatbots, in other words, make life harder for those students who are already vulnerable, and this reason is enough for me to utterly despise and reject such technology.   

Saint Olaf in Skjervøy

 

Yesterday, July 29, was the feast of Saint Olaf, one of the most widely venerated Scandinavian saints. As I have done, and continue to do, a lot of research on Saint Olaf and his cult, I take the opportunity to present one of the many surviving sources to Olaf's medieval cult. The source in question is the Skjervøy altar from after 1515, brought to the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo from the church of Skjervøy in Troms, Northern Norway. The altar is likely the product of a workshop in Northern Germany or the Netherlands, made after specifications from the commissioners, as this was common for a lot of church art in late-medieval Norway. 

The altar can be closed as a cupboard, and one door has since been lost, as has the traditional axe held by Saint Olaf. The axe is only suggested by the empty fist of the saint, holding an object that is no longer there. Based on the iconography typical of the era, we can surmise that this axe was a halberd. Olaf is also seen carrying a jar, whose iconographic significance is not clear. Beneath the saint, we see another iconographical feature which became widely common in the depictions of Saint Olaf from at least the thirteenth century onwards, namely the defeated beast. In this iteration, the beast has the head of a man, and wears a crown. The beast still defies interpretation, and the most important hypothesis seems to be that there are numerous ways to understand the meaning of this beast. 

The Skjervøy altar 

The Museum of Cultural History, C3000, Oslo

What is particularly important about the Skjervøy altar is that it highlights the status of Saint Olaf in the collegium of saints, at least in medieval Scandinavia. Olaf stands on the viewer's right, but the left of the group of figures, which is traditionally the lowest rank. The figure in the middle is God the Father supporting the Son, apparently after being taken down from the cross, if we are to judge from the wound in the side. To the right-hand side of God is the Virgin Mary, holding the Christ-child, and occupying that place of seniority which the Nicene creed affords to the Son, 'ad dexteram patris'. Olaf, then, holds the lowest position in the group, but the group itself is so high-ranking that even this position attests to the importance of the holy king.  

Olaf's appearance in such groups of holy figures is common, and the configuration of each group is different and much be understood on its own terms. Not all groups can as easily be interpreted as evidence of the importance of Olaf over most other saints, and Olaf's importance - while widely common - also depended on the preferences at each church. The Skjervøy altar, however, is one of the clearest examples of the Olaf's high rank in medieval Norway. 

Saint James the Elder and Saint Olaf - a brief comparison

 

Today, July 25, is the feast of Saint James the Elder, one of the most famous saints of Latin Christendom, and arguably the most famous saint of Spanish history. One of Christ's apostles, medieval legend placed his shrine in Compostela in Galicia, Northern Spain. At the beginning of the twelfth century, Compostela was the locus of one of the most intense bouts of mythopoiesis - myth-making - in the Middle Ages, where the clergy at Compostela created a legend that tied their place with biblical history, the legend of Charlemagne, and with the contemporary, twelfth-century world. This myth-making process created one of the three main pilgrim sites in the Latin Christian consciousness, with Rome and Jerusalem being the other two. Part of that process was the erection of the great Romanesque cathedral of Compostela, which is now largely supplanted by a later Gothic one, and the corpus of hagiographical material that is compiled in the Liber Sancti Jacobi (Book of Saint James), whose main textual witness is the twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus. Since James the Elder was known throughout Christendom due to his appearance in the Bible, and since his sanctity was accepted by all Christians, Compostela's claim to be the apostle's resting place resulted in durable myth that has continued to work its effect into our own times. Saint James, or Santiago, has become in effect a patron saint of Spain and of Spanish imperialism. The historical development of the cult is complex, but a very simplified summary of the evolution of Saint James' iconography can be found in this old blogpost. In short, however, we should note that Saint James goes from being an apostle, to a pilgrim, to a battle-helper. This is an evolution that demonstrates, in a typical fashion, the plasticity or malleability of saints.   

From a Norwegian perspective, there are notable similarities in how Saint James the Elder became a focal point of myth-making in Spain and how Saint Olaf became a focal point for a similar process in Norway. The myth-making centred on Saint Olaf gained momentum from the 1150s onwards, after the establishment of the Norwegian Church Province in 1152/53, where Trondheim - Saint Olaf's resting place - became the metropolitan see of a church organization that stretched from Oslo to Greenland. By the mid-twelfth-century, the sanctity of Olaf had become an accepted part of Scandinavian historical thought, and he was venerated throughout the Norse world, largely thanks to the Nordic diaspora whose members continued to tell stories about him. From the 1150s onwards, however, these stories became more fixed as they were committed to writing, and the clergy at Trondheim used the legend to anchor Norway and the Norwegian Church both locally within Norway, within a wider European context, and also within a universal history that reached back into biblical times. Saint Olaf became the patron saint of Norway, and his cult enjoyed a stable and widespread popularity well beyond the Reformation, and he remains an important point of reference in our own time. (He is even featured - although as a historical figure rather than as a saint - in the TV series Beforeigners.) Like Saint James, Olaf has also undergone an iconographic evolution, being presented as a warlord, a battle-helper, and as a Christian ideal king. Also like in the case of Saint James, while these representations accrued over time, they also co-existed and made for a very composite and complex image of the holy figure.  

The two saints were both important focal points in their respective geographies, although the similarities between the two cults are out of balance due to the much more widespread fame and status of Saint James the Elder and of Compostela as a holy site. Many of the mechanisms between the two cases of myth-making are similar, however, and it remains an academic fantasy of mine to have those two myth-making processes carefully compared through an international project. For the time being, however, I will have to be content with noting, as people have done before me, that these similarities exist, even though there are very few zones of contact between the two cults. While Saint James was venerated in Norway, there is little reason to think that Olaf was known in Spain, even though the twelfth-century miracle list, known as Miracula Olavi, claims that a Galician knight came to the shrine of Saint Olaf to be liberated from his chains.   

As far as I know, the Norwegian mythmakers drew inspiration from the general practices of Christian mythmaking, and not from one single cult in particular. It is unclear whether any of the clerics and monks involved in the Norwegian mythmaking drew on the corpus of legends connected to Saint James, but the gist of this corpus was indeed known in twelfth-century Norway. This knowledge is demonstrated by a detail from a reliquary in Hedalen stave church, which contains a relic of Saint Thomas of Canterbury (d.1170; can. 1173). One of the short sides of the reliquary contains two figures, namely Olaf and James the Elder, the former recognizable through his axe and crown, the latter recognizable through his pilgrim's garb. This depiction of James shows that the Compostela legend - which formulated him as a pilgrim - was known in Norway. 

The Hedalen reliquary 
Photo by Nina Aldin Thune; courtesy of Wikimedia

Detail from the Hedalen reliquary 
Photo by Trond Øigarden
From an exhibition at the Oslo University Library curated by José Maria Izquierdo, autumn 2021