The leonine undertakers - a detail from the legend of Saint Paul of Thebes

Today, January 15, is the feast of Paul the Hermit, who is also known as Paul of Thebes. According to tradition, he died in the year 341, and was the first Christian hermit. The earliest known account of Paul's legend was composed by the church father Jerome, and functions in essence like a prequel to the very popular biography of Anthony of Egypt written by Athanasius of Alexandria and later translated into Latin by Evagrius. Athanasius' biography of the historical hermit Anthony had a long-reaching impact on the development of Christian mythology - both chronologically and geographically speaking. It is, therefore, tempting to suggest that by penning a story about an even older hermit whom Anthony meets, Jerome sought to capitalise on this popularity and expand the emerging Latin Christian historical vision that was being solidified in the course of the fourth century. 

The narrative of Jerome's story tells about how the hermit Anthony learns about an older and even more austere colleague living in the Egyptian wastes. He sets out to meet him, and after the two hermits have shared a meal brought by ravens - a typological connection to Elijah - Paul eventually breathes his last, and is interred by Anthony in a grave dug by two lions who miraculously appear. The burial of Paul became a well-known motif in later medieval art, presumably - at least in part - because it is the most iconographically interesting episode in the narrative. One of the more curious renditions is found in a Flemish manuscript from around 1300, which is now known both as the Rotschild Canticle, and by its shelfmark Beinecke MS 404. The manuscript is a collection of various Christian texts, assembled as a kind of florilegium or anthology, and also left unfinished. The pages are filled with a rich array of medieval illuminations which showcase the magnificent world of the medieval imagination. One of these illuminations is a full-page depiction of the burial of Paul the Hermit (f.31r), and it is a curious rendition of the motif. As can be seen in the picture below, the artist has illustrated the lions' assistance in a peculiarly anthropomorphic twist, by having one of them actually carrying the body of Paul together with Anthony. The anthropomorphic lion is not uncommon in medieval art, but is perhaps most often seen in illuminations showing episodes of Reynard the Fox or other animal tales typical of the Latin medieval literary world. Consequently, this illumination stands out as rather unusual, at least to the modern mind. To the medieval beholder, on the other hand, this scene might simply be understood as a very effective rendition of the well-known topos from Latin Christian hagiography, namely that nature and all its denizens were subordinate to, and came to the aid of, the saints of God.  

In Beinecke MS 404, this scene is one of several full-page illuminations by the same artist found in the manuscript, and these are all depictions of a single scene from the life of a saint or from a particular story. Unfortunately, the page following each illumination is left blank, and the extracts from the various legends that were likely intended to be included, were never copied into the manuscript. For this reason, it can sometimes be difficult to assess to which story a particular illumination refers. In the case of the one on folio 31r, however, every detail of the scene provides a clear pointer to the legend of Saint Paul the first hermit, one of the earliest and most successful prequels of the Latin Christian traditions, at least outside the biblical apocrypha. 

The lions help Anthony bury Paul

Beinecke MS 404, f.31r 

 

A year in reading - 2024

 

For me, 2024 was the closing of a chapter, as my forty-month postdoctoral contract came to its end. The knowledge that this would quite possibly be my last year in a long while having access to a university library, did have a significant impact on how I went about my reading. While most of my reading in any given year is a balance between the structure and chaos, between plans and whims, the struggle between these opposing forces was felt more keenly as I sat out to prioritise like someone saving books from a burning building.

 

Luckily, 2024 was a busy year for me, one that provided a lot of opportunities to travel, and a lot of opportunities to delve into new material and expand my horizon in many different directions. As I always enjoy how travel and books serve to reinforce the impressions from either in my brain, there turned out to be many memorable moments throughout the year.

 

Travelling by page   

While I have been fortunate enough to do a lot of travelling during my recent employment, most of my travelling is by page. I always try to travel as widely as possible, but this year I was particularly anxious to explore new countries through their books, since I wanted to make the most of the university library’s holdings, as well as the interlibrary loan system. In the end, I think it would be an overstatement to say that I made the most of it, but I did manage to tick several countries off my list.     

 

Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, By night the mountain burns

(Translated by Jethro Soutar)

The first country I visited was Equatorial Guinea, through Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel’s novel By night the mountain burns, which describes life on the island of Annobón. The book was a steadfast companion during my wanderings in Madrid, and by a lovely coincidence I was still reading this novel by the time I visited the anthropological museum and beheld some artefacts from Equatorial Guinea (although the mainland, rather than Annobón).            

 

Several of my paginated peregrinations this year were directed to the Arab-speaking world, partly by deliberate choice since I saw an opportunity to fill in the blanks on the Arabian peninsula. Unlike the synchronicity of reading By night the mountain burns, the three books in question contrasted notably with my surroundings as I was reading my way through them. The best example is perhaps Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh, which is a fantastic portrayal of social stratification and gender roles in turn-of-the-century Saudi Arabia. I read most of this book during a train journey between Bergen and Oslo that was delayed by several hours, and where the snow-covered mountains were a world away from urban life in Riyadh. The contrasts were less striking when I read Wajdi al-Ahdal’s A land without Jasmine (a crime story from Yemen), since I was then travelling through the Netherlands and Belgium. This was also the case when reading Sarah A. al Shafei’s Yummah (a sort-of historical novel from Bahrain), as I was then in a relatively warm Oslo. Nonetheless, the differences between the read and the travelled worlds were notable. I learned a lot through these books, especially Girls of Riyadh, which should be read by most men due to its various insights into the vulnerability of women in a patriarchal society.        

Rajaa Alsanea, Girls of Riyadh

(Translated by Rajaa Alsanea andMarilyn Booth)

Wajdi al-Ahdal, A land without jasmine 

(Translated by William Maynard Hutchins)

Sarah A. al Shafei, Yummah

As for the remaining three countries, the contrasts were also notable. Men of Maize by Miguel Ángel Asturias provided fascinating views of Guatemalan folklore, as well as social history, and most of this book was consumed en route to and from the narrow and extremely beautiful village of Flåm in the Western Norwegian fjords. Mother’s Beloved, a collection of short stories by Laotian author Outhine Bounyavong depicted a world very different from December in Western Norway. Similarly, the dry desert vistas and narrow vales of Azerbaijan in Kurban Said’s Ali and Nino (in a Norwegian translation) was in many respects alien to my own frame of reference. Yet all these novels did provide an inroad that allowed me to sense a deep-running vein of familiarity, namely because they all dealt with aspects of rural societies. Even though life on a farm is significantly different in Norway compared to these countries, the concerns and much of the work remain startlingly similar in various aspects, and I felt I could immerse myself more deeply in these books than I might otherwise have been able to do, had I not had a farming background.    

Outhine Bounyavong, Mother's Beloved

(Translated by Bounheng Inversin, Roger Rumpf, Jacqui Chagnon, 

Thipason Phimviengkham, and William Galloway)

 

New places for reading       

Luckily, 2024 was a year of travelling, both for work and for my personal pleasure. For me, part of the pleasure of travelling consists of finding new places for reading. The very act of moving through pages in a new location makes me connect more strongly to that place, and what might otherwise have been a very fleeting and difficult-to-remember occasion, instead becomes lodged in my memory in a very positive way. Such memories are important, as they are part of the arsenal to wield against those dreary days where routine and overwork make time feel like a grey stodge.    

 

Some of the most memorable reading-places of 2024 are connected with my foray into the history of the cult of Saint James the Elder in Santiago de Compostela. Not only did I travel to Compostela twice in the course of the year, I also read several books about the cult and its development. Reading some of those texts in Compostela made it easier to envision the past about which I sought to learn and write. I found it particularly thrilling to read part of the liturgical repertoire of Saint James – as contained in the first book of Codex Calixtinus, a mid-twelfth-century collection of texts pertaining to that cult – while staying in the place where this repertoire was put together. Relying on a translation of the liturgical texts, I read them both at what became my regular haunt in Compostela during a five-day sojourn, and also in the nave of the cathedral itself. Reading liturgy hits very differently when you imbibe the words in the very same location where they have been performed for generations, and, perhaps more importantly, where they were intended to be performed.

 

My regular haunt in Santiago de Compostela

The nave of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela

Antón de Pazos (ed.), Translating the Relics of St James – From Jerusalem to Compostela

Santiago de Compostela

My regular haunt in Lisbon

In the course of two trips, I spent ten days in Compostela last year, and this was not enough time to get through all the texts pertaining to Saint James that I read throughout 2024. After leaving Compostela, I went to Lisbon. There, I found another regular haunt – as is my habit when staying somewhere for several days – and at this café just beside the entrance of where I was staying, I continued the literary journey that had reached its zenith in Galicia. This was in May, and a few months later I continued this particular theme when travelling to Belgium, where the chance encounter of a chapel dedicated to the Compostelan patron reminded me that this particular cult was an important phenomenon in the Middle Ages.     

John Williams and Alison Stones (eds.), The Codex Calixtinus and the Shrine of St. James

A charming café in Lier, Belgium

Even though the cult of Saint James the Elder loomed large in last year’s reading, there were many other books, and many other travels which brought about new places for reading. A trip to Vienna in January allowed me to read about medieval European perceptions of otherness while sharing in the Austrian penchant for apricot juice. Moreover, as I was in Vienna for work, and as my colleagues and I were working in a converted post office which now houses the Austrian Academy of Sciences, I occasionally withdrew to the ground floor café where the architectural grandeur of a bygone age became a pleasant framework for both reading and writing. My travels in the Iberian peninsula also provided good opportunities for finding new places. Aside from those examples that I have already noted in relation to my reading about Saint James the Elder, I also took great delight in reading about the cult of saints in medieval France while eating traditional Galician cooking in both Compostela and Pontevedra, especially because these were places frequented by the locals. Similarly, as cancelled plans provided me with a very quiet December Saturday in Madrid, I could read about relics in the medieval Nordics at an almost empty little café in one of the barrios on the outskirts of the capital.       

Shirin A. Khanmohamadi, In light of another's word

View from the café in the old post office, now housing the Austrian Academy of Sciences

Thomas Head, Hagiography and the cult of saints

Pontevedra

 

Thomas Head, Hagiography and the cult of saints

Santiago de Compostela

Lena Liepe, Reliker och relikbruk i det medeltida Norden

Madrid

Reading by lists       

While I am a chaotic reader, driven by impulses to a far greater degree than I would like to admit, I do try to follow a set list of twelve items each year, divided by four categories: a) Nobel laureates, b) Norwegian books, c) academic books, and d) books from a list I put together during my first year at university. However, since I was painfully aware that my current chapter was coming to a close, and since I own many of the books in category d, I neglected this category completely, and instead focussed especially on academic books. Consequently, I did a lot of learning as I delved into a number of fascinating monographs and article collections, several of which pertaining to the cult of Saint James the Elder. Other academic books, however, were chosen for different reasons, and partly owing to my unwillingness to be too logical about my chosen reading. It was on an unrestrained impulse of this latter kind that I ended up reading Jennifer Nelson’s wonderful Disharmony of the Spheres, a brilliant analysis of the theological, scientific and art-historical zeitgeist of the 1530s. This is a book that has little to do with my own work, at least for the time being, but it was very inspiring, and a true eye-opener.    

 

Jennifer Nelson, Disharmony of the spheres

This year, I also mostly neglected Nobel laureates, with the exception of Asturias’ Men of Maize. On the other hand, my work allowed me to delve into a number of Norwegian historical sources, both medieval chivalric romances, and medieval laws. The deep-dive into the laws was prompted by the 750-year-anniversary of the Norwegian law of the realm of 1274. This anniversary was an event that presided over the public discourse throughout the country, and it provided me with a good opportunity to incorporate the law material in my teaching as well as in public lectures. Moreover, a friend and I were commissioned to write the script for an exhibition at the historical site of Moster in Western Norway, where we provided a longue durée perspective in Norwegian law history. Naturally, 2024 was the year when I finished reading the Law of the Gulathing province (written down in the mid-twelfth century) and the Law of the realm. As interesting as these books are as sources, they are nonetheless slow reads, and therefore they came to play a big part in my year of reading.  

The Law of the Gulathing province

(Translated by Knut Robberstad)

Reading while waiting outside a lovely Tamil restaurant in Oslo

The Law of the realm

(Translated by Absalon Taranger)

Read on the train en route to a conference in Bergen

 

A meeting in Madrid           

The greatest book-related highlight of the past year was a meeting in Madrid, where I caught up with Raquel Lanseros, my favourite poet of all time. Her verses are deeply important to me, and they have been so ever since I first encountered them in the first spring of the pandemic. At the time, I was cooped up in a small barrack on the edge of a Swedish wood, and translating some of her poems into Norwegian became a way of keeping relatively sane. Thanks to her immense generosity, moreover, I was allowed to put these translations on the blog, and share them with readers. This generosity laid the foundation for a treasured friendship, and in 2024 we finally managed to meet up. I was then gifted her latest collection of poetry, namely El sol y las otras estrellas (The sun and the other stars), which is a powerful meditation on love in its myriad iterations. This collection became a treasured companion that I read at my regular haunt during my Madrid sojourn, in Compostela, and finally in the Western Norwegian fjords, where I finished it.

Raquel Lanseros, El sol y las otras estrellas

Read at my regular haunt in Madrid (April/May 2024)

Santiago de Compostela

 

Utopian literature   

As in 2023, last year I immersed myself in utopian literature, aiming to read a number of texts related to this topic. Part of the motivation for doing so was a course I co-designed with a colleague and friend, where we traced certain themes in utopian thinking from Antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern Period. However, I have also been able to work on this topic for articles, lectures, and conference presentations, and it has been a great pleasure to immerse myself in a wide variety of such texts. As part of this work, I have read The Letter of Prester John, a forgery made at the court of Frederick Barbarossa, which purported to be sent from a Christian king who ruled a fantastical kingdom in the middle of India. The figure of Prester John had a massive impact on Western European utopian thinking form the twelfth century onwards, and continued to provide a touchstone for several generations of utopists.    

 

Other texts in this theme have been Anno 7603 (1781), a time-travel theatrical play by Johann Herman Wessel, Denis Veiras’ The History of the Sevarambians (1675), A Narrative of the Life and astonishing Adventures of John Daniel (1751) by Ralph Morris, and The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes (1708) by Hendrik Smeeks. Even the last finished book of year, The First Men in the Moon (1901) by H.G. Wells falls into this category. These books have been very enjoyable in their own right, but also immensely useful as I continue to research utopian thinking and how this aspect of the human imagination continues to impact the current discourse.

Denis Veiras, The History of the Sevarambians

Hendrik Smeeks, The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes

(Translated by Robert H. Leek)

H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon

A book in every language

As with every year, small mini-projects of reading materialise along the way. In the autumn of 2024, I realised that I was on my way to read one book in each of the six language in which I have reasonably fluent in both speaking and writing, and so I decided to complete the set, especially as I have not managed to do so in many years. Norwegian and English were easy to tick off the list, as these are the two main languages of my reading in any given year. Spanish is likewise a language I engage with a lot, but it is far rarer that I finish an entire book. One Spanish book that I finished in 2024 was El porque de los mapas (literally The why of maps) by Eduard Dalmau, a very fascinating account of the history of cartography until c.1500. Despite its shoddy treatment of the Middle Ages, it was a pleasant companion on several of my travels last year.         

Eduard Dalmau, El porque de los mapas

In Danish, I read the novel Spionen fra Atlantis (The spy from Atlantis) by Erik Juul Clausen. This is a delightful fantasy novel which describes a mission to find and steal a secret weapon in Egypt and bring it back to Helgoland, the centre of an Atlantis populated by proto-Danish speakers. Swedish was represented by Lena Liepe’s wonderful account of the cult of relics in the Nordic Middle Ages, Reliker och relikbruk i det medeltida Norden (Relics and the use of relics in the medieval Nordics). I do, however, feel that I have cheated with regards to German, as I read Alberto Manguel’s Sehnsucht Utopie (Utopian yearning), which was a translation from French that I encountered in a Vienna bookshop.  

Alberto Manguel, Sehnsucht Utopie

(Translated by Amelie Thoma)

Lena Liepe, Reliker och relikbruk i det medeltida Norden

 

What made me particularly happy about this mini-project was that I was able to finish my first book in French, namely Voyages en Utopie (Travels in Utopia) by Georges Jean. Granted, this book is very well illustrated, so it did not require a lot of reading to finish it, but I nonetheless felt a delightful pride in what is my first proper step in the further exploration of untranslated Francophone literature.

 

Georges Jean, Voyages en Utopie

Sundry highlights    

In addition to these main themes, there have also been several other highlights, both small and large, that have comprised the reading year of 2024.

 

 

Writing the last entry in the guest book at the family shieling, and whose first entry was written in 1957.         

 

Dropping by the Madrid book festival.        

 

Purchasing a collection of medieval sources pertaining to Portugal at a metro station bookshop in Lisbon.

 

Contemplating my book haul after two weeks in Iberia.     

 

Seeing the local bookshop in my native municipality advertising a multivolume work of local history with the slogan ‘You don’t need Google when you have the hamlet book’ (a hamlet book being a historical overview of all the families and farms of each local hamlet).           

 

Receiving author and editor copies of a co-edited volume of articles.

 

Working on articles at the shieling.              

 

Encountering a mini library at the train station in Lier, Belgium.  

 

Visiting the exhibition on the Law of the realm of 1274 at the National Library in Oslo (several times).     

 

Spending some last sessions of reading and writing at one of my favourite haunts, namely the library café at the University of Oslo.

 

+++   

Related blogposts (2024) 

My quest for Austrian poetry 

Synchronicity in Madrid 

A Dutch haul 

Reading-spots, part 5 

A lesson from the legend of Saint Christopher

I often think that if we, as a twenty-first-century society, ought to be more familiar with the literature of the past, in order to get a better sense of the psychological breadth that humankind contains. While we now have a much better grasp of some of the nuances of the psychological spectrum, our public discourse is often framed by axioms that are too general to capture the variety of human individuals - even though we are living through an age marked by unparalleled individualism. For instance, the idea often attributed to the stereotypical economist, that a person would not do something that was not in their own best interest, makes it difficult to understand how things have developed the way they have for the past ten years or so. Moreover, the ideals touted by the more optimistic types, such as how people will step up in a time of crisis or other variations on that theme, have been severely challenged by the blatant and overt willingness of so many actors to serve those who happen to be in power. In the case of those who take up the yoke offered by authoritarian powers, this is often explained as being driven by economic gain. After all, it is more financially profitable to serve the powerful, however morally ruinous it is.  

However, I find myself unconvinced that economic profit is always the best explanation for why people flock to the powerful. It might be true of the broad majority of such people, but I also believe that a significant number of those who become willing servants of authoritarian powers do so for other motives than just financial gain. This is where medieval literature comes in handy. In particular, I think the legend of Saint Christopher is particularly useful. 

In the Latin Middle Ages, Saint Christopher gained prominence in the thirteenth century, especially following the compilation of the Legenda Aurea by Jacobus de Voragine, which became widely disseminated - including in vernacular translations - from the last quarter of the century onwards. According to this version of the legend, Saint Christopher - originally named Reprobus before his conversion to Christianity - set out to serve the most powerful king. This ambition brings him into the service of a Canaanite king, but at court Christopher learns about the Devil. When witnessing how the mere mention of the Devil makes the king cross himself, Christopher sets out to serve the Devil instead, since he is so much more powerful. After entering into the service of the Devil, however, Cristopher learns that the Devil is afraid of Christ, and so he sets off on a new quest. Instructed by a hermit, Christopher settled by a river to carry travellers across, since such a task would fit the commands of Christ. One day, he carried Christ in the shape of a child across the river, and by this act - which became a popular motif in Latin medieval art - Christopher gained his new name (since Christoforos means Christ-bearer in Greek). 

While I am convinced that Saint Christopher never existed, historical existence is never a requirement for providing valuable lessons. The most important detail in this legend is that Christopher set out to serve, but to serve the most powerful. The reason for this desire is not expressed in the version found in Legenda Aurea, but the desire itself is identified clearly and matter-of-factly. And this is the lesson that I wish we would remember better in our own time, namely that some people are very eager to serve. In some cases, this eagerness is directed towards positive means of service, such as caring for those who need it, or engaging with your local community. But the desire to serve can also be perverted and have power as its lodestone, and there are indeed those who choose their masters simply because they admire and venerate power, no matter the configuration and consequences of that power. Saint Christopher - while he was still Reprobus - provides a clear example of this kind of service, and while we are allowed to doubt the reality of Christopher's story, its relevance for our own time, and its psychological depth, should be clearly acknowledged. 

Saint Christopher carrying the Christ-child (fifteenth century)

Sanderum Church, Denmark

Death and otherness - a note for the feast of the Holy Innocents

Today, December 28, is the feast of the Holy Innocents, instituted to commemorate the children murdered on the orders of Herod according to the Gospel of Matthew. Throughout the Latin Middle Ages, the feast held a high liturgical rank, and the episode itself was frequently depicted in various media. One of the best preserved examples is from the ciborium of Ål stave church, which was painted sometime in the second half of the thirteenth century. The scene is deeply moving, and hits immensely hard with its detailed rendition of violence and blood, and the raw humanity of the pleading mothers.  

Detail from the ciborium of Ål stave church 

Norway, thirteenth century 

Currently at the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo

This scene reminds me how universal grief is, and how the violent loss of children is a tragedy recognisable across temporal and cultural divide. Heart-rending and disturbing though it is, the depiction of the royally ordered slaughter of young children is nonetheless a valuable reminder of grief, of pain, and of motherly love. 

The scene unfolding in frozen timelessness on the wooden planks of the medieval ciborium also serves as a reminder of two great untruths that continue to influence the way many people deal with death and the cultural and temporal Other. There is a pervasive and seemingly inextinguishable idea that people in the past did not care that much about the loss of their children, as lower life expectancies had inured them against the pain of loss. While there might be variations of this idea where the callousness expected from medieval parents is not as hard, and where some grief is admitted, the core of the idea is nonetheless that grief hit differently back then. The temporal otherness of medieval people has enabled some of us to see them as different, and by consequence also less human. 

The reminder that the temporal Other could grieve like we do, is also tragically relevant in the second year of the genocide against the Palestinian people executed by the Israeli government. The way that the West has failed the Palestinians in their enormous and publicly unfolding tragedy is a blemish beyond words, and I believe it is related to deeply rooted prejudices that make so many people think that the cultural Other does not grieve and does not feel the way we do.  

The present blogpost is merely a grievous sigh in the midst of this ongoing calamity, and a faint hope that we might remember that grief, pain, and loss are human universals that cut like knives across temporal or cultural divides. 

 

Closing a chapter

 

Last Friday, I closed the most recent chapter in my life, as my postdoctoral contract came to an end. For 40 months, I lived and worked in Oslo, exploring new things, delving into old, familiar things, and learning more about myself and the world in the process. This period can best be summarised by the first of the two pictures below, as I quickly assembled a large collection of books in my office - most of them borrowed from the university library - and kept them as a reference library for both my actual and my intended writings. This was a temporary library, a library of ambitions. Some of these ambitions came to past, but, as is usually the case, the majority fell by the wayside due to time constraints, distractions, and various unforeseen or ad-hoc additional tasks that sucked both time and energy out of less prioritised projects.  

Friday December 14 was an emotional day. It marked the end of a period that entailed a lot of personal highs, but also some very crushing reminders of how academia is not a meritocracy, and that sometimes your efforts will not be rewarded. It was also a period that reminded how much academic work is hindered by admin, by formalities, and by various conventions that can often only be learned the hard way. I write this blogpost in quiet frustration, partly over the stunted personal hopes, but just as much because of the overarching societal trends that currently affect how we approach academic output and the value of universities and general education - trends that only make it more difficult to do the kind of work that helps us understand the nuances of reality somewhat better than what previous generations have been able to do. 

For the time being, I'm left to apply for jobs, and to digest all the lessons of the past 40 months, and to treasure those of my memories that can bring me joy.   

November 13

December 14 

Saint Nicholas in Compostela

Today, December 6, is the feast of Saint Nicholas. After the removal of his relics from Myra to Bari in 1087, his cult became more popular than before as it entered into the geographical ambit of the Latin Church, and thereby became more accessible to Latin Christian pilgrims. I do not yet know of any monographs that explore his cult in a longue durée perspective, and I only have a piecemeal overview of how his cult was received, what impact it made, and where the various parts of his iconography were embraced. In art, there were particularly three aspects that could be employed in the fashioning of statues or paintings, namely seafaring, a golden coin (which he gave to poor women in order to enable them to marry well), and his resurrection of three children that had been killed and placed in a tub. These last two episodes are rooted in his legend, whereas the seafaring might have had more to do with the voyage through which his relics were taken to Bari. Consequently, while several guilds came to embrace Saint Nicholas from the twelfth century onwards, depictions of him in art often appear to draw on his legend (although I should emphasise that this suggestion might be incorrect, and I encourage the reader to correct me if I am wrong).  

Two days ago, I was reminded of the miracle of the tub, since I was attending a guided tour of the cathedral museum of Santiago de Compostela. Among the many treasures of medieval art that have been made and used in the liturgical space of the cathedral since at least the twelfth century, is a fifteenth-century statue that is badly damaged yet completely recognisable thanks to the surviving iconographic feature, namely the tub. The statue shows Nicholas carrying the tub, while one of the three murdered boys climbs out of it. The boy is rendered in diminutive stature, perhaps both to emphasise his tender age, but also the greatness of Saint Nicholas. As this iconography was both widespread and common, it is likely that it has contributed to the metamorphosis of Nicholas towards the modern Santa Claus. Traditionally, the gift of golden coins is more directly linked with this trajectory, but as that story pertains to young girls rather than children more generally, it is tempting to suggest that both these episodes from Nicholas' legend have played their important parts in the eventual making of Santa Claus. 

One of the resuscitated children climbing up form the tub