Hopperstad stave church, part 2 - The flight to Egypt

In my previous blogpost, I talked about Hopperstad stave church in Vik in Western Norway, and its exterior. My aim was to showcase how the exterior decorations served to emulate styles from other parts of Latin Christendom, thus demonstrating that this wooden church in the Norwegian fjords was part of that same cultural community. In this blogpost, my purpose is the same - to highlight the interconnectedness of the Latin Christian world of the Middle Ages - but this time I will do so by focussing on one element from the church interior, namely a thirteenth-century ciborium.

The nave of Hopperstad stave church

Stave churches are small spaces, even those the most stupendous of them. This has mostly to do with the centralised skeleton of logs, around which the walls are raised. Consequently, the church space is different in a stave church than in, say, a basilica or a cruciform church, where the nave can be extended and where it is possible to build a broad and long space. This means that the division between nave and choir - an important division in the medieval liturgy - must be made in a different way than in other churches. As might be seen from the pictures, the ciborium where the priest performed the mass was not a separate room from the nave, but was situated in the nave itself. It is possible that in order to emphasise the difference between the space for the church-goers and the space for the ministrant priest, this ciborium was erected.

(It should be noted that the church as it stands today does have an apse-like choir, but this is a later addition.)

The decorations on the outside of the ciborium is from the thirteenth century, while the inside of the ciborium vault is covered with a series of roundels traditionally dated to the turn of the fourteenth century. It is especially this pictorial narrative that serves to highlight that the iconographic expressions of medieval Norway were the same as those found elsewhere in Latin Christendom.

The roundels in the vault recount the story of Christ's birth and the flight into Egypt. The narrative runs from left to right as you face the congregation, and the top four roundels contains the first part of the narrative, while the rest is told in the lower four.. In the top roundels we see the Annunciation, the Nativity, and the angel announcing the birth of Christ to the shepherds. In the bottom roundels we see the gift of the magi, the presentation in the temple, the slaughter of the innocents, and then the flight into Egypt.

These roundels are made in a style typical of its time, in emulation of styles in England and on the continent. The fact that the captions of the roundels are in Latin, and also impossible to see when you are part of the congregation, suggests that these roundels were intended primarily for the priest. We can only guess as to why it was painted, and one suggestion has been that it served to educate and remind the priest of the how the second-most important narrative of the Gospels actually progressed. This suggestion, while in and of itself reasonable, is borne out of a traditional impression of Norwegian medieval priests as poorly educated, barely latinate and in need of constant supervision. While there are sources from medieval Norway that testify to troublesome and insufficiently educated priests, the idea that this was representative of the entire medieval clergy in Norway is probably at its core a Protestant interpretation, which formed part of their general demonisation of the Catholic Middle Ages. Ultimately, we can only guess why this vault was painted the way it was when it is only visible to the priest, but considering that medieval church interiors were often covered in image cycles for educational as well as pious reasons, we should expect that these Norwegian roundels came about through a combination of intentions and desires - just as similar cycles did elsewhere in Christendom.