Earlier this month, I explored one of the churches of my native municipality, Gloppen, in the Western fjords, and in this way I am slowly reaching my goal of exploring all the churches in the district. The trip was made possible thanks to a friend of mine who works as a sexton, and who showed me around the many nooks and crannies of the building. The church in question is referred to as "nye Gimmestad", or New Gimmestad. It was built in 1910 as a kind of successor to a seventeenth-century church which is still standing, and still in use. Moreover, in the Middle Ages there was also a church here, which we know from fourteenth-century letters from the bishop of Bergen, but the location of this medieval church is not known to us. What is clear, however, is that Gimmestad - meaning "old place" in Norse - was one of the main centres of local power in the Middle Ages. A stone cross situated close to the shoreline is believed to have been erected during the christianisation of the late tenth and early eleventh century, suggesting that there was an early collaboration between the head farmer/chieftain of the area and the priests.
I mention this early history of Gimmestad because when I explored the new church, I noticed that those who had been responsible for the decoration of the church throughout the decades had emphasised the historical continuity between the old and the new, and highlighted the historical continuity of Christian ritual at Gimmestad, which is the focus of this blogpost.
As a medievalist working on institutional identity, examining how ecclesiastical centres formulate their own place in history through texts and art, I was struck by the degree to which Gimmestad church also employed similar strategies of identity-construction as we often find in the case of medieval ecclesiastical institution. The decor invoked a sort of spiritual bond, a kind of transposing of religious authority, that was supposed to exist between the various remnants of historical religious practice, namely the stone cross and the old church from 1692. Some of this historico-spiritual continuity was formulated through what appeared to be coincidences, not revealing much intent but nonetheless some concern, suggesting that although past caretakers of the church might not have expressly wanted to showcase a spiritual continuity, they nonetheless ended up doing so. This will hopefully be clearer as we go along.
View from the nave
The first example of a formulation of historical continuity could be found in the church porch (a part of the building called "våpenhus", weapon house, in Norwegian, as it was said that those who went to church had to deposit their weapons here before entering the nave). In the porch stands a magnificent painting showing both the old and the new Gimmestad church in the greater landscape, invoking the moving of the religious centre of Gimmestad from the old to the new, and in this way describing the historical bond between them in an elegant and simple way. The effect is unmistakable. However, this painting, I was informed, was originally placed in another religious building, in Norwegian called "bedehus", literally prayer house. Such houses were common in the Norwegian religious landscape, and they were a kind of folk churches, or low-church arenas, in which itinerant preachers would often perform, and where the daily run of things was left to the laity. This does not mean that these prayer houses were divorced from the high church. After all, it was through the effort of the leaders of the prayer house that the new church at Gimmestad was erected in 1910, and also that the old church was saved from being torn down, as had been the original plan of the ministry of religious affairs at the time. As can be seen in the painting, the leaders of the prayer house cared about historical continuity, but the painting was not made for the church but rather ended up in the church once the prayer house became defunct.
The same process of moving items from the defunct prayer house to the new church is the explanation for the two examples below, a photograph of the old church and a painting of the medieval stone cross. These emphasise the long history of Christianity at Gimmestad, and they also express a sense of continuity between the religious sites, from the cross to the church to the prayer house to the new church. That they ended up in the new church was not planned, but the original purpose for when they were placed in the prayer house was exactly the purpose they serve now in the new church: Highlighting the spiritual bond between these locations.
Moving on from these unintentional markers of historico-spiritual continuity, we also see that part of the decor in the church is deliberately fashioned to emphasise the spiritual bond between the old and the new church, and with the stone cross. This can be seen in three paintings from the Danish artist Kjeld Heltoft, finished in 2000 and commissioned by the church. The first painting is the altar painting, located on the right-hand side of the choir. Here we see the new church, the statue of Christ in the choir - presumably invoking Matthew 18:20 - and the holy spirit descends to the congregation. And in the foreground, we see a fish in a twisted shape, and this is the clue to the historical continuity.
The fish represented in the painting is a cod that was suspended from the ceiling in Old Gimmestad sometime in the eighteenth century. One version of the story states that it was caught by a farmer on a Sunday, a day when it was prohibited to work, and as penance the farmer gave the fish to the priest. The fish has become iconic, and serves in the painting above to be a pars pro toto invocation of the old church, showing the continuity of spiritual history that binds the two buildings together.
The same emphasis of historical continuity is seen in two paintings that hang either side of the door from the porch and into the nave, also by Kjeld Heltoft, and commissioned for the church. One shows the medieval cross, the second shows the old church, with the iconic fish visible in its original location hanging from the beams of the ceiling.
I was also struck by another piece of art displayed in the church, located just behind the first row of benches as you enter the nave from the porch. The picture, whose artist I do not know, is one of several children's artworks to be found in the church, but this one has, whether intentionally or not, latched on to the iconographic theme of historical continuity that permeates the new church Gimmestad. While I cannot say with certitude that the family fishing in a boat is meant to invoke, or inspired by, the story of the cod in Old Gimmestad, it is very tempting to make that association, and it is at least very apposite.
Even the smallest or poorest of churches tend to have some sort of comprehension and care for its place in history - be it the universal history of Christendom, or a more elaborate historical vision whose geographical framework is marked by more details. This historical identity can be expressed as simply as having the year of the church's founding written somewhere in the church space, or memorabilia of other religious sites in the area. But rarely have I seen such a comprehensive iconographic programme of historical and religious continuity in such a relatively small church as I have in New Gimmestad. And as a historian specialising in such forms of identity-construction, I was thrilled to see it.
A view towards the old church
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