Briseld - the fires of Saint John's Eve, and a reflection on historical methodology

 
In Norway, Saint John's Eve, June 23, is the celebration of midsummer. The traditional name for this feast is 'jonsok', which is a contraction of 'jonsvaka', or John's wake, since this is the evening before the feast celebrating the birth of John the Baptist on June 24. This name points to the practice of keeping vigil during the night of important Christian feasts, usually in the hope that miracles would occur during the vigil. When we read medieval miracle accounts and catalogues, several of them recount how people were healed or had visions during the night hours. The night of a saint's feast was a mystical highpoint, both because of the expectation that miracles occurred in these hours, but also because this was when the clergy would celebrate the office of Matins, the most extensive performance of chants and readings in the course of the daily round of divine services. 

Midsummer traditions are often seen as forms of religious continuity, where pre-Christian traditions have been taken up in the Christian context and given new meaning. Such claims of continuity are often difficult to ascertain, partly because they often seem to stem from some kind of wishful thinking concerning the possibility of salvaging pre-Christian traditions. Interpreting these traditions as pagan survivals, or paganism pretending to be Christianity, is to underestimate the variety and complexity of Christian practice. Moreover, such interpretations tend to expect that the rules and norms of ecclesiastical ritual were the only forms of religious practice that was imagined in the Middle Ages, and that anything which deviated from these rules should not be labelled 'Christian'. To pursue such a line of thought is to accept the thinking of ecclesiastical leadership, those bishops, abbots and occasional parish priests who doggedly sought to ensure that their flocks kept to the straight and narrow path, and who saw deviation as a breach with orthodoxy. In other words, while we might encounter claims of pre-Christian continuity and pagan survivals in the writings of medieval churchmen, we tend to forget that these claims have a specific function for those ecclesiastics. This function is to signal the triumph of Christianity over paganism. The desire to write history as a narrative of progress and victory from the ecclesiastical point of view, means that stories of pagan survival has less to do with historical accuracy than with a particular view of teleological history. Such a narrative can be seen in the chapter on the feast of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist in Legenda Aurea, in which Jacobus de Voragine recounts that the bonfires of midsummer stem from a pre-Christian practice which served to keep away dragons. The smoke of the fires prevented dragons from ejaculating their sperm into wells, thereby poisoning the drinking water of the villages and farmsteads. While it is possible that such a practice has historical foundations, and while we should expect that Jacobus himself believed this practice to be a historical fact, we must remember that Jacobus wrote his collection of saints' legends in the 1260s, after more than a millennium of Christian history. Consequently, those so-called pre-Christian practices might just as well be early Christian practices replaced by more recent, or 'reformed', Christian practices.   

In more recently-Christianized parts of Latin Christendom, continuities in religious practice are more likely, but must therefore be approached with even more caution. This is especially the case in the Norse world, where there has long been a tendency to seek out pre-Christian practices in search for a so-called authentic Norse culture. This tendency is connected to the national romanticism and nationalism of the late nineteenth century, when the quest for the folk spirit of the Norse peoples was in vogue. 

Some aspects of the midsummer traditions of the Nordic countries do appear to have pre-Christian roots. The concept of the vigil, for instance, resembles the practice of 'uteseta' or 'out-sitting', which occurs in several Norse sagas written in the Christian period. This practice consisted of staying up at night to gain access to the secrets of the world, and to learn of hidden knowledge. The idea that nights, and especially nights imbued with extra holiness and mysticism like Saint John's Eve, were periods pregnant with revelations and visions has also continued in Norwegian folk tales, where we, for instance, learn that the animals gather at the night of July 29, the feast of Saint Olaf, to tell stories to each other. While we here might see Saint John's Wake as a pagan survival, we should nonetheless be cautious to suppose that Norse Christians themselves saw the vigil in this way, rather than as a way of petitioning Saint John the Baptist to intercede for them before the throne of God.   

Another aspect of the midsummer traditions that might at first seem like a pagan survival is the word 'briseld', which in my dialect is used about the bonfire itself. This version of the word is typical of Nordfjord, whereas the word is rendered as 'priseld' in Sunnfjord, which, as the name suggests, is the fjord south of Nordfjord. The word briseld can be translated as glimmering or shining fire. The prefix 'bris' appears in more well-known contexts such as 'brisingamen', the necklace worn by the goddess Frøya, which shone and glimmered with gold and jewels. It can be tempting to see the word briseld as a pagan survival, referencing some pre-Christian practice. However, we must also remember that although the Norse vernacular was the language of of the pre-Christian Nordic cultures, it was also the language of the Nordic medieval Christians, and the name itself can simply stem from a Christian context rather than anything older and pagan.  

The main point of these examples that I have listed here is that we must be cautious when interpreting traditions as survivals and continuities of something older. While we should expect that there is a lot of continuity in religious practice across the conversion from paganism to Christianity in several cultures, those aspects that are most typically taken as evidence for such continuity might easily be evidence of the opposite, or might at best echo a narrative that comes from a triumphalist Christian point of view.