Reading-spots, part 6

 

In December, after the end of my most recent employment, I returned home to my native village of Hyen in the Western Norwegian fjords. Here, I spend as much time as I can tying up various loose ends, applying for jobs, and working on the several commitments I have made to friends and colleagues. Such transitions like this one are always difficult, always emotional, because they are final and irreversible, and they are always tinged with a series of annoying what-ifs. As I'm settling into a new rhythm, I also find myself seeking out some solutions I have tried out before. One of these is to use my late paternal grandfather's room as an office, which was how I organised my work back in 2021. I was then in a similar situation, although I still had some short-term employment, and to sit in this room again with a cup of coffee and a cup of tea makes the transition seem less dramatic - the irreversibility of turning a new page feels less dauting, simply because I have been here before.  

This early in the year, it is still too cold to spend long sessions in this room, but when I do the quietness of the walls and the view of the beloved fjord serve as a great framework for thinking and reading, and especially to try and forget about the world for long enough periods at a time.  

Typographic continuity - an example from the novel Antangil

 

In a recent blogpost, I wrote about some of my early impressions and experiences researching the 1616 utopian novel Histoire du grand et admirable royaume d'Antangil incogneu jusques a present à tous historiens et cosmographes (History of the great and admirable kingdom of Antangil, unknown until the present by all historians and cosmographers). Since then, I have had cause to delve deeper into structure of the book, and the book as an object - mainly in order to compare its thematic division with similar works, and to see how much of the novel was dedicated to military matters. 

One detail that struck me with particular force during this work, was how the typography of the of a book printed in 1616 retained many of the same features of medieval manuscript culture that was carried over into the first printed European books. Granted, I always tend to emphasise continuity and to eschew the common medieval/early modern divide, but I was pleasantly surprised to see how the abbreviations from the Middle Ages were retained. One passage that demonstrated the situation particularly well is the one illustrated below, from a chapter on the exercises of the gendarmerie in times of peace. The passage describes how the soldiers are promised to be liberally bestowed with "[charges] et honneurs, venans à se monstrer de plus en plus braves, genereux et fideles" (responsibilities and honours, coming to show themselves off as more and more brave, generous and faithful). I am amused by this aspect of early seventeenth typography, and especially because this makes it actually easier for me to read the text, unaccustomed as I am to read French and seventeenth-century material. 

I. D. M. G. T., Histoire du grand et admirable royaume d'Antangil incogneu jusques a present à tous historiens et cosmographes, 1616, p. 90.

Eden in the Norwegian fjords

Yesterday, I wrote a blogpost on how medieval Christians in Europe connected themselves to the biblical past through typology. Typological thinking, however, is a phenomenon in many Christian cultures and periods, and today I was reminded of another case of Nordic biblical typology that is far removed from the twelfth-century baptismal font in Fiskbæk Church.  

I come from the small village of Hyen in the Western Norwegian fjords, and at the time of writing I am residing here while applying for jobs. Earlier today, I went for a walk which took me along part of the old main road which was used from time immemorial until the 1930s. In so doing, I passed an old stone which looks somewhat like a bed or a couch, which goes by the name of "Adam og Eva-steinen", the Adam and Eve stone. My paternal grandmother, born in 1912, told me about how she and her generation imagined that this was where Adam and Eve had their bed, and this idea was commonly shared at the time of her childhood. My grandmother also had an idea that I believe to be her own - at least based on how she told me about it when I was little - namely that the orchard of one of the farms in this part of the village was the Garden of Eden.  

My grandmother was born into a world of Lutheran piety, where the biblical frame of reference saturated a lot of popular culture as well as the schools and public gatherings. In this sense, Western Norway of the 1910s was quite similar to the Middle Ages, although the type of Christianity in those two eras were very different from one another. It was only natural that both children and adults would fuse their knowledge of the Bible and their immediate geographical horizon together in the way that led to the naming of the Adam and Eve stone. This case, then, points to how easily typological thinking can be infused into a cultural framework, and how human creativity can run with this kind of thinking and create very lovely and very endearing ideas.  

 

The River Jordan in Denmark - a baptismal font from Fiskbæk Church

 

In the Latin Middle Ages,  meaning the part of the medieval world where Latin was the liturgical language, people understood themselves as belonging to a divinely created pattern where contemporary elements were reiterations of similar elements from biblical history. To put it differently: people, events and iconography of, say, the twelfth century interpreted their role in Creation according to patterns and references laid out in the Bible. This typological connection could be iterated in many different ways, such as by drawing on biblical passages in descriptions of persons or in narratives, or by presenting persons or events as new iterations of episodes in the Bible. This connection provided a keystone in Latin medieval identity-construction. 

In this short blogpost, I present to you one of the vestiges that point to this typological thinking, which also shows how this way of thinking was disseminated to every nook and cranny of Latin Christendom. The vestige in question is a Romanesque baptismal font from Fiskbæk Church in Northern Jutland. The font is most likely twelfth century. I have not yet encountered any suggestions about its origin, but it could very well be from Gotland where the production of baptismal fonts was common in this period. 

The font is beautifully carved with a row of trees circling the bowl, and these trees provide the key to the nature of the typological connection represented by the font. While it is always difficult to assess exactly which tree is represented in these highly stylised renditions, it is safe to assume - based on the shape - that the middle tree in the picture is intended to be a palm tree. The palm tree is a symbol of the Holy Land, and pilgrims to Jerusalem returned with pilgrim badges in the shape of palm leaves to commemorate their journey.     

Given that this is a baptismal font, the evocation of the Holy Land is particularly interesting. The trees are lined up in a row as if on a river bank, and we know that beyond the trees - so to speak - is the water in which people are baptised into the Christian faith. In the Bible (Mark 1:6-9), John the Baptist baptises Christ in the River Jordan to mark the start of Christ's ministry on earth. The font in Fiskbæk Church serves as a reminder that every Christian who is baptised imitates Christ, and in the moment of baptism the little church in Fiskbæk Northern Jutland is mystically transformed into a new iteration of the River Jorden. This is the logic of typology, and such connections with the biblical past could be done simply, effectively, and very poetically. A row of stylised trees in stone sufficed to evoke one of the key elements in the history of Christ and, by extension, the history of human salvation, as viewed by Christian eyes.