Today is July 10, which is the feast-day of Saint Knud Rex, a Danish king who was killed in 1086. His cult was formally established in 1095 when his bones were translated to a new burial place after being tested in the fire. The feast of Saint Knud Rex was celebrated throughout medieval Denmark, and also reached Norway within a few decades. Although the cult of Saint Knud in medieval Norway is still insufficiently mapped, we know that the feast was important enough to be mentioned as a day of rest in the law of the Gulathing province - one of the four juridical units of twelfth-century Norway. This lawcode was written down around 1160 in the Norwegian vernacular, in which the feast of Saint Knud was known as 'knutsok', meaning 'knutsvaka' or 'the vigil of Knud'.
July 10 was marked on late-medieval runic calendars with a rake or a scythe to signal the beginning of harvest season. This was when the Julian calendar was still in use, and so this date came slightly earlier in the agrarian cycle than it does today. Even so, the feast of Saint Knud continued to be a marker in the annual round also after the Danish-Norwegian Reformation of 1536/37. Well into the twentieth century, it was customary in my home village of Hyen that July 10 was the date when the cattle and the milkmaids moved to the summer farms - either on the day itself or the weekend nearest that date. (In some cases the milkmaids did not stay at the summer farm but only spent the nights and then returned tot he farms to participate in the harvest in the daytime.) While I never heard my grandparents talk about knutsok when growing up - as opposed to jonsok (Saint John's Eve) or pederstol (cathedra petri) - it is evident that the medieval practice of connecting harvest season with the feast of the saint-king was still alive several centuries after the formal introduction of Protestantism in Norway.
In our time, the summer farm in my part of the village is mostly used as a recreational space. None of the byres that still stand are used for keeping animals, and the cattle are now mostly moving about freely in certain parts of the valley. The summer farm is a beloved space, and much of my childhood was spent here, learning about the natural cycle in this part of the village. Today, I went to the shieling that belongs to my family. I did this as an homage to the old ways, even though we only stay at the shieling for a few days at a time, and then only for the sheer pleasure of it. A few sheep were grazing in one of the nearby fields, and the scent of pines, ling and bog filled an air rich with moisture. It felt right to maintain this connection - however flimsy, tenuous and construed - with a tradition that is now lost to all but a vague collective memory deciphered by scholars, and it was a pleasant reminder that some things are worth doing if only symbolically.
