After the interview - or, Correcting a big mistake

This post is in response to a very big mistake I made last month. I should have known better, and it has bothered me profoundly ever since. The mistake cannot be undone, but I am writing this as a way to correct the record, as it were. 

In the middle of April, I attended a conference organized to mark the millennium of the so-called Moster assembly. According to twelfth-century sources, such as the Law of the Gulathing Law Province, which covered most of what is today Western Norway, it was at this assembly that Saint Olaf and Bishop Grimkell introduced the Christian law to Norway. The date of this assembly is traditionally set to 1024, and although the dating is debated, there are good reasons for accepting that such an assembly did indeed take place. What is more contested, however, is the importance of this assembly in its own time, and much of current scholarship is of the opinion that the importance for the Christianization of Norway was rather limited, partly because much of Norway was already Christian at that time. The importance of the historical assembly was much greater for the twelfth-century Norwegian Church, as this event became a historical point of reference that the clergy could use to formulate its institutional identity and provide an anchor point in the country's past. In other words, the assembly became a tool of legitimization for the Norwegian Church.  

At the conference, I gave a presentation called 'Stories of a Violent Triumph – The Conversion of Norway in Light of the Hagiographical Tradition'. My aim was to show how our ideas about Norway being converted by the sword was established in the twelfth century, and is largely exaggerated, although not completely wrong. I sought to problematize our willingness to subscribe to simple narratives, and to show that our understanding of the history of eleventh-century Norway is hugely influenced by the way in which the Norwegian Church sought to establish its identity. 

During the conference, I was contacted via email by someone from a Norwegian conservative Christian media outlet. They asked if I would give a written interview about my talk, and sent me a number of questions about the topic and about our own contemporary approach to this part of Norway's past. It took a long time for me to decide on what to do. I had never heard of this outlet, and after checking some of its texts I was disgusted but not horrified - disgusted because I could see that they were conservatives of a type that I both dislike and disrespect, but not horrified because from the samples that I made, they did not seem to espouse the more militant views typical of American conservative Christians, such as a blind and militant support of the Israeli government in their effort to commit genocide on the Palestinian people.  

After mulling it over in my head for a couple of days, I said yes, and wrote some responses to each of the questions I had been sent. I said yes, because I thought I had found a way to both take this opportunity to do some outreach, and also to challenge their conservative views. As I am myself a Christian, I thought I could use my familiarity with the Christian frame of reference and the Norwegian Christian tradition to make my points in a way they could understand, and in a way that would be familiar to them. Consequently, in my responses, I talked about how the Christian law did not suddenly and radically improve the life of those members of society that were at the bottom of the hierarchy, such as slaves and the mentally or physically handicapped. I also explained that while I do not believe Norway to have been converted predominantly by the sword, there are plenty of examples of how Christians became persecutors once they had attained power, drawing on the case of Archbishop Ambrosius of Milan, who ordered the torture of Arian Christians, and also emphasizing that the Crusades led to unimaginable atrocities committed against Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Middle East. I stated that I do not believe that milestones in Norway's Christian history should be celebrated, even though they should be acknowledged and be used as opportunities to reflect on our understanding of the past - i.e., that they could be commemorated, but not celebrated. I also made sure to make reference to the ongoing genocide in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli government in two of my responses. 

I hoped that my interview would provide a small measure of balance in a media outlet that espouses a Christian nationalism that I find revolting. I hoped that I could enter into this territory and provide a countervoice that could potentially lead to some readers less mired in the myopic and simplistic understanding of reality to distance themselves from the outlet's grand narrative. I hoped that I could make a difference. I was utterly, completely and gut-wrenchingly wrong. 

After the interview was over, the whole affair escaped my mind for a while, as there were other things to think about. However, a few weeks later, I decided to check how the person who contacted me had rendered the material that I had given. After all, they had said that they had only made some teeny-tiny changes to the text. The changes, however, were not teeny-tiny, as both my references to the ongoing genocide had been deleted. All that remained of my effort to counteract Christian supremacism was the reference to the atrocities of the Crusades, and that they had been committed against Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Middle East. To increase my utter dismay, it seems that the outlet has also ramped up its Zionist rhetoric in the past few weeks - or perhaps I only now have managed to notice it properly. 

I feel very stupid for having agreed to participate in the interview. I feel very stupid for having lent my name to this outlet in a way that only serves to legitimize it. I feel very stupid for thinking that I could make a difference when the outlet was in control of how the final product would appear. I abhor Christian supremacism, conservatism, nationalism and Zionism, and I have contributed to the outlet in a way that only strengthens. For this, I am both deeply ashamed and deeply troubled. Hopefully, I will know better than to engage with such people in terms that are so in favour to them a second time.        

No soy peregrino - a first encounter with Santiago de Compostela

Sunday morning I arrived in Santiago de Compostela after a long and arduous journey on the night bus from Madrid. I had underestimated the need for planning far ahead when travelling to Santiago, so when I sat down to buy the tickets I had to forego the quicker and more comfortable train. Looking back, this was effectively a foreshadowing of the lesson I came to draw from my first encounter with the city itself. This first encounter came about when I was leaving the bus station. A man accosted me and asked me for money to travel, and because I am stupidly unaccustomed to carry small cash, I had nothing to give him. One thing that struck me was that as he was explaining his situation, he included the defence "no soy peregrino", I am not a pilgrim. This very simple disclaimer carried a lot of context, and it was a glimpse into local attitudes about pilgrims, a glimpse with more clarity than I would have expected. However, I was only surprised by the clarity of the statement, not what the statement alluded to, because as one of the foremost pilgrimage sites in Western Europe, Santiago de Compostela is full of pilgrims of all sorts. 

That evening, when meeting up with a dear friend of mine who is herself from Galicia and lives in Santiago, I mentioned this encounter, and she confirmed my suspicions about local attitudes. It is quite common that modern pilgrims ask for money and argue that they should receive it because they are performing a pious endeavour. This is an argument that would be perfectly legitimate in the Middle Ages, when many people would not have had the means to cover every expense of the journey to Santiago and back home. Nowadays, however, when a lot of the pilgrims are dressed in outdoor gear that is certainly not inexpensive, carrying modern-day walking sticks and other paraphernalia, the idea that some of these people ask for money does leave a bad taste in one's mouth. 

I am writing this on my third day in Santiago, and I very much sympathise with the locals in their distaste for the tourism connected with the pilgrimage. Every day, I have seen numerous people with their backpacks - which are not permitted when entering the cathedral - their walking sticks, and, occasionally, some odd headwear that seems borderline farcical. I try very much not to be a pilgrim, at least not in this sense, and so far it seems that I am succeeding in not appearing as a tourist. I wear a shoulder bag rather than a backpack, I am dressed in ordinary clothes, and I speak a passable Spanish. On the other hand, I am also both a tourist and a pilgrim. This is my first time in Santiago, and I have already got lost while trying to exit the labyrinth that is the old town. Moreover, going to Santiago has been a dream of mine for years, and my scholarly interest in the cult of Santiago himself, Saint James the Elder, is one of the primary reasons for being here. Yesterday, for instance, I bought my first Bible in Spanish, something I decided years ago that I would first do in Santiago de Compostela rather than in any of the other places in Spain that I have visited. And as I have been sauntering about town for a couple of days now, I am very much feeling like some sort of pilgrim. But I also have a very strong feeling that if I ever came in a situation in which it were relevant, I would also add the very useful disclaimer: I am not a pilgrim. 

View of the historical centre of Santiago de Compostela from the outskirts of Sar 

The towers of the cathedral can be seen in the centre of the picture

Saint Florian and the fire

Today, May 4, is the feast of Saint Florian. According to legend, he was killed during the Diocletian persecution, and his main cult centre was at Linz in Austria. His relics, however, were said to be kept at Rome, and from there they were allegedly translated to Krakow in 1183/84. In the later Middle Ages, Florian was predominantly venerated in Austria and Poland, due to the centres of Linz and Krakow.

It was believed that his wonderworking speciality - or his patronage par excellence, as it were - was protection against fire. The belief in Florian's firefighting abilities is clearly demonstrated by this late-fifteenth-century statue from Vienna, where the saint is pouring water onto a towered building which seems to be on fire. As this statue was originally placed on the facade of a house nearby the Church of Saint Stephen, Vienna's cathedral, it is likely that several onlookers would interpret the building at Florian's feet as the cathedral which he was facing.       

Florian's armour marks him as a soldier saint, which was quite common for male saints of the Diocletian persecutions. Tales of Christian soldiers in the imperial army who were martyred for their faith were popular, and the sheer size of the Roman army - at least as that size was imagined in later centuries - provided a near-endless possibility for new stories to be told. Just as the Diocletian persecutions became a time in which it was logical to place unknown saints or saints of an uncertain date, so the occupation of a Roman soldier became a logical marker of male saints killed in this period.

Saint Florian, c.1480-c.1490 

Wien Museum Karlplatz

Synchronicity in Madrid - encountering Equatorial Guinea

As all human beings, I experience coincidences that might loosely fit under the term 'synchronicity', that elements that are thematically connected, or resemble each other, happen at the same time or to the same person without there being any causal connection between them. Mostly when this happens, I relish the coincidence and I find it very pleasing, and one such pleasing case came about during my current sojourn in Madrid.  

By the time I am writing this, I am sitting in a small room in an apartment in Madrid, preparing for the next step of my journey and reflecting on the various experiences I have had in the past few days. In preparation for my holiday, I decided to bring something to read on the road, as it were, even though I already have ended up expanding my personal library with a few items - to say nothing of those that are likely to be added in the days ahead. The novel is the gut-wrenchingly beautiful By night the mountain burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, a writer from Equatorial Guinea, translated into English from Spanish by Jethro Soutar. The book is a novelised rendition of Ávila Laurel's experiences on the island of Annobón some distance from the Atlantic coast of Africa, and now belonging to Equatorial Guinea, which was a Spanish colony until 1963.  

I brought this novel with me for the simple reason that by the time of departure, I had not yet finished it, and I was stuck in a part of the novel that is particularly difficult to get through. However, I also thought that it was fitting to be reading a text written in Spanish, albeit in an English translation, when going to Spain. As it turned out, I would encounter several other aspects of life in Equatorial Guinea - albeit mainland Equatorial Guinea - and I did so when visiting the National Museum of Anthropology. This visit was not planned, because this museum is not widely known by tourists, and it was almost empty while I was there. It is a small museum, but full of very interesting materials collected from various parts of the world, including Equatorial Guinea. To me, it was particularly exciting, as well as quite touching, to be able to see something from the country of the book I was reading - even though I was also quite aware that the items in the museum are largely from the nineteenth century rather than the mid-twentieth century described by Ávila Laurel, and even though I was aware that the Fang culture of mainland Equatorial Guinea is very different from the culture of Annobón. The connection was nonetheless striking, and did help bring several aspects of Ávila Laurel's novel - above all the hardship and the various cultural codes that dictated parts of communal conduct - more vividly to life. 

Bikuele, a form of currency in the Fang culture of Equatorial Guinea

Museo Nacional de Antropología, Madrid 

Two types of bikuele, and a wooden seat

Museo Nacional de Antropología, Madrid

Fang headdress, collected in 1890-91

Museo Nacional de Antropología, Madrid

Bottle from the Fang culture, first half of the twentieth century

Museo Nacional de Antropología, Madrid

Wooden mortar, from the Fang culture

Museo Nacional de Antropología, Madrid

Random resonances - the Law of the Gulathing Province and the First Book of Samuel

As a historian, I am trained to look for patterns and connections in history. Not in the sense of how the learned understood history in the Latin Middle Ages, which was founded on the idea that history was shaped by a divine creator, and that the patterns, symmetries and repetitions of history were part of God's plan. In modern academic history, we have thankfully lost this methodological principle, a principle that I believe to be both bad history and bad theology. In modern academic history, however, the patterns and connections have to do with detecting influences and offering hypotheses about how impulses and ideas might have travelled, and whether phenomena appearing in one part of the world is connected to similar phenomena elsewhere. 

In general, it is fair to say that people in my geography of expertise, Western Europe, have received and passed on impulses across a much larger chronological scope than we often tend to given them credit for, and that roads of trade, travel, pilgrimage and plunder have been established much earlier than the surviving sources allow us to ascertain. Yet despite the undoubtable un-reconstructable routes of contact, it is also important to keep in mind that some similarities have nothing to do with influence, but are rather random resonances. These resonances are such that they might allow one individual familiar with both ideas or impulses to recognize the similarity, but this similarity would be more of a surprise, something uncanny, perhaps, rather than the kind of recognition that comes from something familiar. 

The concept of random resonances was something that occurred to me as I was preparing a presentation for a conference on Mostertinget, the Moster assembly, which traditionally has been regarded as the place where Christian law was introduced to Norway in 1024. Modern scholars are doubtful about this narrative, at least when it comes to the claims about the importance of this assembly. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to accept that something important happened at this assembly, and that we are still unlearning a lot of the accumulated tradition in order to better understand the importance of this historical event.  

Moster, an island south of Bergen in Western Norway, was part of the law province that is called Gulatinget, the Gula thing or the Gula assembly, which covered most of Western Norway south of Møre up until the implementation of a law of the realm in 1274. The rules of this provincial law were passed down orally until they were written down in the second half of the twelfth century. One of these rules lay out the proper and legal conduct for when a ship called out to defensive service in the event of an attack from the sea, is running out of food and needs to replenish its stores. This rule is found in the part of the law that Erik Simensen, in his 2021 translation of the Older Gulathing Law, has rendered as 'The book on the naval levy'. In his translation, the rule is as follows: 

Now they return northward and run out of food, then they should call other ships to witness and show them their food, that they have no more food than one month’s rate of each kind for two squads, then they may slaughter two head of cattle from a householder with impunity, and they should pay two aurar for a cow and the same (amount) for a three-year-old ox, and two and a half aurar for a full-grown ox; and they should leave the head, the hide and the feet behind; then they are free of guilt if they slaughter in that way. But if they take away the head or the feet or the hide, then they are liable to punishment. 

- The Older Gulathing Law, translated by Erik Simensen, 2021: 203

The rule is typical of the old Norwegian laws: detailed an eminently practical. The command that the head, the hide and the feet should be left behind is probably to be understood as a form of receipt, a physical proof of what a family had lost in the name of the kingdom's defence. Perhaps we might also see this as a way of leaving parts of the animal that would also yield some food in the even that the family in question were likewise in dire straits.  

The age of the Gulathing law is an unsolvable historical question, especially because it underwent changes across centuries, and even though it is a very conservative law - as most laws tend to be - it is far from as stable as some people might imagine. Consequently, when talking about the random resonance to this passage, some caveats are in order. The resonance I encountered - as randomly as is the resonance itself - comes from 1 Samuel, one of the books of the Old Testament that would probably have not been widely known in Norway by the eleventh century. I emphasise this caveat because we know very little about the transmission of the Bible in medieval Norway. Christianity is likely to have arrived in Norway much earlier than we traditionally think - which is the second half of the tenth century - but it is only in the eleventh century that a Norway-wide church organisation came into being. The transmission of the Bible, in this early period of Christianisation, was predominantly oral and conveyed through the sermons of the priests. Some books of the Bible might have been available at certain religious centres, but I very much doubt that any one-volume edition of the Bible ever existed in medieval Norway. This is all to say that big chunks of the Old Testament are likely to have been unknown to most medieval Norwegians until at least the twelfth century. 

Given the probability of the books of Samuel having had little cultural impact in the time when the section on the levy of boats in the Gulathing Law was implemented, I was struck by how someone familiar with the Gulathing Law might have reacted to the following passage from 1 Samuel: 

And the next day again, when they rose in the morning, they found Dagon lying upon his face on the earth before the ark of the Lord: and the head of Dagon, and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold 

- 1 Samuel 5:4 

  

The passage in question relates the destruction of the statue of the god of the Philistines following their stealing of the Ark of the Covenant, which was brought to the land of Azotus and placed next to the statue. The breaking of the head and the hands was the culmination of a series of signs that led the Philstines to return the Ark to the Israelites. In a way, the hands and head of Dagon can be understood as a kind of receipt, evidence for the stronger power of the god of the Israelites, and a manifestation of a certain hierarchy. However this was encountered, whether written, spoken or, which is unlikely, in pictures, to Norwegians familiar with the Gulathing Law, this story would perhaps have resonated in a particular way, seeing that the head and the feet - or the head and the hand - carried a specific legal connotation that also marked the trust to be placed in a higher authority, in this case the king of Norway. By bringing the feet and the head of the commandeered cattle, Norwegians had hope for restitution, a hope that in turn legitimised the government of the king over that of local lords. Norwegians might, therefore, have understood the importance of this display of power enacted on the statue of Dagon, precisely because their own culture had a similar symbolism that was also connected with the hierarchy of power. 

Of course, we do not know of any medieval Norwegians, at least outside the clergy, who knew of the fate of Dagon's statue. The juxtaposition has laid the ground for an entirely hypothetical scenario, but one that might be of some academic value nonetheless. Because the imagery of the head and the hands in the Bible is older than the Gulathing Law, but did most likely not influence the latter. The similarity between these two texts, that each in their own way pertained to the recognition of power and authority,  is an entirely random resonance - one that might have taken on a particular meaning to a particular audience owing to complete coincidence. Such resonances might affect the reception of the new, unfamiliar element of the juxtaposition. Consequently, even though we cannot assert any historical examples of such receptions, we might imagine that they existed, and by imagining this we might come closer to acknowledge how the patterns and similarities that we encounter in the study of history might be nothing but coincidence.  

Saint George in Vienna - the protector and the shield

 

Today is the feast of Saint George, who, according to his legend, was a Roman soldier martyred during the Diocletian persecutions of the early fourth century. The early history of his cult is obscure, and scholars have yet to piece together something close to an overview of the cult's trajectory throughout the medieval period. What we do know, however, is that from the twelfth century onwards, George became increasingly popular in Latin Christendom, and in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the image of George as a dragonslayer became dominant in his iconography. I have written a short piece on this trajectory here. That George was both a soldier and a dragonslayer made him a very suitable patron for knights and other soldiers, and we often find his image in a military context. One such context I encountered by chance while I was visiting the Wien Museum on Karlsplatz in January, which has a small but very interesting selection of artefacts from Vienna's medieval past. Among these artefacts is a late-fifteenth-century shield featuring Saint George in the act of slaying the dragon, standing atop it and piercing the beast with a spear - a posture inherited from the iconography of Saint Michael the Archangel.   

The image of Saint George is quite typical of the period and resembles a number of contemporary depictions in church art, such as a wall-painting from Sanderum Church in Denmark. However, it is the first time I see the dragonslayer on a shield, an object which really highlighted the close ties between the cult of saints and the military life of the Middle Ages. The shield is called Setztartsche, or in English a pavise, and was developed by the Hussites during the Hussite Wars of the early fifteenth century. The shield featuring Saint George, however, was used in Vienna, and was part of the city's own armament efforts of the late 1400s.   

The ubiquity of the cult of saints in medieval life is a continuous source of fascination for me, and the many ways in which the saints were present in people's lives - if only as images - is a good reminder that we are still a long way away from understanding the full impact of the the cult of saints in medieval society. 

Pavise featuring Saint George 

Wien Museum Inv. 126100

New publication: 'Saints and Urban Medievalism: The Case of Saint Knud Rex in Modern-Day Odense'

 

Earlier this week, I was notified about the publication of the collection of articles Doing Memory: Medieval Saints and Heroes and Their Afterlives in the Baltic Sea Region (19th–20th centuries), edited by Cordelia Heß and Gustavs Strenga. The book is open access, and can be read and downloaded here. I was elated by these news, as the collection also features an article written by me, namely 'Saints and Urban Medievalism: The Case of Saint Knud Rex in Modern-Day Odense'. 

Cover of Doing Memory (ed. Heß and Strenga)

Courtesy of De Gruyter 

The article is an examination of how the figure of Saint Knud Rex - who was king of Denmark from 1080 to his murder in 1086 - has been used in the cityscape of Odense, the city where he was killed and later venerated as a saint. The article puts together a range of materials from artworks, signage and place names in Odense, and examines these sources through the concept of urban medievalism, a term I coined for a conference presentation in 2020. 

I am very proud of this article, because it allowed me to explore a new timeframe and types of historical sources with which I am not accustomed to working, such as temporary art works. It also provided a great opportunity to become more familiar with the concept of medievalism - the reception of the medieval past in a post-medieval era - and to think more carefully about how we, as modern humans, make use of the Middle Ages. 

The article was also a joy to write, in part because the writing and subsequent publication mark the culmination of a process that began in the autumn of 2014, and I can see how ideas and observations from back then have flourished into the text that now has been published. It was in 2014 that I moved to Denmark to begin my PhD, and as I was exploring my new home I was frequently bemused by the numerous details of the cityscape that showed some sort of engagement with the Middle Ages, or with ideas, concepts and aesthetics from the medieval period. For instance, that autumn I wrote a blogpost on artworks depicting dragonslayers in Odense. 

In the course of the five years I lived in Denmark, I accumulated a collection of pictures and notes that I intended to put together into some sort of overview. Eventually, that goal did not come to fruition, at least not as I had intended it to do, but the process of collecting and reflecting on these aspects of the cityscape of Odense did provide me with the groundwork for writing this article. I am very happy that the article has given me an opportunity to engage with these materials that I gathered during my Danish sojourn. Moreover, I am quite proud to note how the article provides glimpses of a process in the history of Odense, as many of the pictures and details used in the article were taken and noted down during the now-completed building of the Odense tramway, as well as apartment complexes. The tramway and the apartments have significantly changed the Odense city centre, and the archaeological excavations and subsequent construction work allowed for an engagement with the city's medieval past - both through the items encountered in the excavations and the artworks that served to beautify the temporary walls around the construction site. During my time in Odense, the city was changing, and I was living through a temporary state that was designed to end in the near future. This feeling of living in a moment with a looming endpoint - a transformation nearing completion, as it were - made me all the more alert to the importance of recording some of these changes. The article has allowed me to share some images of a cityscape that is no longer there, because even though the constituent parts of the city are still in place, new buildings have been erected and the vistas are no longer the same. The article, in short, provides some snapshots of a lost past, recorded in the process of losing that past.