A saint against lightning - Saint Olaf and the bell at Moster Old Church

 

Today is the feast of Saint Olaf, the patron saint of Norway, who died at the Battle of Stiklestad north of Trondheim in 1030. He was declared holy on August 3 1031 by Bishop Grimkell. The bishop had the king's body translated to the Church of Saint Clement, and at this point in time the authority of a bishop - the only bishop in Norway - was sufficient to proclaim someone's sainthood. The cult of Saint Olaf became a defining feature of medieval Norway, and also spread throughout the North Atlantic and Baltic regions. 

Since the cult of Saint Olaf was in practice ubiquitous in medieval Norway, there are several sources that testify to the veneration of the saint-king - and even more sources that we should presume lost in the passage of time. One of the surviving sources is the oldest of the two bells in Moster Old Church in Southwestern Norway. The church dates to the mid-twelfth century, and is located in the village where twelfth-century tradition claims that Saint Olaf and Bishop Grimkell introduced Christian laws to Norway at the Moster assembly in 1024. The historicity of this tradition is dubious. It is not certain that there was an assembly at Moster in 1024, and it is even more uncertain whether the Christian laws were introduced at such an assembly. When the Norwegian provincial laws were recorded in writing in the second half of the twelfth century, the text of Gulathing law - in whose law province Moster is situated - established this tradition and made it part of the Church's formulation of Norway's history, a formulation in which the course of Norwegian history was guided by divine will and in accordance with a typological pattern found in the Bible. 

Whatever the historicity of the Moster assembly, we do know that Moster was an important village in both the eleventh and the twelfth centuries, as is partly evidenced by the fact that its church was built in stone, a costly and cumbersome material. Sometime in the thirteenth century, a bell was cast for the church, and it is currently located in the church loft. The bell testifies to the veneration of Saint Olaf, as it contains an etching of the saint-king enthroned and holding the axe which had become his main attribute already in the eleventh century. The bell also contains a prayer to the Virgin Mary, perhaps the only saint to gain greater importance in the Norwegian cult of saints than the king. The etching is difficult to see in the pictures below, but it follows an established iconographic pattern and bears resemblance to both wooden sculptures and manuscript illuminations of the period.  

While we cannot say this for certain, it is likely that the figure of the saint and the prayer to the Virgin were both intended - or at least became interpreted over time - as a way to ward off lightning. It is also likely that the figure of the saint-king should be seen as a testament to how the Gulathing tradition - where Moster was the starting-point of the Norwegian Christianisation process - was received in the local community, and we might imagine that the people of Moster in the thirteenth century saw this historical episode as a keystone in their own identity. 

Moster Old Church, April 2024

Covered in a protective net due to restoration works

Saint Olaf, Saint Lucius, and Saint Dorothy in Roskilde Cathedral

 

Today, 29 July, is the feast of Saint Olaf of Norway. Since I have spent a lot of my academic career researching his cult in the Middle Ages, as well as the modern reception of him and his stories, I am taking this opportunity to write about one of the myriad cases where the figure of Olaf can be used to explore facets of medieval history. 

Olaf was king of Norway from 1016 to 1028, and died in 1030 in an attempt to regain the Norwegian kingship. The following year, he was proclaimed a saint by Bishop Grimkell, who had been part of the king's retinue and was in practice the only bishop in Norway by 1031. The cult spread quickly throughout the North Atlantic and the Baltic, and Olaf became particularly popular in the Danish cult of saints. While most of the the sources to the veneration of Olaf in Denmark are lost to us, there are some places where there remain some interesting and significant pockets that indicate Olaf's importance. One such place is Roskilde, and I will illustrate this by way of a piece of art visible in the nave of Roskilde Cathedral.  

These restored wall-paintings are found on one of the pillars by the entrance to the choir, and date from the early sixteenth century, when the interior of the cathedral was subject to an extensive redecoration programme. The most famous results of this effort are some of the chapels, where the walls are lavishly decorated with a host of holy figures. The scene shown in the pictures of the present blogpost, however, are more easily missed, but perhaps much more revealing of the priorities of the cathedral clergy around 1500. 

The scene is an interesting summary of how the Roskilde clergy understood themselves in the Christian cosmology. The central figure is the only one without a nimbus in the scene, and it is likely that he represents the bishop of Roskilde, or perhaps the entire cathedral clergy as a pars pro toto. Below him is the tortured - but as-yet uncrucified - Christ surrounded by the instruments of his passion, an iconographic assemblage that was in vogue in the late medieval period, while above the bishop we find the Trinity represented in a similarly typical late-medieval fashion, with the crucified Christ in the foreground, the Holy Spirit descending upon Christ's head, and God the Father seated in the background. This vertical sequence of figures also situates the Roskilde bishop historically and mystically, as his episcopacy is made possible and given meaning through the sacrifice of Christ, while the bishop might also be understood to occupy the historical here-and-now between the historical event of the Passion of Christ below and the Holy Trinity above which sublimates the mystery of salvation and represents the future end of history. This mystic-historical iconography is very common.  

Three other figures, however, who are flanking the Roskilde bishop, comprise a configuration particular to the diocese in question. On the bishop's close left is Saint Olaf, standing atop a dragon in accordance with an iconographic standard that had developed since at least the thirteenth century. Further to the bishop's left is a figure now almost worn away by time, but whose caption tells us that it is Saint Dorothy of Caesarea. Interestingly, she is positioned behind a smaller, cross-legged figure wearing an episcopal mitre, whom she seems to either protect or punish. 

To the bishop's right is the cathedral's patron saint, Pope Lucius I, whose relics were brought to Roskilde at some point around 1100, possibly in the episcopate of Svend the Norwegian (d.1088). The combination of Lucius, Olaf and Dorothy is significant, as Olaf appears together with the cathedral's patron and is in effect the sainted pope's second-in-command, while Dorothy appears to take the place of a third but still important member. The Roskilde bishop is thereby protected by a holy bishop, a holy king and a holy virgin, two universal saints representing early Christendom, and a local (albeit near-universal) saint representing the more recent, perhaps even contemporary Christendom. The placement of these figures served to remind the cathedral clergy at Roskilde that they and their institution are guarded by these saints, and that they are owed particular veneration because of their role in the cathedral's history. In a single work of art, the cathedral and its clergy are positioned within salvation history, and also reminded of their duties towards their heavenly patrons.

Sanctus Lucius

Sanctus Olauus and Sancta Dorothea

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.        

Podcast appearance: Bishop Grimkell, and Anno 1024

Earlier this year, I was invited to participate in an episode of the podcast Anno 1024, a podcast dedicated to topics pertaining to the millennium anniversary of the so-called Moster thing, or Moster assembly, in Western Norway. The episode is available here (in Norwegian only).

The anniversary is based on the texts of two law collections which were written down sometime in the second half of the twelfth century. These collections are known as the Gulathing law code and the Frostathing law code. They are named after the two major law provinces of eleventh and twelfth century Norway. Gulathing - or the Gula assembly - covered most of the western seaboard of Southern Norway, from Sunnmøre to Agder, as well as various parts of the central valleys of the interior. Frostathing - or the Frosta assembly - covered the western seaboard from Romsdal and northwards, eventually also including Hålogaland, as well as parts of the hinterland of the Trondheim fjord. 

In the law codes, we read that the Christian law was introduced by King Olaf Haraldsson - the later Saint Olaf - and Bishop Grimkell at the Moster assembly, which has traditionally been dated to 1024. There is an ongoing debate about whether this claim is actually true, and whether there was an assembly at Moster, and also whether this was the starting point for introducing Christian legislation in Norway. It is clear that King Olaf did collaborate with ecclesiastics to strengthen royal control over the Norwegian juridical infrastructure of the time, and also to strengthen his legitimacy among the people. However, whether the introduction of Christian rules can be dated as precisely to one assembly, and whether there was an effort to reform the laws in the way described by the twelfth-century texts of the law codes, is highly uncertain. 

These are some of the questions that are discussed in the episode. While the host, Torgeir Landro, and I agree on the main issues, there are also other scholars who interpret the material differently.