A new publication on local history

 

Two weeks ago, the households of my native village of Hyen received this booklet in their mailboxes. It is a publication that celebrates the 150th anniversary of the local church, which is one of the historical and cultural centrepoints of the village. Aside from its importance as a religious house and a landmark in the fjordscape, it also serves as a reminder of our identity as an oft-forgotten backwater that has to speak loudly for its rights. This new church was built in 1875 and consecrated the year after, which was the culmination of a political process that had gone on for decades. In the nineteenth century, Norwegian governments were very economically minded when it came to the care of rural parish churches. A demand that functioning churches had to accommodate a certain number of people led to the destruction of the vast majority of the country's medeival stave churches, most of which were small and dark. Similarly, a village like Hyen was considered too small to warrant its own church. While there was a church in the Middle Ages, it is likely to have been decommissioned after the Reformation, and in the period c.1600-1876, the villagers had to row to the next fjord in order to attend services. The story of the drawn-out effort to build a church in the village is emblematic of how small rural communities often have to spend much time and money to make themselves heard. 

I was asked to write a contribution to this booklet, and I was very happy to do so. Although the booklet is dedicated to the modern church, its long-gone medieval antecessor is none the less an important part of its story, so I wrote a three-page overview of what we know about the church and the village in the Middle Ages. 

Contributing to a volume like is one of the great joys of being a historian. While this is the kind of publication that yields zero points when it comes to those bibliographies that have to be submitted as part of applications for academic jobs, it is a text that is academically solid and that will be read by a much wider number of people than any of my professional articles. In terms of outreach, this little piece on local history might be something of the most important work I have ever done. 

Questions of continuity - sacred landscapes, Stiklestad, and the Christianisation of Norway

One of the perennial questions when teaching or researching medieval Norway is whether the introduction of Christianity was a sudden rupture or a gradual process. These days, most scholars that I know favour a slow development in which Christianity was familiar to pagan Norwegians. Knowledge about stories, symbols and practices was available through contact with merchants and royal households abroad, and several of the slaves that were kept on Norwegian farms were taken from Christian societies. While the pagan Norse religion was dominant, there was some sort of co-existence between the two religions, and individuals no doubt embraced various hybrid forms where elements of both religions were combined in their rituals, prayers and the symbols that they either wore as jewellery or that they carved into their possessions. It was only with the rise of the Norwegian bishop and the gradual establishment of some sort of a church organisation in the early eleventh century - a process that would culminate with the establishment of bishoprics around 1070 - that Christianity attained religious monopoly in Norway. 

While the history of institutional religion in Norway is largely uncontested, the nature of belief and religion remains a matter of debate. There is a tendency to imagine that paganism remained a vibrant element of Norwegian religion throughout the Middle Ages, and one common version of this claim is the idea that the old Norse gods continued as part of the religious practices in the guise of saints. This claim is unsubstantiated and is based on a severe misunderstanding of what the cult of saints was, and how familiar it would have been to the Norwegians long before the official Christianisation of the country in the first decades of the eleventh century. 

I was reminded of these issues on Monday as I was then being shown around the museum complex of Stiklestad, which is where King Olaf II was killed in 1030, and which became one of the two main cult sites associated with him following the proclamation of his sainthood the year after. (The second main cult site was his shrine in Trondheim.) When the battle in 1030 happened, Stiklestad had been a centre of both religious and secular power for several generations, and several grave mounds are found within the radius of a kilometre from where a twelfth-century church is now standing - the spot where Olaf was believed to have been killed. Such grave mounds are found across all of Norway, and they were sites of some kind of ancestor worship or veneration.  

The museum complex at Stiklestad provide very striking evidence that the sacred landscapes of Christianity were being made in a landscape that was already sacred to the pre-Christian Norse religion. On what was once a high river bank, an old burial mound is still visible and this was once the centre of a sacred landscape where the pagan populace held ceremonies and turned to their ancestors for protection. In the eleventh century, a new sacred landscape was established, centred on the field where Olaf had died. There might have been ereceted a wooden church at this early stage, but the current stone church was first built in the twelfth century. As seen in the pictures below, from the mound we can see the church, and to medieval Christians the mound might have been less covered in birches and more of a visible reminder of the religious practices that had been in place in earlier generations, and which the saint-king had reportedly sought to eradicate.  

The question of continuity becomes more urgent in a place like this. The mound remained through the shift from a pagan to a Christian sacred landscape. What the mound represented was removed - sometimes forcibly, sometimes by long neglect - but the mound itself was allowed to remain. This continuity of existence is perhaps not as surprising, given that the local aristocrats - chieftains and wealthy, powerful farmers - were related to those who rested in the mounds. While paganism was no longer allowed, and proably soon fell into disuse, the kinship between the living and the mound-resting dead was still keenly felt for as long as that family stayed on the ancestral land. In this sense, there was a kind of continuity in place. But the new generations embraced Christianity and by the twelfth century we have little reason to believe that the ordinary Norwegians had much understanding of the pagan cosmos within which those who dwelled in the mounds or those who had erected the mounds had understood themselves. Rather, the mounds were now part of a Christian sacred landscape. Those who rested there awaited the same kind of last judgement as did the living, and it is easy to imagine that to many of the Christian Norwegians there was some concern about the salvations of the soulds of their ancestors. It is also to be expected that the Christians turned to their ancestors for protection or help, especially since a belief in revenants is attested in many later Old Norse texts. But the kind of continuity that we find in a landscape was this was one of relationships, of kinship, not one of religious practice. Saint Olaf became the intercessor of the god of the new faith, and whatever help the ancestors could provide was little compared to the saints' ability to ask God for miracles to be wrought for the benefits of the living. The nature of the dead was different in the new faith, and that difference did not allow for the kind of functional continuity that some have imagined. Put differently, it would be very difficult for a long-deceased pagan to take on the function of a saint who had gained access to God's heavenly court through their manner of dying or their manner of living. 

That there was some continuity in a landscape like Stiklestad is only to be expected. But this was not the resisting paganism of the modern imagination. It was a continuity of historical knowledge, of respect for ancestors, but a respect and knowledge that was also shaped by the awareness that the ancestors could neither replace nor enter into fellowship with the saints. Rather, the ancestors were no doubt respected and memorialised, but within a Christian sacred landscape and within a Christian understanding of history. As the country became Christianised, so, too, was the landscape, and this changed how those who inhabited the landscape - whether living or dead - understood themselves in the grand scheme of things. 

 

Saint Olaf in Aarhus, part 2 - the lost church

As I mentioned in the first blogpost of this series, I have a particular fascination with the development of the cult of Saint Olaf of Norway in medieval Denmark. He was a ubiquitous figure in the Danish cult of saints, often taking on a more kingdom-wide importance than most of Denmark's native saints. Why he came to overshadow these local figures is a question with which I am still grappling, and to get a better sense of this development I am constantly seeking to learn more about the cult and its dissemination throughout the medieval Danish kingdom. 

Last month, I was able to do some more exploring as I went to Aarhus. This was one of the main cities of medieval Denmark, and one its episcopal centres. The city expanded in the late eleventh and throughout the twelfth century, and in this period the cult of Saint Olaf appears to have become rooted in the religious life of Aarhus. The early history of the cult in Aarhus is unknown. The earliest trace is a stone church which is mentioned in a letter of donation from 1203, and this church was excavated in the twentieth century. Unfortunately, the excavation yielded little of concrete information regarding the early stage of the building's history. It is tentatively dated to the early thirteenth century, but it is likely that a church dedicated to the Norwegian saint was in place in Aarhus before the 1200s. The remnants of a Romanesque baptismal font believed to have belonged to the church, and currently placed witihin the church walls, strengthens this suggestion since this style was superseded by the Gothic in the course of the thirteenth century. 

We do not know when the cult of Saint Olaf arrived in Aarhus. It might have arrived through veterans from the battle of Hlyrskov Heath in 1043 when an army of Norwegians and Danes under the leadership of King Magnus I fought against the Wends. According to a tradition recorded in the twelfth century, Magnus was aided by his sainted father, who had been declared a saint by episcopal authority in 1031, the year after his death. This tradition is likely to stem from eleventh-century stories, and the fact that Magnus commissioned coins with images of Saint Olaf minted on them after the battle suggests that a veneration of Olaf as a battle-helper was in place already in the 1040s. These stories might have travelled north to Aarhus shortly after the battle. However, it is also possible that the cult was spread by merchants. Aarhus was a thriving mercantile centre throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and excavations in the city centre have revealed several stoneware items produced in Norway. The cult might have been spread by Norwegian and Danish merchants alike. 

Whatever the history of Saint Olaf's cult in Aarhus, it is likely to have been in place well before the year 1200. One strong indication of this is the history of Aarhus' own native saint, Niels, who died in 1180. His early cult is likewise obscure, but in the early thirteenth century the Aarhus cathedral chapter applied for his canonisation. The application failed, but a local cult seems to have persisted, and a memorial to Saint Niels is located right next to the ruins of Saint Olaf's Church (but this is a topic for a later blogpost). This little episode is important because it teaches us two key points: First of all, Aarhus did not have a known native saint until 1180 at the earliest. Secondly, the canonisation attempt in the early thirteenth century suggests that the cult of Saint Niels might not have been widely popular but rather an ecclesiastical phenomenon. These two points lead us to the hypothesis that in the period leading up to the death of Saint Niels, and indeed up to the failed canonisation attempt, there was no local figure in Aarhus who could attract the kind of veneration that was shown towards Saint Olaf, and so it was easier for the foreign saint to become a favourite saint among the populace of Aarhus. Other factors are also likely to have played a significant part, such as Olaf being appealing to many social groups rather than just one, but the lack of saintly competition from saints with a stronger local connection must be considered an important factor.  

Today, the excavated outline of the church wall can be seen in a plot of land that serves as a minute city park. When I visited in late March, the crocuses were blooming, and there was a serenity which was immensely enjoyable. Situated at the waterfront, overlooking parts of Aarhus harbour, it is also easy to be reminded that this church might have been particularly well situated for merchants, which in turn reminds us that they are likely to have been instrumental in either introducing the cult, sustaining it, or both. 

Saint Olaf in Aarhus, part I - the altarpiece of the Church of Our Lady

 

Some day I will go to Aarhus 

- Seamus Heaney, The Tollund Man 

Last weekend I was in Aarhus, and this was a trip I had been looking forward to for more than ten years. I have been in Aarhus twice before, but on those two occasion I was not able to explore the city, being once confined to the university area and once to the train station as I was changing trains on a journey from Northern Jutland. This time, however, I had set aside enough time to get to see some of the sights that I had been wanting to see for professional reasons. As it turned out, along the way I learned about more things to see, and this prompted a very felicitous discovery that I had not anticipated. 

The Church of Our Lady, Aarhus 

One reason for going to Aarhus was to visit some of the important medieval sites, especially the cathedral. Since I have been working a lot on the cult of Saint Olaf of Norway, and since I am currently very interested in his cult in Denmark, I had also included a trip to the ruins of the now-lost church that was dedicated to him (and about which I will write another blogpost). En route through some of the sights of Aarhus, I learned about the Church of Our Lady - formerly the Church of Saint Nicholas and the first cathedral of the town - whose medieval crypt was still intact. The church was nearby, and, despite some modernised features, proved to be full of interesting vestiges of its medieval past. The one that made me most excited was an altarpiece which featured a full-figure rendition of Saint Olaf of Norway.

The altarpiece is dated to the early sixteenth century, just a few years before the Danish Reformation of 1536/37. It is attributed to Claus Bjerg, an artist mainly based in Odense and Fyn. Typical of altarpieces of the period, it can be opened on particular feastdays, but when I was there the wings were shut and displayed the exterior paintings. The central doors depict fthe enthronement of the Virgin Mary with Mary sitting next to Christ - whose feet are resting on a model of the spherical earth - and this scene is flanked by six saints. Beside the Virgin is Mary the Magdalen with her pot of balm, and beside Christ is Anthony of Egypt, accompanied by the pig who serves as his attribute (a common feature in church art from late-medieval Denmark, owing to the rise of his cult in this period). The four saints below the enthronement scene are - from left to right - Barbara, Catherine of Alexandria, Christopher, and possibly John the Evangelist (due to his appearance as a young man holding a book). On the left wing of the altarpiece are Saint Anne with the Virgin and the Christchild, and on the right wing is Saint Olaf with his halberd - which by this time had replaced the long-shafted axe of earlier centuriers - who is trampling a dragon with a crowned human head. He is also holding what appears to be a pot of balm, which might signify the salved king.

The representation of Saint Olaf is typical of its time, and a very interesting rendition of a figure common in Nordic medieval church art. Olaf appears like a contemporary king, dressed in armour of the time, and serves as a reminder that saints are believed to transcend time, being forever contemporary and relevant. Since Olaf was a popular saint in medieval Denmark, his appearance on this altarpiece is unsurprising, but nonetheless an interesting testament to his importance in Aarhus. Indeed, from the evidence familiar to me so far, it is possible that Aarhus was the most important centre of the cult of Saint Olaf in Denmark. It remains to gather enough evidence to test this hypothesis, and also to suggest explanations for why this is the case. And thanks to this serendipitous encounter in the Church of Our Lady, I am now better placed than ever to get a better understanding of the history of Saint Olaf's cult in medieval Denmark, a long-standing ambition of mine that goes all the way back to my time as a PhD candidate. 

A stone for Saint Agnes

Today is the feast of Saint Agnes of Rome, who was killed during the Diocletian persecutions of the early fourth century. She was one of the first Christian virgin martyrs to gain a substantial cult outside of Rome, and it is possible that she might have more of a claim to historicity than some of her fellow virgin martyrs like Catherine of Alexandria, Lucy, Agatha, or Barbara. Her cult spread throughout Latin Christendom, and she was - and remains - typically associated with the lamb which is her main iconographical attribute. 

The main centre of her cult is the Church of Saint Agnes Outside the Walls, located in Rome. Its position outside the old city walls point to its origin as a Christian place of worship from before the legalisation of Christianity during the early reign of Constantine, although the church building itself is younger. At this church is found one of the surviving catacombs from the early Christian period, and it is a marvellous place for coming close to the everyday realities of Christian worship in this part of history. 

The church itself has undergone several changes in the course of the centuries, and like most churches in Rome it is a blend of different historical periods and styles. I was there for the first and so far only time in the early summer of 2023, when a friend and I co-presented at a conference. We had set aside one day for sightseeing and being both medievalists we went to Sant'Agnese Fuori le Muri to see one of the oldest of the surviving Roman churches. Unfortunately, our visit coincided with the funeral of a dignitary from Thailand, so there was limited opportunity for photography. However, we did get to see the old basilica, the catacombs, and one archaeological jewel that I came to appreciate greatly. The jewel in question is an old stone fragment, ostensibly part of a grave slab or a stone covering. Although it is broken, the words 'S[aint]' and 'Agnes' are still legible, and provide a quiet testimony of the craft and skill that has gone into furnishing the cult of Saint Agnes with various paraphernalia. The stone, although unassuming, is an important testament to the material dimension of the cult of saints, and it has been displayed in front of a marvellous apsis fresco which shows the cross of Christ standing atop a summit from whence the four rivers of Paradise burst forth. This combination of iconography also reminds us that like the Church of Saint Agnes itself, Christianity is a mish-mash of different ideas, different images, different impulses that more or less cohere into some sort of unity - which is what makes studying its history all the more interesting.  

Saint Catherine in Bergen

 

Today is the feast of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, one of the female saints who achieved broad veneration in the Nordic countries at a very early stage in the Christianisation process. In the law of the Gulathing province of Norway - which is roughly coterminal with the south-western seaboard and the western fjords - her feast was included in the list of holidays whose observation was required by law. This law was committed to writing around 1160, but it is likely that the feast of Sainth Catherine arrived much earlier in Norway. The evidence from the Gulathing law is particularly interesting because we have few other sources to the cult of saints in Norway prior to the mid-twelfth century, especially female ones. (One other example is Saint Cecilia, whose name was given to Cecilia Sigurddotter, born c.1155-56, but that is another story.)  

The cult of Saint Catherine gained even more popularity following the dissemination of Legenda Aurea, a collection of saints' legends and texts on liturgical feasts composed by Jacobus de Vorgaine around 1260. The dramatic events of Catherine's life and memorable details - such as her christomimetic debate with fifty philosophers and the torture wheel that miraculously broke into pieces - made her easy to depict in medieval art, and also easy to recognised. One of the surviving depictions of her from medieval Norway is the altarpiece of the Church of Saint Mary in Bergen. The altarpiece was made in Lübeck in the late fifteenth century, and its main saint is the Virgin Mary, but she is flanked by - going anti-clockwise from the top left - Saint Olaf, Saint Anthony of Egypt, Saint Dorothea, and Saint Catherine of Alexandria. She is wearing a crown, as she was believed to be of royal stock, and two of her main attributes - the wheel with which she was not tortured and the sword with which she was killed - make her easy to spot among the saints of the altarpiece.  

The altarpiece was commissioned by the Hanseatic merchants in Bergen, for whom the Church of Saint Mary was the main religious hub. Its selection of saints is neither particularly German nor particularly Norwegian, but rather reflective of saints whose popularity was high throughout the Baltic and North Sea region in the course of the 1400s. Saint Catherine's cult also benefitted from her frequent inclusion in the malleable collective of saints known as the fourteen holy helpers - the configuration of which was changeable according to local tradition - and she was one of the most important universal non-biblical saints of the Nordic Middle Ages.

The restored twin towers of the Church of Saint Mary 

The oldest part of the church date back to the twelfth century

Cantigas de Compostela, part 4 - Saint Bartholomew

 

Today is the feast of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle, who - according to Latin medieval tradition - had evangelised in India, where he had been flayed alive as part of his martyrdom. The sensational and macabre manner of his death provided medieval artists of various media with the licence to depict his passion story in varied and inventive ways. To the modern mind, the most famous examples are from Renaissance artists, such as Marco d'Agrate's statue in the Cathedral of Milan, or Michelangelo's Last Judgement scene from the Sistine Chapel, in which Bartholomew - with the face of Pietro Aretino - is holding his empty and dangling skin. These late examples, however, are part of a much longer tradition. One older example can be found from one of the portals of Santiago de Compostela, the Fachada de las Platerías, in which are assembled masonry from various parts of the twelfth-century cathedral. On the side of one of the archways is the haloed and bearded figure, holding his butcher's knife in his right hand and holding his saggy, empty skin in his left, clutching it by the hair. The iconography is immediately recognisable, the masonry is exquisite, and the piece as a whole is a solid reminder of how the iconographical tropes that we often first encounter through canonical Renaissance art have a much older history, and that the Renaissance was a squarely medieval phenomenon. Moreover, it is important to note that there are no straight lines from Compostela to d'Agrate's Milan or Michelangelo's Rome. Rather, these are all dots in an evolving network of ideas and images that connects various places, but where the transfer of influences cannot possibly be mapped or recorded.  

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 Martin and the birds in Salamanca

From the Middle Ages, we have numerous stories about saints and animals. Some of these stories are about animal companions, such as Saint Hugh of Lincoln and his swan. Others are stories of protection (Saint Giles and the wounded hind), stories about healing and recovery  (Saint Thorlak and the lost cow), or stories about control over the animals (Saint Francis and the singing locust, or Saint Edward the Confessor and the nightingales). Regardless of the shape of these stories, they all serve to demonstrate the holiness of the saint in question because of their care for animals or their owners, or because of their miraculous communication with them. These stories also convey the hierarchy of Creation, according to Christian theology, in which humans were set above the beasts and were commanded to be custodians of the earth.  

The various topoi of animals in saint-stories provide a useful background for appreciating a symbolic convergence in the Church of Saint Martin in Salamanca. I went past this church a couple of times when I last visited Salamanca earlier this year, and I happened to note that there is an extensive avian symbolism in both the decoration and the use of the church - all of which has nothing to do with the legend of Saint Martin, but serves to highlight how such coincidences can reinforce pre-existing associations. 

 

One of the entrances to the church was easily accessible as I walked between my hotel and the university area, and I was entranced by the beautiful carvings on the Romanesque portal, a nice - if partial - survival of the twelfth-century stone church, which has been expanded and renovated at various times. The figure of Saint Martin seen above the portal is most likely form the renovation campaign of 1586, but the figures in the arches of the portal show the typical design of the twelfth century, and also has the wear to be expected of carvings that old. In capitals between the pillars and the arches are several winged creatures, including what appear to be sphinxes, long-necked birds (possibly storks), and harpies. These figures are stock characters in Romanesque art, possibly signifying the wild and chaotic world beyond Christian civilisation which the church visitor leaves behind when entering the hallowed space beyond the doors. 

These figures have nothing to do with Saint Martin and his legend. While there is an avian episode from the story of Martin of Tours - in which he hid among geese to avoid being elected bishop - these particular carvings are part of the portal because they were typical figures of their time. Despite not pertaining to Saint Martin's legend, however, these winged creatures do bring a certain symmetry, not so much to the legend itself, but to the Salamancan church of today. Above the church bell, a pair of storks have built a nest and were flying back and forth across the neighbouring streets. As storks are common in Salamanca, there is nothing uncommon about this sight, nor does it have any particular significance for the legend of Saint Martin. Nonetheless, there is something pleasing about the coincidental convergence of iconography and reality when storks settle on the building dedicated to a saint who hid among birds, and which building is also decorated with several avian creatures, including what might possibly be storks. These are coincidences, serendipities, happenstances - but they do converge in a wonderful way to show how life and art sometimes line up, and when you know the art you can also appreciate this convergence more strongly. And we should expect that medieval venerators of Saint Martin would do just that in case they saw birds nesting on this church in the Middle Ages.