A church in the Belgian hills - the Church of Saint John the Baptist in Sean-Jean-Sart

 

Earlier this month, I was hiking the hills of Eastern Belgium together with two friends. It was a lovely opportunity to immerse myself in a landscape that seems familiar in some ways, yet which is also unknown to me. It was a welcome change from the flat landscapes around Brussels, Lier and Heerentals, which was what I knew of Belgium at that point.  

One of the highlights of this trip was to happen upon the Church of Saint John the Baptist in the small village of Saint-Jean-Sart in the Aubel district. The church, built in 1879, has a beautiful facade decorated in a way that resembles the scales of a fish - very fitting for a house dedicated to worship of the fisher of men - and makes for an arresting view as it materialises as you follow a bend in the road. 

Sadly, the church was closed so I did not get to see the inside of the building. But it was a pleasant view along the way, and then it disappeared almost as suddenly as it had become visible. 

Saint Michael in Tønsberg, part 2 - the church on the mountain

 

Today, September 29, is the feast of Saint Michael and All Angels. In the Middle Ages, Saint Michael was an important figure in Latin Christian cosmology, as he was the one who would fight Satan at the end of the world, and as he was the one who weighed the souls of the dead. He was often associated with summits and high places, and many - but not all - of Latin medieval churches dedicated to him are found in such places. One example is the Church of Saint Michael in Tønsberg, which is located atop the crag called "Slottsfjellet" (literally, Castle Mount). 

The ruins of the Church of Saint Michael 

In the background is the Castle Mount Tower, built in 1888

The earliest mention of the church is the narrative account titled Profectio Danorum in Hierosolymam (The Journey of the Danes to Jerusalem), which describes a joint Danish-Norwegian failed attempt to travel to the Holy Land to participate in the Crusades. The reference is dated to 1191, but it is likely that the church had already been active for several decades. It was part of a small castle complex, as Tønsberg was one of the residences of the Norwegian kings. This fortified complex is mentioned in Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum (c.1206), concerning an episode dated to 1165. Despite the date of the episode, the later date of the account itself provides us no certainty about whether the church had been erected as early as 1165. It is, however, very likely, given that the church would have been a natural part of such a royal fortress as what we find in Tønsberg. The church is believed to have been destroyed during a Swedish attack in 1503

The Church of Saint Michael in Tønsberg raises some important questions about the general cult of the archanagel in medieval Norway. Was the church dedicated to Michael because it was placed on a summit, or should it rather be seen as an indication of Michael's importance to the secular warrior elite of twelfth-century Norway? Was the cult an elite phenomenon in the early phase, or was it always widely popular? The inimitable Professor Judith Jesch has reminded me that there are seventeen runic inscriptions that mention Saint Michael, ranging from Greenland to Gotland, and this points to Michael's wider popularity. Similarly, the sermon for Saint Michael and All Saints in the Old Norwegian Homily Book, probably written in Bergen c.1200, demonstrates that the story was available in the vernacular. Although the text was only available to the clerics for whom it was composed, the sermon itself could be disseminated broadly, providing the populace with the key details of Saint Michael's importance. But this, in turn, leaves us wondering whether the elite cult of Saint Michael - possibly represented by the church in Tønsberg - had a different focus than the popular cult. It has been suggested by Siân Grønlie - in her article '‘Ok er hann sannheilagr’: The Role of Saints in Remembering and Representing Iceland’s Conversion' from 2022 - that one of the strands in the cult of Saint Michael, his martial aspect, might have appealed especially to warriors and crusaders. The general populace, on the other hand, might have favoured his role as the weigher of souls. 

Model of the medieval Church of Saint Michael

A saint is a mosaic of qualities and the venerators might focus on a few or just a single one. Therefore, it is important not to generalise too much when trying to map the cult onto the social fabric of a historical period. The Church of Saint Michael in Tønsberg is connected to the king and his retinue, and the veneration of the archangel might here have been fuelled by his role as the leader of the Heavenly armies. But since there are other churches dedicated to Michael and placed on summites in medival Norway - one example being the church in the monastic complex of Selja in Western Norway - it is possible that the placement of the church in Tønsberg guided the choice of dedicatee rather than the other way around. 

View of Slottsfjellet from Tønsberg city centre

The king shot an arrow - a runic inscription from Sogndal, Norway

 

Last weekend, I made a roadtrip through parts of Sogn, a district that covers both the northern and southern shores and inlands of Sognefjorden, the largest fjord in mainland Norway. This is an area which contains a lot of historical survivals that are of great interest to a medievalist, and in some upcoming blogposts I will write about some of the many medieval monuments encountered along the way. 

The first example is a rune stone from Sogndal, which currently is housed in a glass case. We do not know when the stone was first erected, and what it was meant to commemorate. The inscription is known by its ID number N 386, and a transcription and a translation into English can be found here. It is dated to around 1100, and reads "King Olaf shot between these stones". The text indicates that there once stood a second standing stone in the area, but this is now lost. 

The text does not give any indication of which king is referenced. By c.1100, there had been three kings of Norway named Olaf. Closest in time to the inscription is Olaf III (r.1067-93), whereas Olaf II (r.1015-28) and Olaf I (r.995-1000) had long since become legendary figures about whom many stories were told. Olaf II had also been recognised as a saint since 1031, the year after his death at the Battle of Stiklestad. 

The reference to a shot - presumably with an arrow - is difficult to explain. One hypothesis is that the king shot an arrow in order to decide on a place where a church should be built. The rune stone - or rather, the standing stone with a runic inscription added later - stands close to the location of Stedje Church, a nineteenth-century replacement for the stave church that stood on the same spot in the Middle Ages. Decisions being left to divine intervention or fate such as this one are a typical motif of folktales and medieval hagiography alike. Since both Olaf I and Olaf II were regarded as missionary kings, stories about the founding of churches were often attributed to them. 

What is particularly important about the runic inscription, however, is not whether it refers to the founding of a church or whether it has a different meaning. Rather, the inscription shows that already by c.1100, stories that connected famous but departed kings to a specific locality were already in circulation close to a century after the oldest of the three possible candidates. The story might have been based on old oral accounts, perhaps even an actual historical event, but decades - perhaps an entire century - had passed before someone saw the need to commit this story to writing. As a medium for this message, the carver decided to use an old standing stone that was central to the story, but which had not been erected for the sake of carrying the kind of monumental memorialisation that is typical for rune stones. In short, the inscription provides a glimpse into the evolution of stories that grow and develop outside centralised, authoritative text production, which by c.1100 was mainly overseen by ecclesiastical and monastic groups.  

The person carving these runes might have remembered Olaf III, and it is possible that it was this king who ordered a church to be founded. After all, new churches were built by both secular and ecclesiastical agents throughout the eleventh and the twelfth centuries. However, it is likely that the kind of church-building story most likely to be committed to written memory would concern a church erected in the early Christianisation period, i.e. during the reign of either Olaf I or Olaf II. If so, this would be an event taking place long before the carver of the runes had been born. In this case, the inscription shows the pull of stories, and how these stories - and perhaps also their implication for local identity - excite people and move them to become keepers of memory in one way or another. In this instance, by carving runes on an old menhir.

All in all, we can only speculate about the origins of this runic inscription. Its content suggests to us the importance of history and the desire to commemorate the past. Seen in the context of other written records from eleventh and twelfth-century Norway, we might understand this as a part of a growing concern with fastening history to the material world in order to preserve it for future generations. The inscription is, in other words, a testament to the importance of stories.  

The Stedje stone looking towards Stedje Church

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.