Histories from home, part 6 - a quiet reminder

 

The centre of my native village, Hyen, is a hamlet called Straume. The name comes from “straum”, which is one of several words in Norwegian that mean “river” or “flow of water”, and refers to the short but salmon-rich river which flows past the farmstead which for a long time was the only settlement in the hamlet. The river in question is one of two rivers that separate the mainland from a small island, which is called “Straumsholmen”. “Holme” means small island, so the full name can be translated as “the small island by the river. In our time, this small island hosts the sole remaining shop of the village, the church, the school, the care home, the community hall, the gym, a football pitch, and a number of residential houses, including the one built by my paternal grandparents in the late 1940s.

 

At present, the residents of Straumsholmen are primarily middle class. No one on the island keeps animals any longer, and the old farmstead of Straume remains the sole farm in the area. This state of affairs, however, is a relatively recent shift, and the number of modern residential houses can make it difficult to grasp the slightly older history of this hamlet, a history in which wealth was divided among the farmers of Straume and the shopkeepers on the island. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, a few smaller farmsteads were leased from the wealthy farm, and eventually, over the next few decades, the hamlet of Straume became the home of several families who came to buy the land on which they lived. These families belonged to a type of rural farmers called “husmenn”, literally “housemen”, whose relationship with the landlord could be similar to that of sharecroppers or crofters in the anglophone world. The term is difficult to translate, however, because the social context of the Western Norwegian fjords is rather different in its hierarchies and practices than rural England or Scotland. Moreover, the housemen of the fjords are often referred to as “bygselhusmenn”, with “bygsel” meaning the act of settling through clearing the ground and erecting buildings. These families had some livestock, a small patch of ground, and supplemented their income through work either for the landlord or in other ways. Fodder for the livestock was often collected by helping out at other farms, or a family could be allowed to harvest from part of someone else’s land. 

 

Although my description of this rural class is rather brief and superfluous, the main point is that these new settlements that emerged both on the island and on the mainland from around 1900 onwards were inhabited by people who were often poor, whose social power was often dependent on local village elites, and who lived a much more precarious life than most because they initially did not own the land on which they lived – in short, their livelihood could be taken from them in a heartbeat. 

Straumsholmen, seen from the bottom end of the fjord

Today, the village centre does not contain many traces of this social stratification and the harsh reality of everyday existence that presided over the housemen. However, during daily dogwalks I have come to realise that there is one part of the area which serves as a quiet yet forceful reminder of this aspect of our village’s past. The part in question is the other river which makes Straumsholmen an island. This is a small river which does not always run, of a type which in Norwegian is called “løk” (not to be confused with the word “lauk” which means “onion”, which is commonly also spelled the same way in modern writing). In our dialect, both the river and the surrounding area is called “Løkjen” in our local dialect, meaning simply “the small, trickling river”. This small river is crossed by two bridges, and at the point of the second crossing the river appears mainly like a heap of boulders left from the Ice Age, lying inconveniently at the junction of fresh water and the fjord. A few buildings are located nearby, such as a well-kept boathouse and the local care home.

 

When you stand on the bridge, however, you will see that there are some stones that have been placed there by human effort, and there is a dent in the shore with logs of sallow-wood placed breadthwise across the bottom. Slightly beyond that dent can be seen the foundations of a torn-down house, foundations made from coarsely cut stones, which have probably been collected after one of the many erratic boulders that once littered the island had been blown up. This little corner contains an important clue about the earlier social stratification of the village, and of the plight of the housemen. 

Løkjen

As can be seen in the pictures, the waterway is not very convenient. The pictures are taken on high tide, and it is possible to navigate a rowboat through some of the rocks and into the fjord. When the sea is ebbing, however, it soon becomes difficult to get through, so all passage has to be planned carefully or one is forced to get ashore elsewhere and wait until the tide returns. In this place, however, four families were given the right to keep their boats, one of which was my paternal grandparents.

 

The white boathouse on the left-hand side of the picture is still in use, and it is well-kept, belonging to a family that bought the property from the housemen who first leased it from the main farm. The foundation of rough stone on the other side of the river belongs to my family, and supported the boathouse which my grandfather used, and which my family dismantled in 2023 because it was on the brink of collapsing. One other family kept its boat on that stretch of land – although I do not know exactly where, as the shoreline was altered when the main road was upgraded some decades ago. Another family has the right to store boats on the other side of the boulders behind my grandparents’ boathouse, but no storage facility currently remains.

 

As might be clear from the photographs, this is not a good location for keeping boats, partly because of the lack of general space, and partly because of the difficult passage. Since the river carries so little water, those who are going on the fjord to fish or collect hay from the farms along the fjord are dependent on the movements of tide and ebb. This area was given to the housemen because the owners of the main farm were not interested in using it themselves, as they had access to the fjord elsewhere. Since housemen could not be choosers, they accepted the locations, and over the decades much effort was put into making it a useful and suitable working space. My grandparents’ boathouse was built in the 1950s, and it was still in use – although badly dilapidated – in the early 1990s. The white boathouse remains in use, but that use remains severely hampered by the erratic boulders left in the small river. 

The socioeconomic context in which these places for boat-keeping were established is now part of the ever-receding past. My family, for instance, has long since moved our boat for the fjord to a different place of anchorage, one independent of the tide, and so have most of the other families who once were housemen in the hamlet. This patch of the small river serves nonetheless to remind us – by its retained inaccessibility – of how social hierarchies were once much more severe, and how social class meant something different in the early twentieth century. This is part of my family’s history, and part of the histories of countless families in the western fjords, and we do well in not forgetting it. 

Constructing an archiepiscopal identity in Toledo Cathedral

 

As mentioned in my previous blogpost, I was recently in Toledo and visited the cathedral, allegedly the oldest of Spain’s metropolitan sees. This building being an impressive and complex conglomeration of historical eras, styles and artefacts, it was difficult to get a sense of the building as a unified whole. In some parts of the cathedral, however, the concerted effort to construct a space that unified, condensed and represented the totality of Toledo’s history as an archiepiscopal see became very clear. In this blogpost, I will briefly present one such space, namely the chapter house, in which the bishop and the cathedral chapter engage in an impressive form of identity-construction centred on the bishop as a historical agent.

The chapter house is a stunning architectural space, featuring a golden mudéjar ceiling, a series of wall-paintings of biblical scenes along the upper part of the walls, and then two rows of portraits – all of a modern make if not a modern style – which show the bishops of Toledo from the beginning until the present.           

While I will be careful in analysing the details of this space of historical meaning and identity-construction – as I know very little about the history of Toledo and its bishops – the overall impression of the chapter house and its decoration is that it is a space designed to imbue the bishops and their retinues with a strong sense of their place in history, and their identity as bishops of Toledo. 

Beginning from the top, it seems that the mudéjar ceiling serves not only to provide the bishop and the cathedral chapter with a beautiful setting, but also to represent the multicultural history of Toledo itself. After all, Toledo is one of the historical centres of the mudéjar style.            

The biblical section of the wall appears to serve as a reminder that the works of the bishop takes place within a holy history that began with the creation of the world and continues under the aegis of God and God’s plan. In other words, the deeds of the bishops of Toledo, and the city of Toledo itself, is linked with biblical time and biblical history. This link is highlighted by a paraphrase of Isaiah 32: 17, whose text ‘cultus justitiae silentium’, ‘the service of justice quietness’, reminds the bishops that they are supposed to be servants, and the spiritual successors of the bishops.  

The lowest section of the wall is perhaps the most striking in terms of a construction of episcopal identity. The rows of bishops do of course represent the historical continuity of the office, and it puts the current bishop in context of his predecessors. But the series of bishops is perhaps most remarkable for its claim about the length of that continuity, namely the first century, starting with Saint Eugenius Martyr.           

It is, I should add, not uncommon for bishoprics to make grand claims about the date of their founding, and perhaps especially archiepiscopal sees. According to tradition – whose history I know too little – the metropolitan see of Toledo was founded by Saint James the Elder, also known as Santiago, and the office was first held by Saint Eugenius. As stated in the portrait in Toledo chapter house, he was archbishop from the year 67 to 103, and was believed to have been a disciple of Dionysius the Areopagite, who is often identified as Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris, according to Gregory of Tours.            

Such a claim of antiquity as seen here is in and of itself neither rare nor uncommon. What is remarkable in the case of the chapter house of Toledo cathedral is the very forceful and direct demonstration of the idea that the current archbishop is the incumbent of an office that stretches all the way back to near-biblical time. Indeed, the archbishop can see his first successor when entering the chapter house. This way of constructing an episcopal identity, and this way of forcefully and constantly arguing for this identity, by making the current archbishop walk among portraits of his successor is remarkable, and a very fascinating case of how such institutional identity can be enacted. It is also a reminder that such forms of identity-construction, where the contemporary era is linked with the Bible, are still employed, and, we might surmise, presumably effective. 

Achronology as a cultural force, part 2

 

In my previous blogpost, I described how achronology’s ability to blur and obfuscate people’s understanding of the past could impact cultural, social and political decisions in the present. This ability to influence decisions and currents makes achronology a cultural force. Achronology in its purest form means the merging of the past into a single unit where periodisations do not matter. However, achronology rarely, if ever, operates in its purest form. Moreover, since achronology usually operates in conjunction with other forces, impulses and factors, achronology is also very malleable. And, in addition, achronology both creates and thrives on vagueness. For these reasons, it can sometimes be difficult to detect how achronology enacts its influence in current events. One of the most complicated, but also best, examples is how the past was used during the presidential campaign of the forty-fifth president of the United States from 2015 onwards. The infamous slogan “Make America Great Again” exemplifies precisely how achronology impacts current events. In this blogpost, I aim to make a case for how this campaign slogan should be understood as achronology.        

From the beginning, it must be emphasised that I absolutely loathe the entire campaign of the forty-fifth president, as indeed I loathe any Republican politician. I emphasise this because this present blogpost will also explain why the slogan “Make America Great Again” is a stroke of rhetorical genius. The genius of the slogan must be acknowledged, much as one must acknowledge the rhetorical genius of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willen, while at the same time one can, and should, detest both Fascism and Nazism.          

The core message of “Make America Great Again” has very deep roots. The message evokes the idea of a glorious past that is lost and must now be recovered, a golden age that has to be made anew. Several versions of this concept exist, most famously the story of Adam and Eve, and also in Greek mythology from which the concept of the golden age was mediated to the Romans and onwards to the medieval imagination. A modern version can be seen in various secularist movements that hold up the so-called Enlightenment era as the apex of historical progress, and argue that we need to return to this apex. In essence, the concept of a golden age is the sublimation of nostalgia, very often a false nostalgia, and it serves as a perpetual mirror where contemporary flaws are accentuated and magnified in seriousness.    

The concept of a golden age is, of course, not per definition achronological. Indeed, in several versions the vision of a lost golden past necessitates other historical periods, especially if we follow the traditional scheme of a degradation with the passing of time, where history moves from the golden to the silver to the bronze to the iron age. However, there is also a very common distillation of the idea of a golden age, namely the expression “things were better before”, something very familiar to Norwegian ears, for instance. This expression demonstrates how the idea of a golden age can take on achronological properties. “Before” is not a precise chronological unit, and its main point is that it is not here and now. When people state that things used to be better, they might very well have a clearly defined period in mind. But just as often it expresses a belief that things have become worse than they used to be. In either case, the golden age is somewhere in the past and when that past is not clearly defined it is up to whomever listens or utters this idea to imagine when that past was and how that past was. The ambiguity of the unstated timeframe of the past which was so much better is, in essence, a form of achronology, because it turns the past into a uniform canvas onto which people can paint and pinpoint the golden age wherever and however they wish.      

When people utter variations of the idea that things were better before, they tend to have a specific period in mind, usually the time of their childhood. However, because the past is mythologised in popular culture, in education, and in public discourse, it is also possible that people have other historical periods in mind. As mentioned, for certain so-called rationalists that period was the Enlightenment, notwithstanding the many horrors that unfolded in that period, horrors which were rationalised by thinkers or with recourse to intellectual discourse. For those who fetishise masculinity, it can be any time when “men were men”, be it the Viking Age, the Roman Empire, or the Stone Age. For pathological individualists, it might be the Wild West, or the age of European colonisation. Other candidates for the lost golden age also exist, and since the past is lost to us every part of it is up for grabs whenever someone wants to turn it into something more glorious than it actually was.            

Individual ideas of the golden age are usually time specific, in that people tend to select that part of the past which they know or have mythologised. It is not simply the past in all its vast irrecoverability, but a specific part of it. In this way, the golden age is not in and of itself achronological. However, because the golden age can be placed in so many different places on a timeline, the concept also carries in it something achronological. Because it can be placed at any point in time depending on who places it, the golden age depends on a vague understanding of the past and the chronological progression of time. In effect, the idea of the golden age carves out a space in time that is immutable, which is the very opposite of what history is. Because the golden age becomes preserved like a bug in amber, locked in one motion that makes it recognisable to those who seek it, the golden age is also achronological: it is then, not now, and this is its most important defining feature.          

The concept of the golden age thrives on, and indeed requires, a blurred understanding of history, of the passing of time, and of the complexity of humanity’s shared and entangled history. In this way, achronology – which simplifies and blurs the distinction between parts of history – is a key component in sustaining visions of any piece of the past as golden. Moreover, since the golden age is unfixed in time but shared by so many as a general idea, it can be talked about and agreed upon by several individuals who all have very different visions of that golden age, but who can communicate the idea through shared features and common reference points. The most important feature is that the golden age is in the past. Because people can agree about the existence of a golden age without agreeing, or even describing, when that golden age was, the rhetoric about the golden past is in effect achronological.           

Now that we have established, more or less, that the golden age has achronological properties, we return to the slogan “Make America Great Again”. This slogan has three important features that together make it a very successful tool of manipulation. First of all, it states that America, or the US, rather, once was great. Secondly, it implies that America is no longer great and that its greatness must be recovered. (Yes, these are two points but they work jointly and cannot be separated.) And thirdly, the greatness is to be found again in the future. The last point is important here, because the slogan does not suggest to move back in time, to retreat into the past. In so doing, the slogan avoids the connotations of degeneration that lies in a similar expression, “back to the Stone Age”. The past is lost, we are not moving back there, we are moving forward. The slogan, then, preys on the idea that we progress not only chronologically but also qualitatively, and the best is yet to come, as one Republican spokesperson once screamed at a national convention. Even though this slogan implies a return to the roots, it avoids the negative connotations of a return, or going back to something, and instead of retreating or deteriorating, things are moving up, forward, onward, upward. This distinction is enormously important to the imagination, especially in a country like the US, where the national mythology has trumpeted the idea of progression and improvement more or less since its beginning as an independent political unit. 

The first point of the slogan, that America was once great, is of course the key component, and this is where achronology is enacting its force. Because the question inevitably becomes. When was America great? The answer depends on whom you ask, and it is very likely that you will get a wide variety of answers, even though some of those will be more or less the same given the country’s very young age and therefore lack of periods to choose from. But the important thing is not when America was great, but that this greatness, this golden age, can be found whenever one seeks it, and whenever one wishes to find it. Also, the greatness is not here and now, as stated by the second point of the slogan. In this way, the slogan is on the one hand very precise: America was great before this point in time. But because it is completely open in its vagueness about when it was great, stating only that this greatness lies in the past, everyone can receive this message according to their own visions, fantasies and frames of reference. And in this quality, the slogan is achronological.        

When we consider the consequences of the 2016 presidential election in the US, it is clear that the slogan “Make America Great Again” was as successful as it is contemptible. It is also clear that the reason why it was successful is that it leaves an unspoken space that can be filled by whomever listens, and is therefore achronological: the greatness is in the past and not now, and this is a problem. Because achronology played such a key role in the presidential campaign, I argue that it serves as a clear example of how achronology – in conjunction with other factors – can work as a cultural force.        

           

Saint Olaf in Tønsberg, part 1 - the dragonslayer

A few days ago, I took a trip to Tønsberg, one of Norway's oldest cities. Located one hour south of Oslo by train, Tønsberg is nestled at the foot of a large crag called Slottsfjellet, Castle Mountain, so named because it was the site of a royal stronghold and, from the late thirteenth century, a castle. Medieval Tønsberg contained several churches, some of which I hope to return to in later blogposts, as their outlines and their placement in the cityscape - nestled at the foot of Slottsfjellet - can still be seen clearly today. 

For this short blogpost, however, I will focus on a feature of modern Tønsberg, but one which invokes the medieval past in a display of medievalism typical of twentieth-century Norway. The feature in question is a stained glass window in Tønsberg cathedral. This church was consecrated in 1858 and replaced the medieval Church of Saint Lawrence which by then was in disrepair. By 1858, the church was simply a parish church, as Tønsberg did not become a diocese until 1948, when it was carved from the diocese of Oslo, to which it had belonged since the late eleventh century. 

As Norwegian Lutheran churches are not dedicated to saints - since saints are not part of Lutheran theology - the common name for the new church was Tønsberg church, and now Tønsberg cathedral. However, the fact that this new church had a medieval predecessor and thus participates in a historical continuum is marked and even celebrated. Outside the cathedral is a model of the Church of Saint Lawrence, and a plaque containing information about this medieval church which colloquially is referred to as "Lavranskirken", Lavrans being the Norwegian name for Lawrence. 

The awareness of the medieval past of the current church is also marked by a series of stained glass windows made in 1939 by the glazier Per Vigeland, nephew of the more famous Gustav Vigeland whose statues are given their own park in Oslo. The nave of the cathedral contains a series of impressive medievalesque windows, each of which contains a religious figure. Most of these figures are apostles and prophets, in keeping with the constrictions of Lutheran iconography, and of course the Virgin Mary. However, some windows also include the saints to whom churches were dedicated in medieval Tønsberg. Aside from Saint Lawrence, the medieval city also included churches dedicated to the Virgin Mary, Michael the Archangel, the apostle Peter, and Olaf. While Mary and Peter could easily fit into the iconographic scheme of the Lutheran parish church, and while Michael at least would be accepted, the choice to also include Lawrence and Olaf in the array of stained glass windows point to a conscious desire to invoke and connect with the medieval past.   

SS Olaf and Thomas in Tønsberg Cathedral 
Made by Per Vigeland in 1939

While there are interesting analyses to be made of all the Tønsberg saints as depicted in glass in the cathedral, I here want to focus on the figure of Saint Olaf. Since he also was a historical king who is given the credit for finalising the conversion of the Norwegians to Christianity - a claim that is rightly challenged in modern scholarship - Olaf is one of those saints who can be found in Lutheran iconography despite the general unbelief in the cult of saints. When Olaf does appear in church art, he is often, as in the case of Tønsberg cathedral, called Saint Olaf, or otherwise Olaf the Holy, which creates a kind of cognitive dissonance that testifies to the importance of Olaf in the historical imagination of the Norwegian Lutheran establishment. To put it differently, the place of Olaf in Norwegian history has ensured him a degree of veneration that circumvents the scepticism towards saintly figures. 

Per Vigeland's depiction of Olaf is interesting not only because of its circumvention of Lutheran standards, but also because of how it connects with and builds on the medieval iconography of Saint Olaf. In the stained glass window, Olaf is seen holding the axe and the royal orb which are typical attributes in medieval renditions. Moreover, he is standing on a dragon, which is a common feature of several paintings and sculptures, although sometimes he stands on a human figure rather than a dragon. In these two aspects, Vigeland's Olaf is very medieval. However, Vigeland has also departed from the medieval models by making Olaf's attention being drawn to the dragon on which he stands. In medieval images, Olaf shows no concern regarding the dragon or the enemy that he has trampled underfoot, but instead the saint stares serenely ahead, his gaze attentive to other matters, such as those who come to venerate him.

In the Tønsberg window cycle, however, Olaf raises the axe as if to strike and pulls the royal orb towards himself as if to keep it out of reach of the enemy, a pose that suggests the dragon is not yet defeated, even though its visible eye is closed. In addition, we see that the dragon is engulfed in flames, which might serve as an allusion to the hellfire to which Saint Michael pushes the satanic dragon in another of Vigeland's window. Olaf is, in other words, depicted as a dragonslayer in a way that builds on, but also breaks with, medieval iconographic tradition. Whereas medieval images showed Olaf having conquered the enemy - be it man or beast, or beast with the head of a man - this modern rendition shows the moment before this victorious pose. 

What we see in Per Vigeland's depiction of Saint Olaf is, in other words, an excellent example of how medieval iconography still impacts modern iconography, and how the figure of Saint Olaf is imagined in a way that has roots stretching all the way back to the Middle Ages. Vigeland's image of the Norwegian saint-king is a clear case of medievalism, where the medieval tradition, the medieval iconography and medieval history is invoked and used as the basis for a modern artistic expression. We can only speculate as to why Vigeland chose to depart from the medieval standard depictions, and it is possible that the answer can be found in Vigeland's contemporary context. But I know too little about Vigeland's view of the world to hazard a speculative analysis here.     

  
 

Enduring materialities - change and stability in Norwegian rural history

This weekend I visited Oslo Museum of Cultural History for the first time, and I was fortunate enough to be able to visit the medieval exhibition, which is going to be taken down on October 10. This exhibition, which has been in its place since the 1970s, contains an array of various and very different objects from medieval Norway, from a fifth-century runestones to wooden sculptures produced in the 1520s. There are many amazing and breathtaking objects in the collection, and my hope is that I will have the wherewithal to write more about some of them on the blog. For this post, however, I will limit myself to one item that in and of itself is rather simple, but which did absolutely take my breath away as I noticed it. 

The object in question is what we in Norwegian call "tvare" or "tvore" (in my dialect, "tvøre"). Its function was to stir porridge and stews to prevent lumps or thickening, and a friend told me that this kind of object is called a spirtle in Scottish. The "tvore" always ends in a cluster of small spikes, and was a typical implement in historical Norwegian kitchens. 

Pot (no. C9246) from Lom and spirtle (no. C34761/G.26439) from Oslo
The Oslo Museum of Cultural History

The reason why this ordinary household item took my breath away is that I encountered this implement growing up. That is, I have never seen one in use, let alone used one myself, but the generation of my grandparents (born in the 1910s) still used these for cooking, and they have been kept in the house where my grandaunt lived when I was a child.  

What fascinates me about the "tvore" is not so much that it has been in continuous use since the Middle Ages. Several items used in the modern world came into their known shape in the medieval period, even before, but there are two important aspects with these particular cooking implements. First of all, the "tvore" has remained unchanged in form as well as in its material since the Middle Ages, which is something we very rarely observe in household items. When we consider how certain tools and implements have changed over the centuries - such as the saddle, the spade, the hammer, the bucket - such permanence is noteworthy. Secondly, unlike the aforementioned tools, the "tvore" is no longer in use. This means that something in the way we cook our food has changed so drastically as to superannuate the "tvore" as a kitchen item. The discontinuing of the "tvore" should probably be seen as a consequence of electricity and a change in the diet, and in this way, the "tvore" is a testament to the dramatic nature of the changes in everyday life that took place in rural Norway in the early twentieth century. In short, the way we cook and the way we eat changed to such a degree in the early twentieth century that utensils that had been used since the medieval period were no longer needed.

Naturally, it is important to keep in mind that there were other changes in Norwegian rural society that marked a break or a discontinuity with the medieval period long before the twentieth century. Changes in growing techniques, the introduction of the potato in the early eighteenth century, changes in social patterns, the transition to more commercially oriented farming practices in the nineteenth century, all these and other elements of Norwegian history were different from how agriculture and the rural life had unfolded in the medieval period. Yet despite such changes, certain things remained long into the modern world, such as the "tvore". And because the enduring materiality of the "tvore", in form as well as matter, the discontinuation of this item signals a break with the past - it signals that some aspect of society is irrevocably and totally different. And it is this change that the "tvore" represents. 
      

Saint Knud Rex in glass - a twentieth-century rendition of Knud's murder

 

Today, July 10, is the feast of the martyrdom of Knud Rex. He reigned as king of Denmark from 1080 to 1086, and was murdered in the now-lost Church of Saint Alban in Odense by an angry mob who rebelled in response to high taxation. Knud was proclaimed a saint at an episcopal synod in Odense in 1095, and he became the patron saint of the city. His cult was aided both by royal patronage - his later successors Erik Ejegod (r.1095-1103) and Niels (r.1104-34) were both his brothers - and also the monastic community at Saint Knud's Church, the cathedral church of Odense. This monastic community was established in the reign of Erik, when the community of secular clerics was reformed to a Benedictine abbey. Several of the clerics, and also the monks, were English, and were experienced in the maintenance of the cult of a saint, and produced materials - including saints' lives and a liturgical office - for the veneration of the martyred king. The detail concerning this development are of great interest to me, and several articles concerning Knud, as well as related topics, can be accessed freely in this book.

In the present blogpost, however, I am not focussing on the medieval reception of his cult, but rather an aspect of his modern veneration, namely a pictorial narrative of his murder as it is presented in a series of stained glass windows from the early twentieth century.

Saint Knud Rex in majesty

Georg Schneider, 1908, Albani kirke, Odense

In the period 1906-08, a new church was built in Odense, the Roman-Catholic church of Saint Alban (Skt. Albani Kirke). The church is built in a distinctly medievalesque style, and the choice of dedicating the church to Saint Alban suggests that those who financed the project sought to establish this building as a modern continuation of the medieval building that had once seen the murder of Odense's patron saint. Moreover, the location of the modern church is roughly - but not exactly - in the area where the eleventh-century wooden structure once stood, which appears to have been rebuilt in stone in the course of the twelfth century. 

The modern Church of Saint Alban in Odense contains a number of medievalisms, and together these comprise a very interesting window into the identity-construction of the congregation in the early twentieth century. It should be noted, of course, that in a modern Catholic context, it is sometimes difficult to assess which aspects of the veneration of saints from the Middle Ages can be considered expressions of medievalisms. This difficulty arises from the fact that in a worldview in which the saints are genuine parts of the cosmology, the representation and invocation of that saint is not necessarily a representation and invocation of the medieval aspect of the saint's story, but rather the universal, timeless aspect of the saint. 

In the case of the Church of Saint Alban in Odense, however, the architecture and much of the art appears to be deliberately drawing on medieval models. It is very likely that the general aesthetic should be seen in light of the Neo-Romantic appreciation of the Middle Ages that materialised throughout Northern Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century. 

Since the Church of Saint Alban is located in Odense, it not only venerates Saint Alban, but also Saint Knud Rex. These two cults have been closely connected in Odense, given that it was Knud who brought relics of Saint Alban to Odense, and it was thanks to these relics that the church could be consecrated to the British protomartyr. That Knud himself died at the altar of that church, whose consecration he had assisted by the gift of relics, strengthened the connection even further. For the commissioners of the modern Church of Saint Alban's to choose Alban's patronage, it would have been implicit that they would also display a strong veneration for the martyred king. 

Images and references to Knud can be found throughout the church space. One of the most significant of these cases is the series of three stained glass window in the Saint Knud' chapel, located on the right-hand side before the altar. These windows were made by Georg Schneider of Regensburg. From left to right they depict Knud receiving the final confession from his brother Benedict right before his death, then the martyred king in Heaven, and on the right the moment of his martyrdom. The images are, in other words to be read in the following order: Left, right, middle. 

The images are interesting in part because they appear to draw on an iconographic tradition that does not go back to the Middle Ages, but rather to antiquarian and neo-Catholic renditions from the Early Modern Period. The exact links to this early modern pictorial lineage, however, is still not sufficiently mapped, and I will not go into details about it here. 

Through the three scenes of the Saint Knud chapel, the story of the martyred king is efficiently narrated in three key points, which are also three of the key points highlighted in the medieval written narratives. This might be deliberate, or it might simply be because when a saint's story needs to be condensed into what Cynthia Hahn calls pictorial hagiography, the scenes chosen for that narrative are selected for practical reasons, namely that those scenes are the most succinct way to present the story. 

While the art of the modern Church of Saint Alban is distinctly modern - even, or perhaps particularly, when it draws on earlier iconographic traditions - it is very clear that a lot of the aesthetic seeks to invoke the Middle Ages. For this reason, I brought a group of students to this church when I was teaching a course on the cult of saints, because the church spaces gives a good impression of how a medieval church might have looked. And in this way, the story of Knud Rex as it appears in glass in the chapel of Saint Knud is the latest expression of a narrative and aesthetic tradition that has its roots in the eleventh century. 

The modern Church of Saint Alban, from 2015

Churches of Gloppen in Western Norway, part 2 - New Gimmestad

Earlier this month, I explored one of the churches of my native municipality, Gloppen, in the Western fjords, and in this way I am slowly reaching my goal of exploring all the churches in the district. The trip was made possible thanks to a friend of mine who works as a sexton, and who showed me around the many nooks and crannies of the building. The church in question is referred to as "nye Gimmestad", or New Gimmestad. It was built in 1910 as a kind of successor to a seventeenth-century church which is still standing, and still in use. Moreover, in the Middle Ages there was also a church here, which we know from fourteenth-century letters from the bishop of Bergen, but the location of this medieval church is not known to us. What is clear, however, is that Gimmestad - meaning "old place" in Norse - was one of the main centres of local power in the Middle Ages. A stone cross situated close to the shoreline is believed to have been erected during the christianisation of the late tenth and early eleventh century, suggesting that there was an early collaboration between the head farmer/chieftain of the area and the priests.

I mention this early history of Gimmestad because when I explored the new church, I noticed that those who had been responsible for the decoration of the church throughout the decades had emphasised the historical continuity between the old and the new, and highlighted the historical continuity of Christian ritual at Gimmestad, which is the focus of this blogpost.

As a medievalist working on institutional identity, examining how ecclesiastical centres formulate their own place in history through texts and art, I was struck by the degree to which Gimmestad church also employed similar strategies of identity-construction as we often find in the case of medieval ecclesiastical institution. The decor invoked a sort of spiritual bond, a kind of transposing of religious authority, that was supposed to exist between the various remnants of historical religious practice, namely the stone cross and the old church from 1692. Some of this historico-spiritual continuity was formulated through what appeared to be coincidences, not revealing much intent but nonetheless some concern, suggesting that although past caretakers of the church might not have expressly wanted to showcase a spiritual continuity, they nonetheless ended up doing so. This will hopefully be clearer as we go along.

View from the nave

The first example of a formulation of historical continuity could be found in the church porch (a part of the building called "våpenhus", weapon house, in Norwegian, as it was said that those who went to church had to deposit their weapons here before entering the nave). In the porch stands a magnificent painting showing both the old and the new Gimmestad church in the greater landscape, invoking the moving of the religious centre of Gimmestad from the old to the new, and in this way describing the historical bond between them in an elegant and simple way. The effect is unmistakable. However, this painting, I was informed, was originally placed in another religious building, in Norwegian called "bedehus", literally prayer house. Such houses were common in the Norwegian religious landscape, and they were a kind of folk churches, or low-church arenas, in which itinerant preachers would often perform, and where the daily run of things was left to the laity. This does not mean that these prayer houses were divorced from the high church. After all, it was through the effort of the leaders of the prayer house that the new church at Gimmestad was erected in 1910, and also that the old church was saved from being torn down, as had been the original plan of the ministry of religious affairs at the time. As can be seen in the painting, the leaders of the prayer house cared about historical continuity, but the painting was not made for the church but rather ended up in the church once the prayer house became defunct.

The same process of moving items from the defunct prayer house to the new church is the explanation for the two examples below, a photograph of the old church and a painting of the medieval stone cross. These emphasise the long history of Christianity at Gimmestad, and they also express a sense of continuity between the religious sites, from the cross to the church to the prayer house to the new church. That they ended up in the new church was not planned, but the original purpose for when they were placed in the prayer house was exactly the purpose they serve now in the new church: Highlighting the spiritual bond between these locations.

Moving on from these unintentional markers of historico-spiritual continuity, we also see that part of the decor in the church is deliberately fashioned to emphasise the spiritual bond between the old and the new church, and with the stone cross. This can be seen in three paintings from the Danish artist Kjeld Heltoft, finished in 2000 and commissioned by the church. The first painting is the altar painting, located on the right-hand side of the choir. Here we see the new church, the statue of Christ in the choir - presumably invoking Matthew 18:20 - and the holy spirit descends to the congregation. And in the foreground, we see a fish in a twisted shape, and this is the clue to the historical continuity.

The fish represented in the painting is a cod that was suspended from the ceiling in Old Gimmestad sometime in the eighteenth century. One version of the story states that it was caught by a farmer on a Sunday, a day when it was prohibited to work, and as penance the farmer gave the fish to the priest. The fish has become iconic, and serves in the painting above to be a pars pro toto invocation of the old church, showing the continuity of spiritual history that binds the two buildings together.

The same emphasis of historical continuity is seen in two paintings that hang either side of the door from the porch and into the nave, also by Kjeld Heltoft, and commissioned for the church. One shows the medieval cross, the second shows the old church, with the iconic fish visible in its original location hanging from the beams of the ceiling. 

I was also struck by another piece of art displayed in the church, located just behind the first row of benches as you enter the nave from the porch. The picture, whose artist I do not know, is one of several children's artworks to be found in the church, but this one has, whether intentionally or not, latched on to the iconographic theme of historical continuity that permeates the new church Gimmestad. While I cannot say with certitude that the family fishing in a boat is meant to invoke, or inspired by, the story of the cod in Old Gimmestad, it is very tempting to make that association, and it is at least very apposite.

Even the smallest or poorest of churches tend to have some sort of comprehension and care for its place in history - be it the universal history of Christendom, or a more elaborate historical vision whose geographical framework is marked by more details. This historical identity can be expressed as simply as having the year of the church's founding written somewhere in the church space, or memorabilia of other religious sites in the area. But rarely have I seen such a comprehensive iconographic programme of historical and religious continuity in such a relatively small church as I have in New Gimmestad. And as a historian specialising in such forms of identity-construction, I was thrilled to see it. 

A view towards the old church

Two voyages centuries apart - unexpected connections in academic research

Research into medieval history often opens up strange and unexpected pathways, and many of these pathways lead into the modern world, highlighting the unbroken continuity of time and disabusing us of the insufficiencies of periodisation. As a medievalist, I enjoy exploring these various ways in which any given research topic also has a reception history that yields knowledge about a time much closer to my own than that of the individuals and institutions of my research. One such case that delighted me this week was that of two voyages centuries apart, the legendary voyage of Saint Olaf, king of Norway (d.1030), and the historic voyage of Lev Trotsky in 1917.

Olaf encounter the trolls of Norway

Dingtuna Church, Albertus Pictor, c.1500 

(courtesy of this website)

The voyage of Saint Olaf is an episode in the corpus of stories told about the saint-king throughout medieval Northern Europe. According to the various accounts, Olaf races his half-brother Harald Hardråde (d.1066) in a ship, and it became a popular theme of church art in late-medieval Sweden, as seen in the example by Albertus Pictor above. The roots of this story might lie in Olaf's return to Norway in 1016 to claim the Norwegian kingship, after having spent years as a mercenary in Normandy and England. But this possible kernel of historical truth became a fantastical tale that was expanded by various villages which claimed that Saint Olaf's voyage had passed through the area.

But what does this have to do with Lev Trotsky? In March 1917, Trotsky had left New York where he had been living for a period of time, and began to make his way back to Europe on a Norwegian steamer. Trotsky was a person of interest to the American and British intelligence services, and was detained in Halifax for a short while, but he was eventually allowed to continue his voyage. The ship that had brought Trotsky from New York to Halifax was SS Kristianiafjord, one of the steamers of the Scandinavian-American line that connected Europe and America, but since this crossing had been interrupted Trotsky had to find a new ship. This ship is what connects him with Saint Olaf, because the steamer on which he travelled from Halifax to Oslo was SS Hellig Olav, named after the man whose legendary voyage to Norway had such a tremendous impact on the cultural history of Scandinavia. So they travelled, Olaf and Lev Trotsky, each in their own vessel, centuries apart.

Now, you may ask what we are to do with this information, how can this contribute to a greater understanding of either Saint Olaf or Lev Trotsky. The simple answer is that this information is of very little consequence to our understanding of either. This is an amusing coincidence that does not yield any information beyond itself. However, the fact that a steamer was named after Olaf is an example of the reception history of the saint-king into the modern era, and gives us at least a somewhat more nuanced understanding of how the myriad ways in which Saint Olaf has set his mark on Norwegian culture. 

Plan of the steamer Hellig Olav of the Scandinavian-American Line

Courtesy of this website

For information about Trotsky's voyage, see Nigel West, Historical Dictionary of World War I Intelligence, p. 223.

Eg synger jolekvad - a Christmas hymn in translation

For the Christmas season, I wish to present to you one of the musical staples of Norwegian Christmas in my part of the country.The song in question is a Christmas hymn - not a carol, mind you - that goes back to the fourteenth century, namely In Dulci Jubilo. The song was retained in the Protestant liturgical repertoire, and it was translated into Danish already in 1569. The first translation into Norwegian was executed in 1861 by the priest M. B. Landstad (1802-80), into what was the first draft of a Norwegian hymnal that was supposed to be a renovation of the old and by then somewhat old-fashioned liturgy. After heavy linguistic revisions, Landstad's translation was accepted and published in 1869. The title of the hymn was then Jeg synger julekvad (I sing Christmas songs).

The hymn was later translated into Nynorsk by the Norwegian theologian Bernt Støylen (1858-1937), and it was included in a Nynorsk hymnal presented to the public in 1925. The title had retained Landstad's rendition, but with the Nynorsk vocabulary, making it Eg synger jolekvad. The clip I include in this blogpost is a performance of Støylen's translation, as this is the one with which I have grown up in the Norwegian fjords.

Merry Christmas.

Saint Olaf in Rome

Today is the feast of Saint Olaf of Norway, a day which in Norway is known as Olsok, coming for Old Norse "Olavsvaka", meaning the wake or vigil of Saint Olaf. To mark the day, I give you one of the more curious manifestations of the importance of Saint Olaf to the Norwegian imagination and the Norwegian identity, namely the painting of the altar of Saint Olaf in Rome.

This altar is found in the church San Carlo al Corso, dedicated to Saint Carlo Borromeo (d.1584). It was dedicated April 9, 1893, and the altar painting was carried out by the Polish painter Pius Welonski (d.1931). The altar itself was established on the initiative of Norwegian Catholics and was intended to mark that it was fifty years since Pope Leo XIII had been ordained as a bishop (although he would only become pope in 1878).

Olav, King of Norway
Painting in the church of San Carlo al Corso, by Pius Welonski
Courtesy of this website

The painting depicts Olaf with his axe and his royal orb, standing on a defeated dragon in a very Norwegian landscape. As such it fits in a tradition in the depictions of Olaf from the late fourteenth-century onwards, in which Olaf is positioned on top of a beast, often interpreted as a dragon. It is clear that Welonski had some very good directions for how Olaf should be depicted according to how late-ninteenth-century Norwegian Catholics expected to see him.

From the lower half of the left-hand side of the frame and to the lower half of the right-hand side of the frame, one can read the legend "S. Olavus Martyr Norvegiae Rex et Patronus", Saint Olaf Martyr, king and patron of Norway. This is perfectly in keeping with how Olaf was understood in the contemporary mindset. However, when seen from the angle of the medieval Olaf iconography and its development, it is noteworthy that the image fuses two separate stages in this development. On the one hand we see Olaf as patron and king of Norway, a presentation and interpretation of Olaf which appeared in the mid-twelfth century under the auspices of Archbishop Eystein Erlendsson (reigned 1161-88). On the other hand, we see Olaf situated on top of a beast, which is a tradition that only emerged later in the Middle Ages, and possibly outside Norway, meaning that it might have its conception in stories of popular origin or stories which were generated outside the control of the Norwegian medieval church. This fusion of Olaf the patron and Olaf the dragon-stander had by the nineteenth-century become perfectly canonical to the Norwegian mind, and this is the version presented to the Catholics of the world who enter the San Carlo church. But this fusion hides a complex and long-winded evolution which has merged elements originating in very different milieus and at very different times, and made it the modern idea of the medieval Olaf.


Bibliography

Kari-Anne Bye, Å drepe dragen, MA thesis, NTNU, Trondheim, 2011

http://www.katolsk.no/tro/tema/historie/artikler/olavsalt 

http://www.olaviroma.no/index.php?sid=2197

Saint George in Odense, part 2

One of the first blogposts I put together after I had moved to Odense in 2014 presented two separate depictions of Saint George which I had come across during my first travels around town. Since then, I have come to understand that Saint George occupies an important place among the saints who in various ways contribute to the urban landscape and memory of Odense. There are, for instance, both a public garden and a public park which are named Sankt Jørgens Haven and Sankt Jørgens Park respectively, both of which lie close to the street Sankt Jørgens Gade. Jørgen is the Scandinavian name for George.

Yesterday, I came across another depiction of Saint George, placed on the facade of Sankt Georgs Hjemmet, Saint George's Home. It is worth noting that in this case the name of the saint is given as George, not as Jørgen, and this is probably due to the fact that the house was erected with the financial help of the Guild of Saint George, which is a modern boyscout organization. I presume they have taken Saint George as their figurehead after inspiration from the English boyscouts.

Even though it is a small detail in the Odense cityscape, it is nonetheless a nice reminder that aspects of the medieval cult of saints are still present in our postmedieval world, having been sifted through centuries of cultural interpretation.

Death and the fiddle - Böcklin, Tartini and a Norwegian traditional

I entertain a deep fascination with the many different ways in which humans meditate on their own relationship to death and mortality, and how they reflect on their own transience in the face of that immense entity of deafening permanence and stability: death. Because even within religious traditions where death is itself transitory, such as Christianity, there has long been a conscience that death marks something definite and, even if it should prove to be only a transition, that death is an endpoint that no one escapes.

The engagement with transient man versus the permanent erasure of death has been the subject of many great cultural expressions. Medieval imagery abounds with meditations on death, resulting in such gloriously morbid concepts and the dance macabre, or the transi tombs which display both the intact body and the rotting corpse in stone for all to see. These are of course connected to the idea of memento mori, that constant reminder of mortality that permeates so much of Christian culture. The memento mori furthermore highlights the anxiety about memory and death, which is a cornerstone in the logic behind impressive funerary monuments. One of the most beautiful meditations on the memorial aspect can be found in Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Buriall from 1658.

One of my favourite modern expressions of the relationship between death and man is the painting shown below, the self portrait with death playing the fiddle in the background by the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin. I particularly like the way Böcklin has rendered his own face, caught in the realization that Death is standing behind him, playing one-knows-not-what tune, possibly as a reminder of the painter's own mortality.

Self portrait with death as a fiddler

Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901), 1872, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

(Courtesy of Wikiart)

Böcklin's choice of giving Death the fiddle as an interesting one, and although I do not know what thought lies behind that choice, it is worth noting that the fiddle have at times been regarded as an instrument proper of the Devil. One of the most famous stories which connect the fiddle and the Devil is that of the Devil's Trill Sonata by Guiseppe Tartini (1692-1770). The story, given to us by Tartini himself, tells us that the composer had a dream in which the Devil was playing the fiddle, and upon waking Tartini tried to reproduce the music, which he stated "was but a shadow of what he had witnessed in the dream", to quote Britannica.

Guiseppe Tartini, The Devil's Trill Sonata (Violin Sonata in G minor)

Another musical piece which connects the Devil and the fiddle is the Norwegian traditional known as Fanitullen (the Devil's song, "Fan" or "Fanden" meaning "The Devil" in Norwegian and Danish). The piece is known from the nineteenth century, and was the subject of several reworkings. The story behind the song was written down, and edited, by Jørgen Moe (1813-82), a Norwegian priest and collector of fairy tales. According to the legend, the song had been played by the Devil at a wedding in Hallingdal in Norway. The song was played during a fistfight at the wedding, and the Devil played while he sat on a barrel of beer.

Fanitullen, Norwegian traditional

Performed by Christian Borlaug

As a final installment in this series of death and music, I also want to point to the song Self Portrait by Rainbow from their debut album in 1975. Here there is no fiddle, but the theme of personal damnation and its title brings us back to the opening of the blogpost which began with the self portrait with Death as a fiddler.

Self Portrait, Rainbow

From the album Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow (1975)

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Blind Heretics Under Ground - Excerpts from the cultural history of the mole

I cannot choose: sometime he angers me
With telling of  the moldwarp and the ant
- William Shakespeare, Henry IV, part 1, Act 3, Scene 1

Outside my office windows, the moles are waging war against the campus caretakers. It all started a few weeks ago, and when I got to the office in the morning I noticed that five-six mounds of modest size had appeared in the course of the night. I assumed right away that these were erected by moles, although it might well be gophers - they mostly work at night and I have not yet seen one. The mounds were levelled in a few days by one of the caretakers, but the very next day five-six more mounds had appeared, and these are the ones that can be seen on a picture far below in this blogpost. The second series of mounds were later levelled too, but they were replaced shortly thereafter by a total of about ten mounds, plus some smaller ones which I only noticed today closer to the office wall. All of these third-series mounds were levelled today, but only a few hours after that I noticed that a small mound had actually appeared in the same spot as a cluster of two-three mounds, and I wonder how many will be erected in the course of the night.  This ongoing conflict prompted me to write this blogpost.

De talpa - chapter heading for the mole

Valenciennes - BM - ms. 0320, f.080, Thomas Cantimpré, De Natura Rerum, c.1290

Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr

In the Middle Ages, the learned world did in general not take kindly to the moles. Like all animals included in medieval bestiaries, the mole was endowed with a spiritual, allegorical meaning which made it serve as a model for mankind - in this case a model to be shunned, as we shall see.

Two of the oldest descriptions of the mole, one of which would influence descriptions in bestiaries centuries later, can be found in book twelve of Isidore of Seville's Etymologies. One description can be found in chapter 2, paragraph 39, where Isidore says that "The mole (furo) is named from 'dark' (furvus), whence also comes the word 'thief' (fur), for it digs dark and hidden tunnels and tosses out the prey that it finds" (Barney et.al. 2006: 254). There is good reason to be somewhat skeptical about Isidore's etymological connection here.

In the next chapter of book 12, or more precisely in chapter 3, paragraph 5, there is another description of the mole, and - as we can see from the chapter heading of Thomas Cantimpré's De Natura Rerum above - this was the descriptions transmitted by later commentators. Here, Isidore writes that "The mole (talpa) is so called because it is condemned to perpetual blindness in the dark (tenebrae), for, having no eyes, it always digs the dirt, and tosses out the soil, and devours the roots beneath vegetables" (Barney et.al. 2006: 254). I do not know how come there are two description translated as belonging to the same animal, but it might be that Isidore are describing both the gopher and the mole in this part of the book.

Mouse stealing the host, and an innocent mole

MS Royal 12 C XIX, bestiary, England, 1st quarter of the 13th century

Courtesy of the British Library

Commentators after Isidore also added an allegorical explanation, In one English thirteenth-century bestiary, MS. Bodley 764, for instance, the natural description of the mole follows the standard set by Isidore, and then finishes with the following exposition (translated by Richard Barber):

The mole, condemned to perpetual blindness, is the image of pagan idols, blind deaf and dumb; or even their worshippers, wandering in the eternal darkness of ignorance and folly. Isaiah writes of them: 'In that day a man shall cast his idols ... to the moles and to the bats' [2:20], that is, the blind shall worship the blind. The mole is also the symbol of heretics or false Christians who, like the eyeless mole which digs in the earth, heaping up the soil and eating the roots beneath the crops, lack the light of true knowledge and devote themselves to earthly deeds. They serve the desires of the flesh zealously, and succumb to the lure of pleasure, while they try in every way possible to gnaw at the roots of all that is good.

The Vulgate does indeed speak of bats and moles as symbols of the wasteland, and the imagery is a typical biblical topos where one or two types of wild animals become a synechdoche for the antithesis of civilization. With the desolate imagery of Isaiah in mind, it is easy to see how the mole came to have such an unfavourable standing in the reading of the book of the universe, and how the mole came to be a counter-example to proper Christians.

Mole and company

MS Royal 13 B VIII, Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hiberniae, England, c.1196-c.1223

Courtesy of British Library

On the next stop in this itinerary of cultural history, we come to early modern Norway, where the mole seems to have held a very different position in the popular imagination than that offered by the exegetical parts of medieval bestiaries. In Norwegian, the mole is called "muldvarp", a name that is etymologically linked to the moldwarp of Shakespeare's time, and which comes from German "Maulwürfe", or mold-thrower (werfen = to throw).

In the popular Norwegian imagination, the mole was seen as a bringer of fortune - much to the misfortune of the animal itself, if we are to believe a collection of magic formulas and remedies gathered by Dr. A. Christian Bang in Norske Hexeformularer og Magiske Opskrifter (Norwegian witch formulas and magical remedies). There are two remedies by which moles are believed to improve a person's luck at cards, and both of them have dire consequences for the mole.

According to one of these remedies, recorded about 1770, (Bang 1901-02: 222-23) one must take a living mole and kill it by striking a big pen-knife to its neck. Once this is done, the mole must be placed in a clean pot or other type of clean vessel, and the body of the dead animal must then be burned to powder. No liquid is to be added. This powder is then to be sprinkled into the right shoe of the player, and this will ensure his fortunes at the table. The remedy concludes with the words "one dare not doubt upon this", which suggests that the rhetoric of conviction has not changed all that much these past centuries.

Another remedy, recorded in 1790, is perhaps even more cruel to the poor animals. Again, the mole in question must be alive when it is caught, and the person wishing for luck in games must then bite off the right foot and then release the animal. The foot of the mole is then to be kept in a piece of paper, and it must not touch the earth lest its luck-bringing power goes away. Nor must it be revealed to any other person, presumably for the same reason. To such an extent must the mole-foot be kept a secret talisman, that if the player is in a game which requires a partner, then the mole-foot must be given to the partner's pocket without the knowledge of the partner.

Fortunately, moles are quite rare in Norway and not easy to come by.

Towers of the mole empire

SDU Campus, Odense

In modern popular culture, the moles have largely been depicted in more favourable terms. In fact, modern literature and film is rife with friendly and more or less anthropomorphic moles. For instance, we have the Mole, the protagonist in Zdenek Miler animated children's tv-show from Cold War Czechoslovakia. In British literature we have the kind Mole of Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows, or the companion of Badger in Colin Dann's The Animals of Farthing Wood, not to mention the moles of Brian Jacques' Redwall novels, who all speak in a dialect very similar to that of the West Country. Indeed, there is even a series of fantasy novels centered entirely on the moles, namely William Horwood's Duncton Woods.

As a final installment in this eclectic mix of cultural history, I also want to mention one piece of popular culture which appears to have had some resonance, namely the 1956 science fiction movie The Mole People, where a people of humanoid mole men are enslaved in a subterranean kingdom ruled by albino descendants of the old Sumerians.

Courtesy of Wikimedia

Bibliography

A. Christian Bang, Norske Hexeformularer og Magiske Opskrifter,  A. W. Bröggers Bogtrykkeri, Kristiania, 1901-1902

Richard Barber (editor and translator), Bestiary, The Folio Society, 1992 (this is an abridgement)

Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, edited and translated by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, Oliver Berghof, Cambridge University Press, 2006

T. H. White (editor and translator), The Book of Beasts, Dover Publications, 1984



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