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

The importance of Saint Olaf - the case of the Skjervøy altarpiece

Today, July 29, is the feast of Saint Olaf. He was killed at the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030, in an attempt to regain his kingship of Norway after two years in exile. The following year, he was proclaimed a saint on episcopal authority, and Olaf become one of the most widespread and popular saints in the Norse North Atlantic and in the Baltic region. The cult underwent several surges of popularity and cult activity, as is the case of all saints. However, because the veneration of Olaf spread far and wide, and because this dissemination happened early and at a point in time when no single cult centre or ecclesiastical authority could control it, the surges of Olaf's cult developed differently at different parts of Latin Christendom. For those of us who research the cult of Saint Olaf, this complexity is both exciting and exhausting, as we have several parallel strands of development. 

Measuring the popularity and importance of a given saint is always difficult, because the surviving source material will rarely provide us with much information. And if there is information, it is usually limited to a specific time period, or it favours the perspective of a particular societal class, or it might do both. In the case of Olaf, the surviving sources allow us to attest to the wide geographic reach and broad societal appeal of his cult. But although he was venerated from Greenland to Estonia, this does not mean that he was always and everywhere equally important. Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Finland, for instance, were cultural geographies with their own native saints. In some cases, Olaf remained more important on what we might call a geography-wide level, but within the different parts of those geographies - landscapes, counties, however you want to call it - a different saint might be more important.  

In the case of Olaf, there is a particularly interesting altarpiece which serves as a very good demonstration of Olaf's importance in the hierarchy of saints. This is an altarpiece from the now-lost Skjervøy Church, located in Troms in Northern Norway. The altarpiece was most likely produced in Northern Germany or the Low Countries and commissioned by the parish priest and probably also high-ranking laypeople of the community. In the centre of the altarpiece is a depiction of God lifting up or supporting the dead Christ, which at the same time communicates the dual nature of Christ - both God and man - and the primary, central position of God in the holy hierarchy of Christian cosmology. On God's right-hand side is the Virgin Mary carrying the Christchild, shown as the second-most important figure in this hierarchy. On God's left hand we find Saint Olaf, holding a ciborium and clutching a now-lost axe (which was his main attribute). The saint-king is standing atop a human-faced dragon, a common aspect of representations of Saint Olaf in medieval art, and its exact meaning is still a matter of debate. 

The Skjervøy altarpiece (after 1515)

Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, C3000

 

In this altarpiece, the importance of Saint Olaf is communicated very clearly: He ranks third in the hierarchy of Heaven, which puts him as the most significant and effective saint in all Creation next to the Virgin Mary, who in turn was regarded as the intercessor above all others. The importance is clear, but we are left with the following question: Importance for whom? Should we infer from this very clear depiction of the top tier of the holy hierarchy that Olaf had a similarly high rank throughout all of the Norse world? Throughout all of Norway? Throughout the diocese? Or just for the parish community in Skjervøy? 

We know from the Breviarium Nidrosiense, a liturgical manual printed in 1519 that set the standard liturgy for the entirety of the Norwegian church province, that Olaf had a high rank. But this standard was set at the metropolitan see of Trondheim, which was also the saint-king's cult centre. Throughout the church province itself, other saints could - and did - rank more highly. Similarly, within Norway, as well as within the diocese of Trondheim - which included the Skjervøy parish - there were communities who turned first of all to other saints. Perhaps the dedicatee of their parish church, or the diocesan patron - such as Sunniva in Bergen or Hallvard in Oslo - or any other saint to whom the a given community felt particularly attached. 

The top of Heaven's hierarchy as depicted in the Skjervøy altarpiece is probably only reflective of Skjervøy and its community. They had commissioned the altarpiece, which meant that they had most likely specified which figures to include. Even within the Skjervøy community, however, we should expect that there were individuals who might accept that Olaf was an important saint, but who turned more readily to other saints for reasons of personal attachment, for instance.  

In short, the Skjervøy altarpiece tells us a lot about Saint Olaf's importance, but only for a very specific community, and at least for the leaders of that community. In this way, the altarpiece is a good example of why the question of importance needs to be approached with great care, lest we exaggerate how popular a given saint actually was. 

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. 

Saint Catherine in Bergen

 

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

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

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

The restored twin towers of the Church of Saint Mary 

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

Saint Edmund in the litany - the 1482 Breviarium Othoniense and the cult of Edmund Martyr in medieval Denmark

Today, November 20, is the feast of Edmund Martyr, who was killed by Danish raiders in 869, and whose cult became one of the most important native cults in medieval England. His cult also spread to the Nordic sphere, most likely as a consequence of both deliberate dissemination and frequent contact between the Nordic polities and medieval England. The history of Edmund's cult in the Nordic world is still incompletely mapped and insufficiently understood in its totality, and there are several tantalising clues to suggest that Edmund was perhaps more important than we have hitherto ascertained. 

In October, I was reminded of one such source when I was doing research in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, and I was leafing through the 1482 Odense breviary, or Breviarium Othoniense. This was the first commissioned printed book in the Nordic world, and the second to have been printed - since a pamphlet was finished before the breviary - and it was later superseded by two new editions in 1497 and 1510. The breviary reflected recent changes in the ecclesiastical scene of Odense, as King Christian I had dissolved the Benedictine abbey of Saint Knud, which had served as the cathedral chapter of the Odense bishop. Since the liturgy was no longer performed by monks, it had to be abbreviated to suit the more restrained length of secular offices (nine lessons versus twelve for the most important feasts). As a consequence, the Breviarium Othoniense is a challenging source to the liturgical history of Odense diocese, since it represents a recent rupture in the historical practice. The evidence provided by the liturgical material in the breviary must therefore be weighed carefully before being used to suggest historical trajectories. 

One of the notable aspects in the 1482 breviary is Edmund's placement in the litany, a list of saints placed according to rank within the diocesan church, to be invoked for their intercession. The litany begins on the previous page and opens with prayers to the Virgin Mary, the angels, the apostles, and then the martyrs. The order of the martyrs is an interesting testament to the popularity of the different saints, and one of the big questions concerning this order is whether it reflects an older ranking or more recent changes. It is, for instance, remarkable that Saint Mauritius comes before Saint Olaf, but that is a different blogpost. 

The page shown below, folio 91v, begins with Saint Alban, who was the patron saint of one of the churches in Odense, and whose cult had been brought to the city in the eleventh century - by Saint Knud Rex himself, if we are to believe the hagiographical tradition. His relatively high position among the martyrs is therefore ot surprising. After him comes Saint Olaf of Norway, one of the most important saints in Denmark, but one whose fame appears to have been less intense in the diocese of Odense than in Lund, Roskilde, Ribe, Aarhus, or Børglum. Then comes Thomas, which is Saint Thomas of Canterbury, whose cult in Odense appears to have developed independently of the diocesese of Lund and Roskilde. Then we come to Edmund Martyr. Interestingly, he is before Oswald of Northumbria, whose relics had been brought to Odense alongside those of Saint Alban, according to the hagiographies of Saint Knud Rex.  

The main clue about Edmund's standing in the diocese of Odense is his placement before Oswald. The veneration of Oswald is, as mentioned, well attested in sources from the late eleventh century onwards, but no such evidence can be found for Edmund. In the breviary, his feast is celebrated with six lessons, making it a feast of medium importance, and in the 1497 edition the feast has been largely overshadowed by the feast of Saint Elizabeth (see this blogpost). That Edmund was placed between Thomas of Canterbury - whose cult spread quickly and whose fame rose to phenomenal heights, also in Denmark - and a saint whose relics were an important part of the local religious history of Odense, suggests that there also was a veneration of Edmund going back to the twelfth century, since this is the period in which his cult is most likely to heave undergone a new vogue in Denmark. No churches dedicated to Edmund are known from medieval Denmark, and I do not know of any relics of Edmund in the Odense diocese. The large trove of relics in Sanderum Church, for instance, which is situated close to Odense, does not include such relics (although some of the labels are illegible).  

The evidence of the litany is not extensive and must be treated with caution. The six-lesson office of Saint Edmund points in the same direction, however, namely that before the overhaul of the cathedral liturgy in the 1470s, the veneration of Edmund in Odense was more significant than other available evidence would suggest. It is perhaps time to envision an even greater impact on religious life in Odense from English ecclesiastics. 

Breviarium Othoniense 1482, f.91v

Same woodcuts, different saints – towards a methodology for establishing minor saints

 

One of the several challenges when researching the cult of saints is to assess the relative importance and popularity of any given saint. There are various parameters for assessing whether a saint had a large cult, and in those cases there is often source material that allows us to flesh out some of details concerning the saint’s popularity. For instance, miracle collections teach us where some of the pilgrims came from, which in turn makes it possible to map the extent of the cult, albeit incompletely. Church dedications outside of the cult centre provide similar nodes when tracing the cult, and so do the spread of manuscripts containing legends or liturgy for the saint in question. Calendar entries are likewise important sources, especially when later hands add further information, to the names that indicate which saint is to be celebrated on that particular day.

            In the case of saints that are less well attested in the source material, the questions of importance and popularity become more complicated. Granted, most saints are not universally important. However, some saints might appear more important than they were due to the state of the surviving source material – both for that saint and for other saints venerated in the same church province – and some saints might have been important for certain social echelons rather than for the populace as a whole. Despite these uncertainties, it is relatively easy to ascertain that saints with a widespread cult and a strong cult centre were both important and popular within a particular geographical area or within a particular time frame.      

            The minor saints, however, are even more complicated. These are saints that might be ubiquitous in calendars and might be attested throughout the Middle Ages, but where there was no particular cult centre where their relics were housed and from where their cult was promoted. Or if they did have a such a cult centre, the institution in question did not attempt, or perhaps did not mange, to disseminate their cult abroad. In some cases, these are old saints which are found in later medieval sources because they were introduced into the martyrologies that were copied and expanded from Late Antiquity and into the Carolingian period. In other cases, they are local saints that emerged later and were incorporated into the liturgical year of a diocese or a church province, and were then copied into later calendars or breviaries without much regard for the saint or their legend. Such saints might have been minor, but that does not mean that we can unequivocally say that they were unimportant. Especially local cults with little imprint on the surviving source material might have been far more important to the non-ecclesiastical populace than the patron saint of the diocese – especially of the smaller cult was venerated in smaller villages or parishes outside the episcopal see. Moreover, popularity often comes and goes in waves, there are surges and ebbs, and sometimes there never comes a second surge. Consequently, we need to employ very careful parameters assessing whether a minor saint was, indeed, minor.

 

In the present blogpost, I provide you with one case where the surviving source material allows me to designate three saints’ cults as neither important nor popular, at least not at the time and in the place of the source in question. This source is a vernacular collection of saints’ legends, printed in Lübeck by Lucas Brandis around 1478. Such collections were common in fifteenth-century Germany, and were ultimately modelled on the liturgically organised collection Legenda Aurea by Jacobus Voragine, compiled sometime in the 1260s. Unlike Legenda Aurea, however, which was put together in order to provide preachers with material for their sermons, collections such as Lucas Brandis’ Passionael were printed and sold to merchants and other literate social groups whose livelihood – such as artisans – allowed them to accumulate more money.

Lucas Brandis’ Passionael allowed ordinary citizens to read and listen to the stories of saints, some of whom they knew well while others were no doubt new to them. It is important to note that when Brandis put together his collection, he had to reflect on his audiences and their tastes. In some cases, saints would be included practically out of necessity, since they were expected in such collections – for instance the biblical saints. Moreover, Brandis must have been aware of the cult of saints in Lübeck: which were venerated in the city’s various churches, and which were popular. As for the saints he included in collection, some of them were likely gathered from similar collections elsewhere in Germany, whether in the vernacular or in Latin, which he then had translated into Low German.

The chapters were typically introduced with a woodcut vignette that depicted the saint or saints who were the protagonists of the chapter, or an episode from the legend. In many cases, the woodcuts were made specifically for the saint in question and demonstrate familiarity with their iconography, or reliance on the text which is introduced. In other cases, however, the saint or saints were less well known, and their legend was sufficiently generic to be summarised in the same way as other saints whose legends, or whose basic iconographical features or elements, were similar. For saints like these, woodcuts could often be reused. Such reuse constitutes fairly solid evidence that the saint or saints introduced in this generic way was to all intents and purposes a minor saint.

In Brandis’ Passionael, there are several woodcuts that are used in this way, but for the present blogpost I will focus on three of them, simply because they are placed at the top of consecutive chapters, meaning that the reader leafing through the book will encounter these images uninterrupted by others. We should imagine that Brandis made this decision consciously and was aware of the effect it would have on the reader and on their impression of the saint. That he nonetheless went through with this organisation of the woodcuts suggests that the saints were, indeed, neither popular nor important in Lübeck around 1478. 

Lucas Brandis, Passionael

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 2 Inc.s.a. 780, f.324v  

The first example comes from folio 324v, which contains the opening of the chapter on Nazarius and Celsus, two saints allegedly exhumed by Ambrose of Milan and venerated there throughout the Middle Ages. Their legend was included in Legenda Aurea, and can also be found in several calendars used in Scandinavia. I have written about their legend here. The legend tells of a pair of male saints who were martyred together. The woodcut summarises the climax of the martyrdom, with both saints placed in a hilly or craggy landscape, shown mid-execution as the head of the one lies on the ground facing the executioner who is preparing to strike the head of the other. It is a dramatic and graphic scene, and it is one that can summarise the fate of several other male martyr-pairs, of which there are quite many in the Latin medieval cult of saints. 

Lucas Brandis, Passionael

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 2 Inc.s.a. 780, f.325v

The second example is found on folio 325v, introducing the chapter on Simplicius and Faustinus, two brothers whose martyrdom is typically dated to the Diocletian persecution. They were beheaded and their bodies thrown into the Tiber. The legend also includes their sister Beatrice, but she was not beheaded, and she is not always named in the calendar entries for their feast-day, July 29. In Scandinavia, and presumably also in Lübeck, their cult would probably have been overshadowed by that of Saint Olaf of Norway whose feast was on the same day.

Lucas Brandis, Passionael

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 2 Inc.s.a. 780, f.326r

The third example is found on folio 326r, the page opposite that of the previous vignette, which introduces the chapter on Abdon and Sennen (here written “Sennes”, which is not uncommon). These martyrs were killed during the Decian persecution, and I have written about them here. They were Persians who were brought to Córdoba, from whence they were brought to Rome and killed following the discovery that they were evangelising. Their feast-day was on July 30, and it is likely that they, too, were eclipsed by the feast of Saint Olaf on the preceding day. 

 

The woodcut used for these vignettes are also employed elsewhere in Brandis’ Passionael, but I have not seen them in such an uninterrupted sequence as this one. To use the same woodcut for all of them was a deliberate decision, as there were elements enough in all of these legends to provide something different for the engraver. That no such effort was taken is a fairly good indication that these saints were included because they were expected – as part of the regular liturgical cycle – but that they were also known to be practically unimportant to Brandis’ intended audiences. Consequently, in this one instance we can be fairly certain that these were minor saints, at least for the time and place in question. Often, this is as much certainty as we can hope for when researching the cult of saints. 

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

 

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

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

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

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

Moster Old Church, April 2024

Covered in a protective net due to restoration works

The Växjö rune stone

This evening, I have returned from a short trip to Växjö in Sweden, where I attended the launch of the Mapping Saints database, which contains descriptions and overviews of the various sources of the cult of saints in medieval Sweden. The project behind this database - Mapping Lived Religion - has been headed by Sara Ellis Nilsson, and I was fortunate enough to work as a part of the team for three months back in 2021. It was lovely to mark the conclusion to this enterprise. Yesterday morning, before the launch itself a friend and I headed into town, where I wanted to visit the cathedral. This was my first time in Växjö since I left the city in December 2020, and I was happy to see both the church and the rune stone again.  

The rune stone is located behind the east wall of the cathedral, and was found during renovations in the church building in 1813. According to the information plaque next to it, the stone has been dated to c.1000, but I will add that I myself do not know enough about rune stones to have an opinion on this issue. On the plaque, the text has been translated into Swedish and English, and the latter runs accordingly: 'Tyke - Tyke Viking - erected this stone in memory of Gunnar, Grim's son. May God help his soul'.   

The Växjö rune stone

 

The early date of the stone is intriguing, because it suggests that Växjö was a Christian centre several decades before the first Swedish bishop was consecrated - which was bishop Adalvard of Sigtuna around 1060, if we believe Adam of Bremen. If the date is correct, therefore, the stone is a testament to the slow and decentralised spread of Christianity in Sweden, especially since there was no Swedish church organisation at such an early point in time. In light of such a lack of an organisational infrastructure and framework, it is important, however, that we reflect on what it means to constitute a centre in this part of the Christianisation process. Centrality is relative, and the Christian community in Växjö around the year 1000 is likely to have been small. We should imagine that it consisted of a few locals, perhaps a significant percentage of whom were slaves, and that the religious life was headed by a missionary, either from England or from Germany, as these were the two main centres of active influence in the Nordic Christianisation. Moreover, we should expect that the community was protected by a local aristocrat, on whose farmstead important services were held, such as baptism, funerals, and the celebration of the main liturgical feasts.  

The durability of the Christian community was dependent on its relationship with locals. The protection of the local noble could be revoked, or indeed be insufficient in the face of a strong reaction from the pagan majority. For this reason, when we talk about Växjö as a Christian centre, this centrality does not necessarily mean that the community was deeply rooted or secure against changing attitudes. Centres can, and often are, short lived, and the testimony of the rune stone should not lead us to think that Christianity was stronger in Växjö than it actually was.  

The likely existence of a small but seemingly vibrant Christian centre around 1000, is especially interesting in light of a later legend that emerged in Växjö, namely that of Saint Sigfrid. I have recounted the legend in a previous blogpost, but a brief summary is necessary for the present purpose. Växjö became a diocese in the second half of the twelfth century, following the establishment of the Uppsala church province in 1164. At some point, the cathedral clergy at Växjö began venerating the figure of Sigfrid, who became the centre-point for the cathedral's institutional identity. The earliest surviving version of his legend - as far as I know - is contained in the liturgical office, composed towards the end of the thirteenth century. Here we learn about the English missionary and his three nephews who established a Christian centre in Växjö. Eventually, however, local opinion turned, and when Sigfrid was away visiting the king, his three nephews were killed. Their heads were found in a tub floating on Lake Växjö, and the local populace repented. 

Much is dubious about this story, in part because it makes a late appearance in the source material. We should also note that the name Sigfrid is essentially the same as Sigafrid, a missionary whom King Olaf II Haraldsson of Norway - later Saint Olaf - brought with him from England to Norway in 1016, at least according to Adam of Bremen's Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesie Pontifici from the 1070s. Sigafrid is known in later Norwegian sources as Sigurd, and is often identified as the first Norwegian bishop. As the story of Saint Olaf was well known in the rest of the Nordic sphere, it could easily become a reference point or an inspiration for other cults. For instance, the early-twelfth-century legend of Saint Theodegarius in Northern Denmark identified Theodegarius as one of Saint Olaf's missionaries (although that name is not mentioned by Adam). It is entirely possible that the figure of Saint Sigfrid is partly connected to the legend of Saint Olaf, if only through the name of the Norwegian bishop.  

Despite the many dubious elements of the Sigfrid legend, the Växjö rune stone does invite a very important question, namely whether this legend could contain some kernel of truth, such as a very faint echo of actual events from the slow spread of Christianity in Sweden around the turn of the millennium. We will, of course, never know, and we are unable to venture beyond the labyrinth of accrued stories and later additions that comprise the Sigfrid legend. Nonetheless, what we can surmise is that there was Christian activity in Växjö around the year 1000, and this activity endured for some time. We do not know how long, but we can assume that a man who had been spending part of his life abroad as a pirate had gone to the deep Swedish woods - presumably returning to his ancestral region - and there erected a monument in memory of a fellow Christian. This interpretation is not the only possible one, of course. The fates and lives of eleventh-century people could twist and turn in unexpected ways - ways unimaginable to us today, so the historical stories of Tyke and Gunnar might have unfolded very differently from how I imagine them here. Even so, this rune stone is a Christian monument, and a monument is a costly, time-consuming matter, which in turn suggests that there was enough stability and a sufficiently sizeable Christian population in Växjö that the monument was allowed to be erected, and that the monument stood for some time. This rune stone, then, is a anchoring point in time, that allows us to think more carefully about later legends, and about the complexities of eleventh-century history.