A year in reading - 2025

2025 began as a limbo. In January I was unemployed and without immediate prospects, but with several obligations to which I had committed myself when I still received a regular salary. As a consequence, although I theoretically should have plenty of time to devote to reading, the many duties that demanded my attention, the many things I had to prepare, and unexpected demands that came along the way, all combined to leave less time for doing the kind of reading I had hoped to do. My pace throughout the year became choppy, and I was unable to follow the parameters that ordinarily guide my literary forays within the calendar year. However, 2025 also afforded me several opportunities for travel, and many of the books I read this year were consumed en route to somewhere.       

Travelling by page   

Every year, I try to explore more of the world through the pages of its myriad literatures. As a bare minimum, I aim to read one book from every country in the world – including Palestine – and I have been chipping away at this goal since I began the project in 2017, inspired by the excellent work of journalist and author Ann Morgan.

In previous years, I have made good use of my access to university libraries and their inter-library loan systems, and although a similar system exists for public libraries in Norway, this year’s limited access to the holdings of universities with departments dedicated to the languages and literatures of other parts of the globe meant that I had to rely on my own reserves. Over the past two decades, I have accumulated a decent personal library with items for future reading, some of which are intended to help in my ongoing quest of travelling by page. However, since I did not know for how long I would remain unemployed, I decided to buy a couple of new books to ensure that I would still be able to keep travelling for a while.

The first book I finished was A girl called Eel by Ali Zamir, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. This novel is an exploration of society and gender roles in the Comoros, and provided an interesting and heartbreaking window into a country about which I know very little, and whose literature is not extensively available to non-francophone readers.

Ali Zamir, A girl called Eel (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)

In a bookshop in Bergen, I encountered a Norwegian translation of Scholastique Mukasonga’s 2008 memoir, La Femme aux pieds nus, translated by Agnete Øye as Den barbeinte kvinnen. I am always happy to see Norwegian translations of non-anglophone literature, and as I have been wanting to read something by Mukasonga for some time, I bought it and read its beautiful and harrowing chapters on and off for the subsequent months. As often is the case when I read books by African writers that describe the practicalities of the agricultural year, I was struck by the recognisable aspects of Mukasonga’s upbringing concerning the various duties pertaining to the keeping of crops and the ever-present concern about whether a harvest will fail or flourish. In other words, the book was yet another reminder that shared experiences connect people the world over, and we remain more similar than different in all our fundamental aspects. 

Scholastique Mukasonga, Den barbeinte kvinnen (translated by Agnete Øye)

New places for reading       

Aside from travelling by page, I also did a lot of physical travel, partly thanks to some plans that had been laid the year before, and partly thanks to a surprise short-term employment that brought me out of my village on several journeys. As a consequence, I was able to find several new places for reading this year, too. For instance, a three-week journey that included Hamburg, Bergen, Oslo, Madrid, and Salamanca in late March and early April meant that I could seek out several places in which to sit down and quietly peruse what I was carrying with me for that specific purpose. In a Latin American restaurant in Hamburg, for instance, I followed C. S. Lewis’ imagined Martian landscape in Out of the Silent Planet, while I was reading up on the cult of saints in medieval Italy and medieval England in the bars of Salamanca and of Madrid respectively. 

C. S. Lewis, Out of the silent planet 

Hamburg

Edward Schoolman, Rediscovering Sainthood in Italy 

Salamanca

Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to relate 

Madrid 

At home, I also found opportunity to read in new locations. In April, my family and I launched the rowing boat on one of the lakes in my village, as we do each year once the ice has drifted off over the waterfall and returned to liquid again. My first trip of the year led me to one of the promontories where I often go searching for blueberries – or what I have recently learned are technically called bilberries. Since most of my journeys to this promontory involves getting my hands dirty with the fruits of the harvest, I rarely bring any reading material with me, knowing that bilberry stains are hard to remove. This time, however, since it was long before berry-picking season, I brought with me a collection of poems by one of my favourite poets, Raquel Lanseros, and ventured up a brook to a waterfall and found a lovely spot for reading.

Raquel Lanseros, 'Ese lejos tan cerca'

In the summer, I took another boat for a ride, this time on the fjord, and went ashore on a small promontory. This journey was eventful, as I hope to explain in a later blogpost, but for the present purpose the main point is that I also brought with me a book to read. Strictly speaking, the promontory itself was not a new place for reading, as I had been here before, but this time the oppressive sun drove me and my youngest sister’s dog into the refuge of some shady foliage, and after a refreshing swim I lay down to read Old Norse chivalric romances translated into modern Norwegian. 

Birgit Nyborg (ed. and trl.), Tre riddersagaer

Reading by lists       

Each year, I steer my reading in accordance with several lists. Aside from the ongoing attempt to read a book from every country, I also aim to read at least three books in four categories: a) academic books; b) books by Norwegian authors; c) books by Nobel laureates in literature; and d) books from a reading-list I put together during my first year at university.

Due to the pace of this year’s reading – dominated in large part by editorial tasks that tired my brain too much for reading as much as I would have liked – I was unable to complete this particular goal. However, some headway was gained in each of the categories. 

Raquel Lanseros, El sol y las otras estrellas 

Diktet om min Cid (translated by Eva M. Lorenzen)

The year started auspiciously with the completion of the Norwegian translation of Cantar de mio Cid, translated by Eva M. Lorenzen as Diktet om min Cid, which I bought during my BA studies and have been meaning to read for years. This was, however, the only book from my old to-read list which I was able to complete. 

When it came to academic books, I was much more fortunate, and I feel greatly enriched by the various titles I managed to read as I was doing research for various articles and mini-projects. For instance, Niamh Wycherley’s The Cult of Relics in Early Medieval Ireland was a particularly interesting foray into a part of medieval Latin Christendom that I keep feeling I should know more about, and this book was a joy to read. I was also happy to finally get an opportunity to read Audun Dybdahl’s monograph on the runic calendars of Norway and Sweden, Primstaven i lys av helgenkulten (runic calendars in light of the cult of saints). I was glad to be able to prioritise this book both because it is an interesting topic on a source type that bridges the medieval storyworld with the early modern one, but also because Dybdahl was one of my lecturers at university. As he passed five years ago, it felt like a fitting if belated tribute to his work. 

Niamh Wycherley, The Cult of Relics in Early Medieval Ireland

Dybdahl’s monograph also ticked the box for a third category, namely books by Norwegian authors. For much of my life, I have prioritised non-Norwegian authors, and as a consequence I feel I do not know the literature of my primary homeland as much as I ought to do. The upside of this neglect is that I now have an excuse to roam widely within the vast flora that is Norwegian literary history. To this category, I also added Olav Bø’s short monograph on Norwegian feast-days, Norske årshøgtider, which examines traditions and superstitions that have survived in some form or other since the Middle Ages. A third example from this category is Johannes Heggland’s Folket i dei kvite båtane (The people in the white boats) from 1962, which is a children’s book set in early Bronze Age Norway, and which aimed to bring a distant part of the Norwegian past to life to young children based on archaeological findings available at the time.

As for Nobel laureates, I only managed to read one this year: Albert Camus’ The Outsider, translated by Joseph Laredo. While a very interesting window into colonial Algeria from the vantage point of the colonising people, and a very easy read, it was also an annoying reminder of prejudices that should be of the past but which are still very much of the present.

Olav Bø, Norske årshøgtider

Johannes Heggland, Folket i dei kvite båtane

Binging sagas

Towards the end of October, I picked up pace in my reading thanks to an earlier discovery that a five-volume set of translations of Icelandic sagas into Norwegian has been made available online. Ordinarily, I do not like reading on a screen – and the fact that I have done so quite often this year is partly why my sense of my own reading is rather muddled. However, at the end of October, this particular medium suited me very well as I was travelling and had not brought enough books sufficiently small to make for suitable travel reading. Additionally, a lot of the sagas are rather short, so at a point when I was feeling hopelessly behind in my annual reading, these tales were perfect for catching up and I devoured fifteen in the course of two months, with a handful others having been finished in the course of spring and summer. This became a veritable binge, both because I read so many of them in such a short time, but also because I eventually could not keep track of all the plots and all the characters once I had finished a given saga, partly because of the speed but also because several of the plots of the sagas share many of the same features, and because there are numerous characters in them. Despite the overindulgence, it was also very satisfying because as a medievalist I have been in arrears with my saga reading for years, and it has been immensely rewarding to finally fill so many of these gaps. 

 

Science and fiction  

Another theme that emerged for this year’s reading was science fiction. This is another genre where I feel I have a lot of catching-up to do, but I have done so rather circuitously. Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra by C. S. Lewis are unsurprising contributions to this theme, seeing as they are classics, albeit not necessarily widely famous in the current age. A more unconventional choice was the 1945 Norwegian novel Atomene spiller (the atoms are playing) by Hans Christian Sandbeck, which describes the world of the year 2250, and which evolves into a meditation on the perennial nature of human violence. What fascinates me the most about this novel is that it was one of the first books to be published after the liberation of Norway on May 8, in a time of general shortage. Moreover, it provides a reflection on the horrors of nuclear warfare at a remarkably early date, seeing as it was published only a few months after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Hans Christian Sandbeck, Atomene spiller

Most of my reading within the theme of science fiction has taken place within a medievalist framework. I read E. R. Truitt’s excellent monograph Medieval Robots from 2015, which deals with automata in Latin Christian literary culture, and which provides several great examples of how the concept of immaterial objects with an agency seemingly of their own fascinated the imagination of medieval writers and readers. It was thanks to this book that I also picked up the collection of three chivalric sagas translated into modern Norwegian which I had purchased several years ago. I was particularly pleased with delving into these medieval manifestations of science in fiction, since the topic dovetails nicely with utopian thinking, which was one of the main themes of last year’s reading. 

E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots

Towards the end of the year, I also added two further books to my repository of science fiction. First up was Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons, which is a wonderful adventure story following a natural historian in a fictional world modelled on Regency and Victorian England. Secondly, I read John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes from 1953, which is both fascinating for keeping its flavour of its age without being dated and also an eerie novel to read in an age of advancing climate change. This novel is also delightful for having one of the most functional married couples of fiction, at least based on my limited experience.

Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons

John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes

A meeting in Salamanca

In March, I spent a few days in Salamanca for a conference. This is one of my favourite cities, and an important literary location. Aside from being the setting of Lazarillo de Tormes, typically regarded as the first picaresque novel, it is also the workplace of one of my favourite poets, Maribel Andrés Llamero. I have been in touch with Maribel for several years, and this year we were finally able to meet up in person. She kindly signed my copy of her previous poetry collection – Los inútiles (the useless ones) – which had bought the year before in Santiago de Compostela. As an homage to Maribel, I subsequently crossed the river Tormes – which I had never got around to do during my previous trips to Salamanca – and stopped halfway to read some of her poems with the city’s skyline as a backdrop. As Maribel’s poems have enabled me to connect more deeply with my native landscapes for several years, it was a particular joy to also weave my own history of reading more tightly to the city of Salamanca through her work. 

Maribel Andrés Llamero, Los inútiles

The river Tormes

Lazarillo de Tormes and his blind master

Sundry highlights    

Due to my bibliophilia, I encounter book- and reading-related highlights in many forms, and some of these are collected here to give a more expansive overview of this year in reading.

Book-buying in Hamburg, which included this German translation of an Italian Donald Duck parody of Der Nibelungelied. I bought the copy even though I have copies of this story in both Italian and Norwegian already.

 

Visiting the university library of Salamanca during the conference, and being shown a fourteenth-century copy of Legenda Aurea, as well as a fourteenth-century copy of Liber de Sancti Jacobi. 

My haul from three weeks’ travel. 

Discovering Bergen public library’s tribute to the author Tor Åge Bringsværd, who passed away in 2025, and who was one of the most beloved literary voices of the past fifty years.

 

Working on an article draft that allowed me to delve deeper into the cult of Saint James of Compostela.

Myriam Moscona, León de Lidia

Trondheim

Nils Holger Petersen et. al. (eds.), Symbolic Identity and the Cultural Memory of Saints

Odense

Returning to old haunts in Trondheim and Odense. 

Researching a book bound in manuscript fragments at the Odense Cathedral School.

Working on descriptions of manuscript fragments at the University of Southern Denmark, the place where I got my PhD some eight years ago.

Breviarium Othoniense (1482) 

København Kongelige Bibliotek LN 29 4to

Breviarium Othoniense (1497) 

(København Kongelige Bibliotek LN 30

Abbo of Fleury, Passio Sancti Eadmundi

København Kongelige Bibliotek GKS 1588 4to

Researching at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. I was finally able to see the first to editions of the Odense Breviary – from 1482 and 1497 – in the paper, having pored over their pages digitally for years. I also revisited an eleventh-century manuscript containing a copy of Passio Sancti Eadmundi by Abbo of Fleury, as well as the earliest known copy of the liturgical office for the feast of Saint Edmund.

 

Returning to the University Library of Southern Denmark to work on a fifteenth-century collection of saints’ legends.

Mikael Manøe Bjerregaard et.al. (eds.), Royal Blood

Receiving the editor and contributor copy of the volume Royal Blood.

Related blogposts (2025) 

Reading-spots, part 6 

A three-week book haul 

Reading-spots, part 7 

A lesson in similarities 

Reading-spots, part 8 

Reading-spots, part 9 

Synchronicities of reading, part 1 

Reading-spots, part 8

 

Earlier this month, I was in Trondheim for a conference and also to perform a kind of personal pilgrimage. I went to university there, and spent seven formative years in the city, and there are numerous places where my own past comes closer and where I notice this release of pain and joy that we call nostalgia, which is memory filtered through our later knowledge of what has been lost and of what might have been.  

Last time I was in Trondheim for several consecutive days was in November 2018, a time in my life when everything seemed uncertain and where I knew I was barrelling towards the end of an era. In some ways, my latest return to Trondheim was marked by several of the same aspects, such as uncertainty, and a sense of loss. But it was also a joyous return, as I met loved ones and walked familiar streets, and as I saw that some of the old places where I left part of my past were still standing. One such place was Baklandet Skydsstation, a cafe housed in the premises of an old house - mainly from the nineteenth century - which has served as a house for manufacture of different kinds throughout its history. It is a quiet and lovely place, with the right kind of old-fashioned atmosphere, namely one that does not feel constructed or contrived.  

In many ways, the quiet, very Norwegian surrounds provided a notable contrast to the book I was then reading, Myriam Moscosa's wonderful novel León de Lidia (Lion of Lydia), which is a reflection on the history of her family and the collective memory of Ladino Jews who migrated from Bulgaria to Mexico in the wake of World War II, a memory that captures a lot of the fissures and faultlines of the twentieth century. Yet as I was there to reconnect with my own past, it also felt like very apposite reading. 

Perhaps a more notable and incontrovertible contrast was provided by the writing which I set out to do after I had finished eating. As I moved to a smaller table in a corner, I sat down to outline a new structure for a co-authored article that deals with the role of violence in medieval and early-modern utopian thinking. The topic is horrifyingly relevant in today's world, but in that particular corner of both the world and of the building in particular, the contrast between subject-matter and place was particularly notable. 

Trondheim without worms - echoes of a lost legend of Saint Olaf?

In medieval art, Saint Olaf of Norway is commonly depicted standing on top of a figure. The nature of this figure appears to have changed over time, although I myself have not mapped the evolution of this iconography, and I should emphasise that there might be several parallel iconographical traditions. In any case, very often we see that in images from the thirteenth century, the figure in question is a human being, the interpretation of which is uncertain. Later on - I hesitate to be precise - the figure takes the shape of a serpent or a dragon, very often with a crowned human head. It is very common in medieval art to see saints standing on such figures, presumably because of Psalm 90:13 in the Vulgate, where God is verbally depicted as trampling lions and dragons underfoot. Consequently, the shift in Olaf's iconography might be part of a wider trend, or perhaps a more localised offshoot that came to take on a life of its own in Northern Europe. The interpretation of this human-headed serpent has been subject to much debate, and I will not enter into here. However, I was reminded of this iconography while I was reading passage from a text written in the seventeenth century, and which might represent some sort of echo of a lost legend of Saint Olaf, or perhaps rather a confusion that ultimately has its root in this late-medieval iconography.   

Saint Olaf stepping on the beast 

Image from the right-hand door of a winged altarpiece, Bygland Church (after 1470) 
Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, C6113

The text in question is the utopian novel La Terre Australe Connue (1676) by Gabriel de Foigny, which David Fausett has translated into English as The Southern Land, Known. Foigny, a Franciscan-turned-Protestant who published the book while living in exile in Switzerland. The novel records the life and travels of Nicholas Sadeur, a hermaphrodite who ends up in a utopian society called Australia in the Southern Land, which in this case refers to the hypothetical southern continent - Terra Australis - which came to give its name to modern-day Australia. As most of the novel's fascinating content is superfluous to the subject at hand here, I will refrain from most of the details. However, in the opening of one of its chapters, there is a claim which becomes very interesting in light of the debate about the iconography of Saint Olaf. When reflecting on the marvellous properties of various landscapes and regions, Foigny - through his narrator Sadeur, mentions that "in Norway's Trondheim worms are unknown". At the time of writing, I have not checked what kind of worm is meant here, whether the serpent-like animal, or the earthworm. It is likely that the worm in question is a more formidable beast than the earthworm, yet later in the novel a note about the positive consequences of the absence of insects might suggest that the more humble creature is meant here. 

Whichever animal Foigny had in mind when writing this passage, it is a claim that I have not encountered elsewhere. The claim is not to be found in Latin medieval chronicles from Norway, even though these books do mention various marvellous properties of various Norwegian locations. It is possible that the claim appears in Olaus Magnus' Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (History of the Northern peoples) from 1555, which was printed in Rome and - due to being in Latin - would have been accessible to a man like Foigny, but such a connection remains to be verified. At the present, I remain at a loss to explain the inclusion of Trondheim in this list of marvellous topographies. What is possible, however, is that there is a connection with the legends of Saint Olaf, and that the absence of worms in Trondheim is based on some now-lost miracle story.    

From David Fausett's translation of Gabriel de Foigny's La Terre Australe Connue (The Southern Land, Known)

During the Middle Ages, several miracle stories were told about Saint Olaf. The earliest of them are likely to have emerged among the Norse mercenaries who had followed the living king into battle, and became some of the most effective disseminators of his cult. Sometime around 1180, a number of these stories were collected and recorded in Latin in a text now known as Miracula Olavi, the miracles of Olaf. This work contains a broad range of miracles that God is said to have brought about in order to prove Olaf's holiness, and the selection includes both old and contemporary stories. However, it is important to note that this collection was never complete, and that several stories are likely to have emerged after this particular text was compiled. Miracula Olavi does not mention any worms or serpents, so even in the unlikely event that Foigny would have had access to this text, it would not have provided the basis for this idea. Other stories might have circulated, however, and it is possible that there once existed a story about how Olaf had liberated Trondheim - which was the centre of his cult and the place of his shrine until the Danish-Norwegian Reformation of 1536/37 - from worms. Such a claim might be based on the beast frequently seen under Olaf's feet in late-medieval art. There might have been some inspiration from the story of Saint Patrick in Ireland, who was believed to have chased the serpents out of the island - a story available to Norwegians in the thirteenth-century book Konungs Skuggsjá (The King's Mirror), which contains a description of the marvellous properties of Ireland. Similarly, a story of how Saint Hild of Whitby chased away the snakes - a legend believed to have been confirmed by the ammonite fossils often found in that region - is also likely to have been available to late-medieval Norwegians. These various elements, as well as others that I have not thought about, might have mixed in the Norwegian mind and produced a story about how Trondheim had been liberated from worms by Saint Olaf. 

Now, Gabriel de Foigny does not mention Saint Olaf, just as he does not mention Saint Patrick when he mentions the absence of spiders and worms in the forests of Ireland. Consequently, if there is a lost story in the distant background of this claim, it was also lost to Foigny. It is very likely that he had never heard about Saint Olaf, a saint whose cult never gained any strong following outside of the Nordic Sphere, eleventh-century England, and the late-medieval Baltic theatre. Some echoes might have arrived, however, possibly in the form of Catholic exiles from Norway, historical figures about whom we know practically nothing, yet of whose existence we can be certain. Such a surmise is hypothetical, however, and I must emphasise that I do not suggest that such a tenuous transmission of stories actually did appear. Yet the possibility remains - the possibility that some warped version of such a legend did reach Foigny, albeit a version evacuated of its explanatory content, a version where the cause - divine intervention on behalf of Saint Olaf - was divorced from the effect, namely the absence of worms in Trondheim.   

Other explanations also exist. The absence of worms - if these are earthworms - might be based on the perceived coldness of the land, the cultural trope of a frozen North willingly believed by someone who had not ventured into that North themselves. Ultimately, however, we do not know, and most likely we will never know. Such a lack of certainty does not give licence to completely free and unbridled speculation. On the other hand, the lack of certainty does force us to reflect on the intangible yet forceful nature of stories - their ability to subsist on very little and to be transported far and wide, even if not always in their original form. 

Saint James the Elder and Saint Olaf - a brief comparison

 

Today, July 25, is the feast of Saint James the Elder, one of the most famous saints of Latin Christendom, and arguably the most famous saint of Spanish history. One of Christ's apostles, medieval legend placed his shrine in Compostela in Galicia, Northern Spain. At the beginning of the twelfth century, Compostela was the locus of one of the most intense bouts of mythopoiesis - myth-making - in the Middle Ages, where the clergy at Compostela created a legend that tied their place with biblical history, the legend of Charlemagne, and with the contemporary, twelfth-century world. This myth-making process created one of the three main pilgrim sites in the Latin Christian consciousness, with Rome and Jerusalem being the other two. Part of that process was the erection of the great Romanesque cathedral of Compostela, which is now largely supplanted by a later Gothic one, and the corpus of hagiographical material that is compiled in the Liber Sancti Jacobi (Book of Saint James), whose main textual witness is the twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus. Since James the Elder was known throughout Christendom due to his appearance in the Bible, and since his sanctity was accepted by all Christians, Compostela's claim to be the apostle's resting place resulted in durable myth that has continued to work its effect into our own times. Saint James, or Santiago, has become in effect a patron saint of Spain and of Spanish imperialism. The historical development of the cult is complex, but a very simplified summary of the evolution of Saint James' iconography can be found in this old blogpost. In short, however, we should note that Saint James goes from being an apostle, to a pilgrim, to a battle-helper. This is an evolution that demonstrates, in a typical fashion, the plasticity or malleability of saints.   

From a Norwegian perspective, there are notable similarities in how Saint James the Elder became a focal point of myth-making in Spain and how Saint Olaf became a focal point for a similar process in Norway. The myth-making centred on Saint Olaf gained momentum from the 1150s onwards, after the establishment of the Norwegian Church Province in 1152/53, where Trondheim - Saint Olaf's resting place - became the metropolitan see of a church organization that stretched from Oslo to Greenland. By the mid-twelfth-century, the sanctity of Olaf had become an accepted part of Scandinavian historical thought, and he was venerated throughout the Norse world, largely thanks to the Nordic diaspora whose members continued to tell stories about him. From the 1150s onwards, however, these stories became more fixed as they were committed to writing, and the clergy at Trondheim used the legend to anchor Norway and the Norwegian Church both locally within Norway, within a wider European context, and also within a universal history that reached back into biblical times. Saint Olaf became the patron saint of Norway, and his cult enjoyed a stable and widespread popularity well beyond the Reformation, and he remains an important point of reference in our own time. (He is even featured - although as a historical figure rather than as a saint - in the TV series Beforeigners.) Like Saint James, Olaf has also undergone an iconographic evolution, being presented as a warlord, a battle-helper, and as a Christian ideal king. Also like in the case of Saint James, while these representations accrued over time, they also co-existed and made for a very composite and complex image of the holy figure.  

The two saints were both important focal points in their respective geographies, although the similarities between the two cults are out of balance due to the much more widespread fame and status of Saint James the Elder and of Compostela as a holy site. Many of the mechanisms between the two cases of myth-making are similar, however, and it remains an academic fantasy of mine to have those two myth-making processes carefully compared through an international project. For the time being, however, I will have to be content with noting, as people have done before me, that these similarities exist, even though there are very few zones of contact between the two cults. While Saint James was venerated in Norway, there is little reason to think that Olaf was known in Spain, even though the twelfth-century miracle list, known as Miracula Olavi, claims that a Galician knight came to the shrine of Saint Olaf to be liberated from his chains.   

As far as I know, the Norwegian mythmakers drew inspiration from the general practices of Christian mythmaking, and not from one single cult in particular. It is unclear whether any of the clerics and monks involved in the Norwegian mythmaking drew on the corpus of legends connected to Saint James, but the gist of this corpus was indeed known in twelfth-century Norway. This knowledge is demonstrated by a detail from a reliquary in Hedalen stave church, which contains a relic of Saint Thomas of Canterbury (d.1170; can. 1173). One of the short sides of the reliquary contains two figures, namely Olaf and James the Elder, the former recognizable through his axe and crown, the latter recognizable through his pilgrim's garb. This depiction of James shows that the Compostela legend - which formulated him as a pilgrim - was known in Norway. 

The Hedalen reliquary 
Photo by Nina Aldin Thune; courtesy of Wikimedia

Detail from the Hedalen reliquary 
Photo by Trond Øigarden
From an exhibition at the Oslo University Library curated by José Maria Izquierdo, autumn 2021

Sources for a conference presentation (30.04.21)

 
As I mentioned in my previous blogpost, I am giving two conference presentations this week. The first of these is tomorrow, where I will be speaking on the third and last day of the Becket conference, the belated 850th anniversary of the martyrdom of Thomas of Canterbury in 1170 (as well as the 800th anniversary of the translation of his relics in 1220). 

In my presentation, I talk about the veneration of Saint Thomas in medieval Norway, as evidenced by materials for the liturgical office for his feast-day on December 29. While there are many interesting sources to the cult of Saint Thomas in medieval Norway, my focus is only on the materials from the feast-day office, and not about his translation feast or the materials for the mass. 

The presentation is pre-recorded, and to access it you need to register for the conference. If you have not done so, you might still find this blogpost useful, as the purpose of the post is to provide links to some of the sources that I have used in my research. 

AM 679 4to, f.10r

The first source is AM 679 4to, a thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript which contains a version of the so-called Ordo Nidrosiense, i.e. a book containing the liturgical feasts celebrated in the Norwegian archiepiscopal province, which included Iceland, Greenland, Shetland, the Orkneys, the Faroes, the Hebrides and Man. This source is invaluable for understanding the yearly cycle of liturgical performance in the churches throughout the Norwegian archdiocese.

The second source is Breviarium Nidrosiense, a breviary containing the materials for the office for the feasts celebrated throughout the liturgical year in the Norwegian church province. The breviary was printed in Paris in 1519, commissioned by Archbishop Erik Valkendorf. The content was most likely drawn - at least in part - from a manuscript of the Ordo, or some similar manuscript used at Trondheim, the metropolitan see of Norway. This means that despite the use of new technology, the content was old and therefore a valuable source to liturgical observance in earlier centuries. 

A digitised edition of Breviarium Nidrosiense can be found on the website of the Norwegian National Library.

A searchable, transcribed edition of the content of the Breviarium can be found on the website Bokselskap. This version is edited by Ingrid Sperber, and it includes an introduction by Espen Karlsen and Sigurd Hardeide, and it is a phenomenally useful tool for any researcher or enthusiast. The edition was published by the National Library for the 500-year-anniversary of the printing of what are known as the first Norwegian (printed) books, and which was celebrated by a series of events throughout Norway in The Norwegian Year of the Book in 2019. 


The third source that I mention, although I do not engage with it, is Missale Nidrosiense, the sister-volume of the Breviarium containing the materials for the mass celebrations in the Norwegian archdiocese. 

A digitised edition can be found at the Norwegian National Library. 

And as with the Breviarium, the National Library has also published a transcribed edition made by Ingrid Sperber, including an introduction by Espen Karlsen and Sigurd Hardeide. And as with the edition of the Breviarium, this edition is an extremely helpful and valuable tool for anyone interested in the medieval liturgy of Norway.



These sources will be mentioned in the course of my talk, and in the event that my presentation, or just the reading of this blogpost, inspires you to explore these sources, here they are gathered on one single plate. Enjoy.

Was Saint Olaf canonised?

Today is the feast of Saint Olaf of Norway, who died at the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030, in an attempt to regain control of the Norwegian kingship. In the following year, Olaf's remains were translated from their first place of burial to a shrine in the Church of Saint Clement in Trondheim. (A church that is believed to have been found in a recent archaeological dig.)

Saint Olaf - thirteenth-century wooden sculpture, Drev Church, Sweden

The life of the historical Olaf, as well as the history of his posthumous cult, have been the subject of much scholarship in the past century, and because Olaf was a saint venerated throughout the North-Atlantic and the Baltic culture-spaces this is a very rich material for academic discussion. One aspect that often comes up when talking about Saint Olaf is how we should understand the events of August 3, 1031. Very often, one will see that this is talked about as a canonisation, which is the typical term for describing when someone is proclaimed a saint in the later Middle Ages, as well as in the modern period. In this blogpost, however, I aim to explain as well as I can why this term is not accurate, and does not provide a good understanding of what happened that day in August almost a thousand years ago.

Olaf is prepared for the translation

Detail from an altar front from an unknown church, Trondheim, c.1330-40

(Courtesy of Wikimedia)

The translation of Olaf's relics was initiated and supervised by Grimkell, the bishop of Trondheim who had come to Norway in Olaf's retinue, and a man likely of Anglo-Norse background and well-versed in the cult of saints. Following Olaf's death on Stiklestad July 29, the body was interred unceremoniously and in secret, according to the account in Snorri Sturlusson's Heimskringla from c.1230 (it is not mentioned in Olaf's saint-biography, now known by the title Passio et Miracula Beati Olavi, which was finalized in the early 1180s). Following reports of miracles, the bishop interpreted these as signs that God was proclaiming the holiness of the would-be king. Olaf was exhumed and enshrined, which consisted of a translatio, a moving of the relics of a holy person to a new resting place. The feast was eventually also included in the liturgy for the Norwegian archdiocese, but we do not know exactly when this happened. The cult of Saint Olaf was thus established.

On August 3 1031, Bishop Grimkell of Trondheim proclaimed to the people that Olaf was a saint of God and demonstrated this by moving his relics to a shrine where those relics could be venerated. The question then remains: Should we call this a canonisation? The simple answer is no, and I will try and explain why this is the case, and why the terminology matters.

First of all, a canonisation means to inscribe the name on a list, a canon, which thus makes the status of this name official. Such a list of saints - be it physical or just an abstraction - became part of the later medieval papacy's system of ensuring orthodoxy in Latin Christendom. In the context of the cult of saints, the term itself, canonisation, means to be formally acknowledged as a saint by the papal authority.

The problem with using the term "canonisation" for the proclamation of Olaf's sainthood in Trondheim in 1031, is that Olaf was never formally acknowledged by the pope, and neither did he have to be. By the early eleventh century, the proclamation of sainthood was left to the authority of bishops. In the more developed church organisations, as we see in Germany, France, England, Spain, a proclamation of sainthood was often done following a synod of several bishops, to ensure that the proclamation was valid. Certainly, the verb "canonizare" had existed in Latin since at least the tenth century, but it was not widely used, and it was not the terminology that accurately described a synodal confirmation of someone's sainthood. The reason why the proclamation of sainthood was an episcopal matter had to do with the limitations of the papal church at the time: In the first half of the eleventh century, the pope's authority was mainly local, and while he was acknowledged as the head of the entire Latin church, he did not have the administrative infrastructure to control the cult of saints throughout the expanding Latin Christendom. The declaration of sainthood, therefore, was an episcopal responsibility. Moreover, since the Norwegian church organisation by 1031 was still very much in its infancy, the authority of Grimkell as bishop of Trondheim was sufficient for establishing the sanctity of Olaf. When canonisation became a mechanism of control for the papacy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this did not work retroactively, and was only used for new cults. Every person that was already venerated as a saint was allowed veneration - unless it was a controversial case.

The question then is: Why does it matter whether we use the term "canonisation" to talk about the moving of Olaf's relics in 1031. First of all, this is simply a matter of precision. While the term "canonizare" did exist in 1031 and is therefore not anachronistic, it was not widely used and it is very unlikely that Grimkell himself thought in such terms. Secondly, the term "canonisation" implies a stronger contact between the nascent diocese of Trondheim and the papal see than was in place by 1031. To call the translation of what was essentially a local saint a canonisation is to vastly overplay the importance of Olaf in the Latin cult of saints. Even though Olaf became immensely popular throughout Northern Europe, this success came in stages and was not directly due to the ceremony of August 3 in Trondheim. In this way, to say that Olaf was canonised is to imply that there were people in Rome, in the minuscule papal administration, that knew anything about the recently-dead Norwegian would-be king. There were other mechanisms by which the cult of Olaf gained popularity, and the term canonisation tends to overshadow those mechanisms.

Olaf was, in other words, not canonised. His relics were translated, and by this translation he was proclaimed to be a saint, who could intercede for those who venerated him and who had merited a shrine in the church and a liturgical feast. This was established through episcopal authority, the highest authority needed for these affairs in the 1030s, be it in Norway, in Germany, in Spain, or any other part of Latin Christendom. 

A commemoration of Saint Thomas of Canterbury in the Nidaros liturgy

Today, December 31, is the feast of Pope Silvester I, famous for converting Constantine the Great to Christianity and for defeating a pestiferous dragon hiding in the caverns beneath Rome. However, this blogpost is not about the sainted pope, but about the sainted archbishop Thomas of Canterbury, popularly known as Thomas Becket, who was appointed by King Henry II to the see of Canterbury, was sent into exile in 1164, and was murdered by knights at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 within a year of having returned to England and been reconciled with the king. Thomas was canonised by Pope Alexander III in 1173, lives and liturgical offices were soon written in his honour, and his cult spread to the various corners of the Latin West.

Thomas of Canterbury going into exile
BL MS Royal 2 B VII, psalter, between 1310 and 1320

One of the corners in which the cult of Thomas of Canterbury achieved great popularity was the Norwegian metropolitan see of Trondheim, the centre of the Nidaros Archbishopric which - by the turn of the twelfth century - covered mainland Norway, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Orkney, Shetland, and the South Islands (Hebrides and Man). The popularity of Thomas in Norway was owed in large part to the circle around Archbishop Eystein Erlendsson (r.1161-88) and his successors, who belonged to the same school of ecclesiastical thought as did Thomas of Canterbury, and also Pope Alexander III. These high-ranking ecclesiastics all embraced the reformist ideals that had been formulated in the course of the Gregorian Reform Movement in the eleventh century also throughout the twelfth century.

We do not know exactly how and when  the liturgical celebration of Thomas of Canterbury arrived in Norway, or who brought the liturgical texts that were used, but there were many points of contact between the Norwegian and the English churches in the twelfth century. Moreover, the metropolitan see in Trondheim were probably eager recipients of the cult of Thomas as this gave them another saintly patron in their efforts to establish a Gregorian ideal kingdom in which the king was subject to the church and not the other way around. These efforts were cut short, however, when the pretender Sverre made claims to the throne and emerged victorious in the civil war that raged from 1177 to 1184. Despite this victory, King Sverre and the Norwegian clergy continued to quarrel about the relationship between king and church, and this conflict is likely to have strengthened the importance of Thomas of Canterbury in the Norwegian church province.

There is much to be said about the liturgical celebration of Thomas of Canterbury in Norway, but for the time being I will restrict myself to one single commemoration to exemplify his importance. The commemoration in question is found in the Ordo Nidrosiensis Ecclesiae, a collation of manuscripts from the Nidaros province in which there are found rubrics and notes regarding the details of the liturgical celebrations of the Nidaros churches. It was edited in 1968 by the Norwegian medievalist Lilli Gjerløw.

In the details for the feast of Saint Silvester on December 31, under the heading of the office of Lauds (around daybreak), a number of antiphons are listed that are to be performed in commemoration of important saints of the Christmas season. Among these were Stephen Protomartyr whose feast was on the 26th of December, the child martyrs of Bethlehem whose feast was on the 28th of December, and Thomas of Canterbury whose feast was on the 29th of December.

While the liturgical office, typically attributed to Benedict of Peterborough, was used for the celebration of Thomas' feast in Nidaros, the antiphon used for his commemoration is not from this repertoire but instead from the common of one martyr. These texts from the common of a type of saints comprised a shared repertoire of liturgical chants that were accessible to all of Latin Christendom. When a chant from this common material was used in the celebration of a specific saint, and especially a saint who had been added to the liturgical calendar in recent times, the individual saint's place among his saintly colleagues was emphasised. In the case of Thomas of Canterbury in Nidaros, the chant from the common of martyrs emphasised that he belonged in the collegium of martyrs who had been martyred alone - as opposed to the martyrs who had died as a group (although links between various types could be established through chant as well).

The antiphon by which Thomas of Canterbury was commemorated, was Nisi granum frumentum (CID 003883). The text of this chant is as follows:

Nisi granum frumenti cadens
in terra mortuum fuerit ipsum solum manet

The antiphon applies the imagery of the grain that is being threshed and in that process is being refined. In the liturgy of martyrs, as well as other saints, it was very common to apply imagery that invoked various labours of refinement. This is also seen in the office composed specifically for Thomas of Canterbury, where one responsory describes the exile of Thomas as a gem that is being hammered for six years, meaning that this hardship was part of what proved Thomas' sanctity.


That the antiphon Nisi granum was used in the Nidaros Archdiocese to commemorate Thomas of Canterbury on Saint Silvester's day, is just one of the many examples of Thomas' importance to the Norwegian clergy. It is as yet unclear whether such a commemoration, and this antiphon in particular, was established in the Norwegian liturgy by the metropolitan clergy, or whether it was a practice that was brought from overseas. The latter is more likely, because in the context of the reform movement the clerics sought unity and adaptation of existing practices, not originality or uniqueness. Together with other commemorations throughout the Christmas season in the Nidaros liturgy, the antiphon Nisi granum demonstrates that the cult of Thomas of Canterbury was of great importance in the Norwegian church province.