Lectures from the Festival of History - St Olaf: An international Norwegian Saint (Dublin, 2023)

 
This October, I had the tremendous honour of being invited to participate in this year's Viking Seminar, a part of the annual Festival of History in Dublin. The topic for the seminar was the figure of Saint Olaf and the international character of his cult, as it spread widely across Northern Europe shortly after he was proclaimed a saint in 1031. Participating in this seminar was an absolutely marvellous experience, and I was delighted to be part of the line-up, especially because the various presentations connected very well with one another in terms of the topics and the details explored in them, and also because the line-up was comprised of very lovely people. 

As the seminar was a public event, the lectures were also recorded, and they are available on YouTube, thanks to the Dublin City Libraries. Consequently, instead of repeating my words unduly and unnecessarily, I give you the link for the whole seminar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD059xzw3CA. 

Celebrating Nynorsk, celebrating Jon Fosse

 


Today it was announced that the recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature 2023 is the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, and the most likely and anticipated Norwegian candidate to receive the prize. The choice of Jon Fosse was therefore not a surprise, but it was great and very welcome news, and it has made me very happy. My excitement about the prize does not have much to do with Jon Fosse himself. I have so far only read one of his plays - Nokon kjem til å komme (Somebody is going to come) - which is also arguably his best known work, at least in Norway. I appreciate this play more than I can claim to like it, and my satisfaction about having read it stems more from its cultural significance than my personal enjoyment. This is a convoluted way of saying that I do not have a strong personal attachment to Jon Fosse's oeuvre. Nor does my excitement stem from the fact that the recipient is from Norway, as there are numerous Norwegian writers I do not care about - and one that I actively dislike to the point that I would have become genuinely angry if he were to have been chosen by the Nobel committee.

Rather, the excitement I feel today is because Jon Fosse is the first Nobel laureate in literature who writes in Nynorsk, the minority form of the two official forms of written Norwegian. (We have no official spoken form.) Nynorsk is my own primary written language, and one that constitutes a massive part of my own identity as a rural Norwegian, a Western Norwegian, and a speaker of a certain dialect which is most closely aligned with Nynorsk. Moreover, since Nynorsk is a minority form, it is also a form that is constantly struggling against neglect or even overt antagonism from various agents in Norwegian society, such as certain political parties or youth organizations of political parties who wish to remove Nynorsk as a compulsory part of the syllabus in Norwegian schools. Most of the national media in Norway is written in Bokmål rather than Nynorsk - Bokmål being the dominant form and more closely aligned with urban and Eastern Norwegian dialects - and the vast majority of books printed in Norway are in Bokmål. Foreigners coming to Norway have typically been most likely to receive study materials in Bokmål, even if they live in a municipality where Nynorsk is the official form of Norwegian. In short, Nynorsk is under constant pressure. 

Due to the pressure against Nynorsk as a written language and its use within Norwegian society, the choice of a Nynorsk-writing author for the Nobel Prize is to provide a globally accessible recognition of the merits of Nynorsk as a literary language. The choice of Jon Fosse signals to the world, and to us Nynorsk-writing and Nynorsk-promoting Norwegians that we are not alone in acknowledging the value and potential of our language. And while I do not, in my excitement, endorse the Nobel Prize as a cultural phenomenon, or any form of institutionally driven, non-organic type of canon-formation which we see at play in such awards, I very much appreciate how such a prize can provide a much-needed recognition of a language that struggles in the face of an often hostile majority, and how Nynorsk as a language can benefit from the kind of visibility and reference point provided by the Nobel Prize. 

To celebrate today's good news, I bought three bars of 'eventyrsjokolade' (fairy-tale chocolate), a small bar of milk chocolate where the inside of the wrapper contains a short version of a Norwegian fairy tale. One of these was the story of the fox widow, a story to which I feel a personal attachment since I performed in a puppet show version of the fairy tale when I was in kindergarten. While these condensed versions of fairy tales are written in Bokmål rather than Nynorsk, the choice still felt appropriate since it is the only literary sweet we have available. And, as always, they tasted delicious. 

On bluer skies

Since 2012, I have been an active member on Twitter, and in those years I have gained a lot of different experiences, and for the most part these have been immensely positive. Both as a scholar and as a general human being, I have become indebted to a wide range of individuals who have showed me great kindness and helped me improve, both personally and professionally. I hope to be able to continue reaping benefits from Twitter, but the current owner - an emotionally deranged, all-too-powerful, idiotic, destructive man-child with the intellectual capacity of an egg cup - has made the possibility of gaining something good on Twitter increasingly difficult. As things seem to be heading down an even more ludicrous road in the coming weeks, I have created an account on Bluesky just to be able to keep in touch with the friends I have made in the past eleven years, friends without whom I would be infinitely poorer. 

My handle on Bluesky is @hopesteffen.bsky.social. You are all welcome to find me there. 

For the time being, my main activity will remain on Twitter, but I hope that if that particular network does implode in the hands of a faux-genius who has not heard the word 'no' often enough in his life, Bluesky will provide a viable alternative, which can foster the kind of exchanges that have broadened my horizon for eleven years.  

 

Saint Michael in Tønsberg, part 1 - the dragonslayer in the cathedral

 
Today, September 29, is the feast of Saint Michael and all angels. For this year's feast, I present you with a modern representation from the city of Tønsberg in Eastern Norway. In the nineteenth-century cathedral, we find a series of exquisite stained glass widows created by Per Vigeland in 1939. The windows contain depictions of a number of saints and biblical figures, including Saint Michael and Saint Lawrence, as seen below. The pairing of the two saints is curious, as is the fact that they feature in a Protestant cathedral. The cult of saints was abolished in Norway following the Reformation in 1536/37, but there survived numerous references to saints in folklore, stories, as well as historical narratives. In the first half of the twentieth century, the strongest anti-Catholic currents of the 1800s had receded, and Catholicism was becoming somewhat more accepted, despite several strands and pockets of more Puritan-like versions of Protestantism.  

What has made saints so ambiguous in the religious landscape of modern Norway is not only their place in surviving traditions from the Middle Ages, as in the case of using the feast of Saint Peter's Chair (February 22) as a marker of the shift from Winter to Spring. Part of the ambiguity also comes from the surges of interest for medieval aesthetic, not limited to the convoluted carvings of the Norwegian stave churches - the so-called Urnes style - but also the statues and the symbolism of surviving medieval art. There came, in other words, a greater acknowledgement of the Middle Ages as part of Norwegian heritage. The stained glass figures in Tønsberg cathedral might be understood in light of that acknowledgement. 

There is one further aspect that explains the representations of Michael and Lawrence, namely the historical connections of these cults to the city of Tønsberg. In the Middle Ages, a church dedicated to Saint Michael was located on the top of the crag that rises above the city. Today, only its foundation can be seen, but enough to give a good impression of its original size and its importance as a landmark. Its earliest reference in the surviving sources dates to the 1190s, but it is possible, perhaps even likely, that the church is several decades older than that. Its position on the top of the crag shows that medieval Norwegians were familiar with Michael's association with peaks and summits. 

Similarly, medieval Tønsberg also housed a Church of Saint Lawrence. This church was torn down in the 1800s, and the current cathedral was built in the same area. By pairing together the dedicatees of two of Tønsberg's lost medieval churches, Per Vigeland is invoking the city's past, reminding the congregation about what these figures once meant for Christians in Tønsberg. 

In the case of these stained glass windows, moreover, we are also witnessing a form of medievalism. When it comes to saints, it is always difficult to assess whether a modern expression of veneration of a saint - either a medieval saint or a form of veneration expressed through means available in the medieval period - can be considered medievalism, or whether we should understand this as a form of continuity. For Protestant countries, however, we are on somewhat safer grounds, as we can very rarely talk about continuity in the case of saints - although there are exceptions - and in the case of such an elaborate and finely crafted use of saints, the case seems even more certain. 

Saint Michael and Saint Lawrence by Per Vigeland, 1939

Reading-spots, part 4

 

Whenever I am home in my native village, I make it my quest to find new spots in which to read. This quest also applies outside of my village, but since I have spent most of my life among the mountains of home, finding new locations in which I have not yet read requires a bit more effort than elsewhere. Today I was reminded of one of these new places which I discovered in 2021, a year when I spent eight consecutive months at home, and when I spent many lovely hours canoeing along the shore of the lake just behind the house after my paternal grandparents.  

The place in question is a short stretch of stony beach where the shore is sufficiently even and sufficiently low to allow for disembarkation, and where it is also possible to find a comfortable place to relax with a good book. As can be glimpsed from the pictures below, this particular location also has the added virtue of being difficult to see from a distance, as old hazel trees are bending in arches over the shoreline, effectively hiding it from view, and creating a kind of canopy under which it is possible to seek refuge from light drizzles. I brought with me a volume of poetry by one of my favourite poets, Maribel Andrés Llamero, to whose poems I had only been introduced earlier that year. This book, La lentitud del liberto, is full of beautiful, melancholic meditations, and was an excellent companion under the greenwood trees by the lake. 

A different Oslo, or - Novels as historical remnants

 

For several years, I have appreciated the value of novels as windows into the periods in which they were written. By referencing a world known to their contemporary readers but not their future readers, novels are what we might call historical vestiges or remnants, in that they can be used as reliable historical sources if we seek for the right kind of information. 

One example of this function of novels, which I recently came across, is Michael Grundt Spang's Operasjon V for vanvidd ('vanvidd' meaning madness in Norwegian.) Spang (1931-2003) was a crime journalist and wrote several novels. Operasjon V for vanvidd was published in 1968. Although it was turned into a film in 1970, the novel did not make a long-lasting impact in the Norwegian cultural sphere, and Spang is not considered a canonical crime author. Consequently, I am not entirely sure why the novel's title has stayed in my brain ever since I first became aware of it around twenty years ago. Likewise, I do not quite understand what prompted me to borrow this book, although I guess it might have had something to do with my urge to read more Norwegian books. I had only a vague notion of the plot, so I more or less came blind to the novel. It turned out to be a fortuitous choice. 

As I am currently living in Oslo, I want to read as many Oslo-based novels as I can squeeze in among the numerous other books I aim to read in the course of a given years. Luckily, Operasjon V is set in Oslo, and describes a city very far removed from the one with which I have become increasingly familiar in the past two years. The novel contains several familiar place names, but since I have no long-term memory of the city's past and its changes, a lot of the routes described in the book appeared very odd to me, as these are routes that do not appear very logical for someone recently moved to twenty-first-century Oslo. 

The best example of this time-shock, or whatever to call it, came within the first few pages of the book, when describing a Christmas party in a villa near Maridalsvann. This name refers to a lake to the northeast of Oslo, which is the main source of the city's drinking water, and which lies quite a long way away from the city centre. As the clock is nearing half past 8, the host reflects to himself that in about an hour he will have to call a taxi so that some of his guest will be able to catch a plane at 11 in the evening. My first reaction to this detail was disbelief, as I could not imagine how anyone could get from that part of town to the airport in so little time. I was then reminded that not only was the general traffic and the number of passengers on a considerably lower scale in 1968 than what they are today, but the airport was elsewhere, namely very close to the city centre. Nowadays, the Oslo airport is Gardermoen, located around 45 minutes by train from the city centre, and to get there by car will require more time, especially in winter. In 1968, however, the airport was Fornebu, located by the shore of the Oslo fjord, and not a very long way from the main part of the city. I was, in other words, reminded that despite my two years - and counting - in this city, I have not yet begun to understand it, because I have not lived through its changes. Thanks to novels, however, I am gradually getting a better sense of what is currently my home city.    

New publication: 'Helgenerne i Skive. Deres udvalg i kontekst'

 
The end of August saw the publication of a book to which I have been fortunate enough to contribute, namely Dansk senmiddelalder, reformationstid og renæssance [Danish Late Middle Ages, Reformation era, and Renaissance]. The book, edited by Louise Nyholm Kallestrup and Per Seesko-Tønnesen, is a festschrift to my primary PhD supervisor, Lars Bisgaard, who is both a lovely man and one of the leading Danish medievalists of our times.

My contribution is a chapter called 'Helgenerne i Skive. Deres udvalg i kontekst [The saints of Skive. Their selection in context']. The article examines the wall-painting cycle of the Old Church in Skive, Northern Jutland, about which I have written several blogposts. The article provides an interpretation of the selection of saints, suggesting how we might understand the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others.  

The most rewarding aspect of this article was to be able to pay a small homage to a supervisor to whom I owe much more than I can ever repay. I was also very happy that the invitation allowed me to write up an article idea that I had had on my mind since the spring of 2019, following a visit to the medieval church of Skive. As such, this publication is yet another reminder of how such ideas that seem too small or too vague at the time of conception can mature into something interesting and worthwhile, given the opportunity.  

The book, most of whose contributions are in Danish, can be purchased here. 

Dansk senmiddelalder, reformationstid og renæssance 

Ed. by Louise Nyholm Kallestrup and Per Seesko-Tønnesen

(Photo courtesy of Syddansk Universitetsforlag)