The Cult of St Olaf and Early Novgorod

The Medieval Review, 2016

is the king to whom the spread of Christianity throughout Scandinavia is generally attributed, at least in most of the (admittedly later) Scandinavian written sources, though modern scholarship generally takes the view that the situation was more complex and Christianity had a rather longer foothold in Scandinavia than the hagiographic sources suggest. As the bringer of Christianity, Óláfr was revered, and not just in Scandinavia. Just a year after his death in battle in the summer of 1030, he was declared a saint, and his cult spread rapidly throughout Scandinavia, as well as England and Normandy (both within a Scandinavian sphere of influence, as it were), and later in the Middle Ages, to a large extent by the agency of the Hanse, through many port cities in northern Germany and the Baltic. While reports about his cult surface in non-Scandinavian sources throughout the eleventh century, it is only in the twelfth century that a written narrative tradition came into being in Scandinavia, and the first Lives belong in that period. A large number of extant (though not contemporary) sources tell us about his life, including many vernacular sagas, some of which are quite monumental in scope: the Life of Óláfr in the Heimskringla, a collection of royal biographies produced in the early thirteenth century, takes up one whole volume of the modern three-volume edition of that compendium. Some of the earliest extant vernacular sagas about kings are, not surprisingly, those concerning Óláfr; and some of the earliest Latin narratives from Scandinavia are also, again unsurprisingly, about this sainted king. The earliest Lives (two in Latin, and one in Old Norse) are now lost; the oldest vernacular narrative fully extant, the so-called Legendary Saga, was composed around 1200; and the oldest still-extant Latin narrative, the Passio Olavi, the subject of the book under review, is extant in a number of manuscripts and, according to the author of this book, in three quite distinct recensions, the oldest of which can be dated to the last decades of the twelfth century. A study of this text is of great importance for our understanding of early Scandinavian hagiography and historical consciousness in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; of the spread of the cult of Óláfr throughout much of northern Europe; and of the place of this cult and narratives of this saint within the social and political spheres of Scandinavia, England, France, and the Baltic. This book delivers magnificently on its promise, and is thus of fundamental significance for anyone interested in any of these subjects, as well as being an exemplary edition of a hitherto insufficiently well-known Latin text. Most of the previous scholarship has concentrated only on one manuscript (Oxford, Corpus Christi College, Cod. 209, hereafter CCC), arguably the oldest source, which contains both the narrative of Óláfr's life itself (the Passio), and a collection of miracle narratives appended to it. Jiroušková argues that not only are there two versions of what she calls Recensio I of the Passio, as has long been acknowledged by the scholarship (version A, which is longer and according to Jiroušková older, and B), but also, first, that this differentiation is true only of the Passio part, not of the miracles (this argument is based primarily on her stylistic analyses of the text); and, second, that the miracle Ghosh

2018

S CANDINAVIAN HISTORIANS IN MODERN times have oft en tacitly assumed that saints in the Middle Ages were peaceful. Saints' lives, miracle collections, and pictures and fi gures of saints have been studied to sift out information about daily life, habits, utensils, attitudes toward health, and the like, or saints have been considered political creatures invented or exploited by rulers to enhance their own prestige and strengthen their dynastic line against other members of the family. Th e topic of saints and warfare, however, has been almost totally neglected. Such a connection has fallen outside the dominant socioeconomic historiographical tradition in Scandinavia during the entire twentieth century, and it has somehow aff ronted or at least been disturbing for the strong Lutheran and pietistic tradition in Scandinavia, according to which a good Christian would also do good, pious, and peaceful deeds. Modern historians have sometimes directly blamed medieval saints for not having lived a truly saintly life, and for having come to be venerated as saints in spite of their engagement in wars, the brutality they showed toward the people, or some other indecent behavior. 1 Such an approach misses an important aspect of the medieval Christian understanding of saints, namely that it could be necessary, and therefore a good deed, to be a warrior. Ever since the earliest church, Christian theologians agreed that it was unrealistic to imagine societies without war, because societies here on earth can never be without evil, and it is therefore necessary to fight against evil, both spiritually and physically. 2 Warfare was endemic to medieval societies, also in Scandinavia, and not least in the Baltic where fighting for trade and economy and fighting for mission went hand in hand throughout the Middle Ages.

2021

Icelanders venerated numerous saints, both indigenous and from overseas, in the Middle Ages. However, although its literary elite was well acquainted with contemporary Continental currents in hagiographic compositions, theological discussions, and worship practices, much of the history of the learned European networks through which the Icelandic cult of the saints developed and partially survived the Lutheran Reformation remains obscure. The essays collected in this volume address this lacuna by exploring the legacies of the cult of some of the most prominent saints and holy men in medieval Iceland (the Virgin Mary along with SS Agnes of Rome, Benedict of Nursia, Catherine of Alexandria, Dominic of Caleruega, Michael the Archangel, Jón of Hólar, Þorlákr of Skálholt, Lárentíus of Hólar, and Guðmundr the Good), using evidence drawn from Old Norse-Icelandic and Latin hagiographic literature, homilies, prayers, diplomas, sacred art, place-names, and church dedications. By placing the medieval Icelandic cult of the saints within its wider European context, the contributions trace new historical routes of cultural transmission and define the creative processes of the accommodation and adaptation of foreign hagiographic sources and models in medieval and early modern Iceland. They provide a clear picture of an Icelandic hagiographic literature and culture that celebrates the splendour of the saints; they also show how an engaging literary genre, which became immensely popular on the island throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, was created.

Alas, the printed version did not include our final corrections. Therefore, instead of the printed or the online version, please use the ACROBAT READER to see all of our comments which represent the finally accepted PDF file for publication. ---> This chapter examines the cult of saints in East Central and Eastern Europe. First, we will dwell on the universal, “primary” saints venerated in this part of Europe, especially the Virgin Mary and St Peter, elaborating on their overarching functions for the emerging kingdoms. Second, we will deal with the native saints, especially those venerated within the entire realms (as opposed to those venerated in one region or in one ecclesiastical institution only) and we will discuss the theological and political meaning that their cults had for the local communities. Finally, we will elaborate on native saints whose cults spread throughout the entire region and beyond, to show that politically, socially, and religiously divergent traditions did not prevent mutual exchanges. Whether imported or native to the region, saints moved freely between East Central and Eastern Europe and the rest of the Continent.

In Norwegian medieval history and historiography, the holy king St Olav (995-1030) looms larger than all other persons. Traditionally, in historical writing, his death in battle in 1030 marks the beginning of the Middle Ages in Norway, while the destruction of his shrine and cult in 1537 marks the end. Many questions still surround the development of his cult: How does one establish the cult of a saint in a newly Christianized country where the concepts of saints and saints' cults are almost unknown? Where does one look for inspiration, e.g. to England, to Rome, or even to Jerusalem? Were any established cults perhaps used as models for the new cult? How should a cult be constructed, by whom and for whom? And how did one spread the knowledge about it in a mostly illiterate society? From viking to king and saint King Olav II Haraldsson belonged to the royal line of King Harald 'Fairhair' who ruled Norway around 900. Olav was born in 995 as the son of a local king in southeast Norway and from 1007 he spent seven formative years as a Viking, mainly in the British Isles. According to the anonymous Historia Norwegie from c. 1160-75 and Snorri Sturluson's Saga of The Norwegian Kings, written c.1230, he served King AEthelred (978-1013, 1014-16) as a mercenary commander, and his ships managed to pull down «Sanctus Olaus rex et martiris»: Constructing the early cult of St Olav of Norway 1030-1220

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2010

Scandinavian Journal of History, 2010

The cult of St Nicholas spread in Scandinavia and northern Rus' in approximately the same period, namely in the last decades of the 11th and the first decades of the 12th centuries. In spite of such a correspondence, the dissemination of the cult in the two adjacent regions has been treated as two separate phenomena. Consequently, the growing popularity of the cult in Scandinavia has traditionally been dealt with as an immanent part of the transmission of the Catholic tradition, and a similar phenomenon in northern Rus' has been discussed with reference to the establishment of Orthodox Christianity. By contrast, the evidence analysed in this article shows that the establishment of the cult of St Nicholas in the two regions was an intertwined process, in which the difference between Latin Christendom and Greek Orthodoxy played a minor role. The early spread of this particular cult thus suggests that, as far as some aspects of the cult of saints are concerned, the division between Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity in Northern Europe was less abrupt in the 11th and 12th centuries than has been traditionally assumed. This was due to the fact that the medieval cult of saints was not limited to the liturgy of saints, but was a wider social phenomenon in which political and dynastic links and cultural and trading contacts across Northern Europe often mattered more than confessional differences. When we leave the liturgy aside and turn to kings, princes, traders and other folk interacting across the early Christian North, then the confessional borders are less useful for our understanding of how some aspects of Christian culture were communicated across Northern Europe in the first two centuries after conversion.

In numerous Russian Chronicles we find under the year 1352 (6860 AM) a curious text entitled “The Testament of the Swedish King Magnus” (Рукописания короля свейского Магнуша). The king in question is Magnus Eriksson, who became king of Norway and Sweden in 1319 at the tender age of three. He drowned as a result of a shipwreck off the coast of Norway in 1374. Not so, however, according to the this Russian text. Instead the king survived, was brought by the wind to a Russian monastery (Valamo/Валаамский?), where in the course of three days he converted to Orthodoxy, became a schema monk, composed the Testament before dying. Although an invention by some Russian monk soon after 1400, it is clear that the author had a now lost source at his disposal, from which we learn that the Swedish commander at the Battle on the Neva in 1240 was Birger Magnusson, the future jarl and founder of a new dynasty. The paper analyses the Testament as a source of Russian Orthodox mentality of the period and suggests that on the basis of the Testament this ghost of a king figure became venerated as a kind regional patron saint of Russian Orthodoxy in defence against encroachments by the Swedes and the Latin Church.