Cross and Scepter (28 page)

Thus, Birgitta was clearly what Vauchez would term a “hot” saint, one of the hottest in the fourteenth century. Of course, people of Birgitta's ilk are exceptional in any society, but, as we have seen, in Scandinavia she was more different from a “normal” saint than she would have been for instance in Italy or the Low Countries. On the other hand, the support she got from her circle in Sweden shows that there was a place for her kind of sainthood, at least in the higher reaches of society. The royal court and the aristocracy lived in a world filled with religion, which frequent masses, pilgrimages, and other kinds of devotion, and in close contact with the higher clergy. Thus, one of Birgitta's main supporters, Bishop Nils of Linköping, had in his youth been a teacher in her home. Although Birgitta's intense devotion was an exception, she grew up in so strongly religious an atmosphere that she could scarcely have avoided familiarity with Christian cult and doctrine, and was fortunate to find, in the country where she spent her formative years, an audience receptive to her revelations.

Nevertheless, Birgitta probably appealed more to the elite than to the common people. A study of sainthood in the later Middle Ages (by A. Fröjmark) indicates that the ecclesiastical elite was very influential in the promotion of the cult of the saints in this period as well. This was not only the result of the introduction of a papal monopoly on canonization, necessitating a long and costly process that had to be initiated and paid by the ecclesiastical elite. Examples from the miracle collections show that the ecclesiastical authorities were also operative in the process, often leading the people in the direction of particular saints whom they personally wanted to promote. The people were essential, too, in order to achieve canonization, because a saint needed a reputation for sanctity as well as a number of well-attested miracles. In the case of Birgitta, there is clear evidence of a popular cult. This extended to some people in her entourage, her daughter Katarina and Bishop Nils Hermanson of Linköping, who reached the lower rank of beatification.

While there can hardly be any doubt that the Church succeeded in introducing its doctrine and rituals in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages, there is less evidence of the newer trends towards a more personal religion, which in the later Middle Ages were expressed for instance in the
devotio moderna
. This may be due to the nature of the sources; after all, the external aspects of religion are more likely to leave traces than the interior workings of the soul, and the new, Lutheran Church was not interested in preserving Catholic devotional literature. We should also be wary of the “Protestant” tendency to assume that external piety
signals the absence of interior devotions. Nevertheless, the extant sermons, as far as they have been analyzed, the number and types of saints, as well as the religious art seem to point mainly in the “traditional” direction. So does also the fact that there was little heresy in Scandinavia. Rather than forming evidence of the Scandinavians' faithful adherence to the Catholic Church, this absence seems to indicate that personal religion was weaker, that religious customs and rituals were well integrated into daily life, but that few people were personally moved by the message of the Gospel.

If we turn to the heresy that eventually did find favor in Scandinavia and in a short time abolished the Catholic Church, namely the Protestant Reformation, we may notice a significant difference between Denmark and Sweden on the one hand and Norway and Iceland on the other. The former countries had a real Reformation movement and even, to some extent, a Counter-Reformation, while in Norway, and to a lesser extent Iceland, the Reformation was introduced from above, with little preparation. Consequently, the new stirrings that were disturbing the calm of the pre-Reformation Church are more likely to be detected in the former countries than in the latter. This impression is also confirmed by the fact that the mendicants were stronger in Sweden and particularly Denmark than in Norway. In addition to the Franciscans and the Dominicans, the Carmelites came on the scene in the fifteenth century, founded a number of houses, and engaged in the reform of the Church.

The Writing of History

Historical writing was the most important literary genre in medieval Scandinavia and was common to the ecclesiastical and secular traditions. It had two main aims: (1) to trace the origin of
the people and record the deeds of the ancestors; and (2) to deal with the relationship between this national past and the universal history of salvation. Given its political importance, it comes as no surprise that the dynasty plays an important part in historical writings. Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1150–1220) traces the Danish dynasty back to a founder by the name of Dan, a native of the country, who is supposed to have had twenty successors before the birth Christ. As some of these reigns were very long, the date of the foundation of the Danish kingdom corresponds approximately to that of the foundation of Rome (753 BC). According to Saxo, the Danes have no connection to any other people. He thus rejects Dudo of St. Quentin's suggestion that the Danes are descended from the ancient Greeks; i.e., the Danai, and he omits every reference to the Roman Empire until the age of Charlemagne, emphasizing that the Danes had no part in it. Consequently, the contemporary Roman Empire, bordering Denmark to the south, has no claim on suzerainty. Saxo was not the first to write about the ancient history of his country; both the Chronicle of Lejre, probably from around 1170, and the slightly later work of Sven Aggesen contain such information, but Saxo's work is by far the most extensive. His sources were to some extent ancient poetry and oral narrative—he explicitly mentions the Icelanders—but he clearly arranged the materials drawn from them very freely and probably even invented parts of his narrative. His extensive reading of Roman writers may have been a source of inspiration, as may also Geoffrey of Monmouth's slightly earlier account of early English history, a very popular work at the time.

In his history of the kings of Norway (
Heimskringla
), the Icelander Snorri Stuluson traces the origins of the dynasty back to the pagan god Odin, who is depicted as a human being worshipped as a god after his death. Odin is the prince of the city of Åsgård in Inner Asia and a contemporary of the Roman conquerors.
Having prophetic power, he understands that the future of his descendants does not lie in the world of the Romans, so he moves to the North to conquer this area. Rather than a descent from the Classical peoples, Snorri here imagines a kind of division of power between the peoples of the North and the Romans. The link between Odin's empire and the Norwegian kingdom is formed by a genealogy of Odin's descendants, ending with Harald Finehair, the ancestor of the contemporary rulers of Norway. The source for this genealogy is an extant poem,
Ynglingatal,
probably composed in the Viking Age and preserved as quotations in Snorri's text. This genealogy was used for the first time in historical writings in the anonymous
Historia Norwegie,
composed in Norway in the second half of the twelfth century. The entire prehistoric genealogy comprises twenty-eight generations. This means that Odin must have lived around the time of the birth of Christ, and thus have been a contemporary of Augustus. Whereas Saxo shows a connection between the rulers and the people from the beginning, Snorri has nothing to say about the origins of the people and only lets the dynasty arrive in the country at a late stage. As we have seen, Saxo as well as Snorri regard the Christianization as a crucial event. Both tried to show that it had its origins in local attempts to find the Highest God, and both point to the importance of indigenous kings in converting their people.

Iceland was a new country when Ari the Wise (d. 1148) wrote its history in the early twelfth century. The first settler had arrived less than two hundred years earlier, in 870. There was thus no question of any relationship to the Romans. However, Ari tries to show a relationship to universal history in another way, by reconstructing an exact chronology for the history of his country, based on the reigns of the Norwegian kings, which in turn is based on some crucial events in universal history, such as the martyrdom of the English King Edmund in 870. Ari's style is terse and
dry, with no attempt at vividness and drama, quite unlike Snorri's style and that of his other Icelandic successors, but he takes the same attitude to the conversion of his country as his successors dealing with the conversion of Norway. The conversion means that the Icelanders accept the truth of Christian revelation and reject their ancient religion. However, the way this happened shows their pragmatism. Seeing that the religious division would make life unbearable, the pagan Thorgeir prudently decides in favor of Christianity (above, p. 63). A later source, the
Landnámabók
(the Book of Settlement) forms a kind of genealogy of the whole people, listing the settlers establishing themselves in various parts of the island and their descendants.

One of the earliest histories of Norway, Theodoricus Monachus's
Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium,
composed around 1180 and dedicated to Archbishop Eystein, takes a different attitude to the pre-Christian history from that of Saxo and Snorri, but indirectly confronts the same problem. Theodoricus refuses to deal with the history before Harald Finehair, because he finds no reliable evidence for it, but nevertheless expresses pride at his ancestors' plundering expeditions over large parts of Christendom. The conversion is the crucial event in his history; the reigns of the two Olavs who carried it out fill around one third of its pages. However, instead of linking Norway's past to universal history by tracing it back to the Romans or the birth of Christ, he achieves the same result by a series of digressions, which create typological parallels between Norwegian history and the history of salvation. Thus, there is a parallel between the death of the pagan ruler Earl HÃ¥kon in Norway and the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (d. 363), who were both succeeded by Christian rulers. Similarly, when Earl HÃ¥kon's grandson, also called HÃ¥kon, is killed in a maelstrom, the maelstrom forms a parallel to the pagan hordes streaming out of Hungary and killing Ursula and the 11,000 virgins at Cologne, which in turns signifies St.
Olav's martyrdom. The author, whose Norwegian name was probably Tore (ON Þórir) has been identified with either of two contemporary bishops, the bishop of Hamar (1188/89–1196) and one of Eystein's successors as archbishop (1205–1214), both of whom were canons of St. Victor in Paris. The Victorine influence on the work is also striking; numerous references to Latin authors correspond very well with works known to have belonged to the library of St. Victor. Theodoricus himself clearly belonged to the contemporary international intellectual elite. Not only does he show considerable learning, but he also tries to adapt to contemporary scholarly standards by focusing on the reigns rather than the biographies of the kings, by trying to confine himself to trustworthy information, and, above all, by integrating the history of Norway into the international history of salvation through his typological parallels.

The Latin historiography of Scandinavia forms part of the common European tradition, whereas its earlier vernacular historiography, the Icelandic and Norwegian sagas, differs from this tradition in several respects. However, the term “saga” which has become conventional even in English is likely to exaggerate this difference. Admittedly, the term in itself does not exclusively refer to historiography. Literally, it means “what is said,” and may thus refer to any story, written or oral, long or short. It is used in modern scholarship of the Icelandic family sagas as well as the kings' sagas, but includes also many fantastic stories about events in distant times or places, mostly composed in the later Middle Ages (
fornaldarsögur
). It is not clear whether contemporaries made a distinction between “historical” sagas, such as accounts of the kings, and fictional ones, but this raises essentially the same issues as attempts at distinguishing between “historical” and “literary” narrative in contemporary Europe.

Despite this common aim, the difference between the Latin and the vernacular tradition is not only a question of language,
but also of expression, aesthetic ideals, and historical interpretation. Stylistically, the Latin tradition shows considerable variation (which is also to be found in the rest of Europe), ranging from Saxo's highly complex and rhetorical Silver Age Latin, modeled on Valerius Maximus, to the “simple style” found in other Latin works, such as that of Theodoricus. It is more difficult to find parallels to the saga style. The style of the gospels and some of the saints' lives, with their simple syntax and little rhetorical embroidery, may be a possible source of inspiration, but popular narrative is probably equally important or more so. However, we are not dealing with oral narrative directly transmitted to writing, as can be shown by tracing the gradual development of the saga style, notably the retreat of the author, from the earlier to the later sagas.