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Review of Margaret Cormack, the Saints in Iceland: Their Veneration

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Review of Margaret Cormack, the Saints in Iceland: Their Veneration Rezensionen 119 argaret Cormack. The they also mentioned, as a rule, the patron Saints in Iceland: Their saint(s) and stated on what days Mass was to Veneration from the Con- be sung, which provides an indication of the relative importance of the saints in question. version to 1400. Preface Most máldagar have only been preserved in Mby Peter Foote. Subsidia hagiographica seventeenth-century transcripts of collec- 78. Bruxelles: Société des Bollandistes, tions made by fourteenth-century bishops, 1994. 296 pages. with the material being richer for the diocese of Hólar than for Skálholt. Another impor- This book has been long in the making, and tant source is saints’ and apostles’ lives and its author was considered something of an miracle collections, whether translated from authority on the subject long before it ap- Latin or (particularly in the case of Icelandic peared. It has been worth waiting for, and saints) collected on the spot; here, too, the Margaret Cormack’s reputation as a closet máldagar supplement the information pro- expert is gloriously vindicated by its appear- vided by preserved manuscripts by indicating ance. what sögur existed in any parish. The same It was a monumental task to gather the is true of pictorial representations of saints, information on saints and their cult in Ice- only a few of which have survived as objects land scattered in manuscripts and printed until today. The Annals, too, recorded events sources, in verbal and non-verbal forms connected to the veneration of saints, and so (buildings, shrines, pictures and statues, did bequests in wills and records of vows for church vestments), and to organize it in a help in need, and finally prescriptive legal way that makes it easily accessible to the his- sources such as Grágás. torian, the literary scholar and the student of The book’s centrepiece is the almost religion, the Scandinavianist and the non- hundred pages of Part 2 (69–165), where the Scandinavianist alike. It was not just a mat- saints are arranged in alphabetical order. ter of becoming familiar with a great variety Each entry lists the feast days devoted to the of source material and critical literature and particular saint (including All Saints and the digesting it for the reader in an economic Holy Cross) and the relative importance and non-repetitive way, but of critically these are given in the calender, the saint’s assessing the available information at every position as patron or co-patron of various step, for the sources are often scanty and churches, the recorded existence of images of varying reliability. In a country where so or of writings about him/her, specific infor- many records perished on account of cli- mation about relics or the cultus associated mate, negligence, poverty, and minimal ad- with the saint, and finally the occurrence of ministrative structures, this task required in- the saint’s name as a baptismal name. This formed judgement and an attention to detail is indeed an important indirect source, for at every step. Margaret Cormack is scrupu- while a church dedication may reflect a lous in indicating what degree of certainty bishop’s preferences (a Dominican bishop attaches to any piece of information, and she might push St. Dominic, a Norwegian bishop goes to a great deal of trouble in situating St. Olaf), the naming of children may be a it in time, for the veneration of saints is not straight reflection of grassroots popularity, a static matter but evolves gradually; in Ice- even though family traditions were certainly land it did not really take wings until the more powerful then than in modern times to thirteenth century. prevent quick changes of fashion. The com- Her most important sources of infor- ments following each statistic weigh the mation are the dedication of churches to evidence and draw in relevant scholarly dis- particular saints as patrons and the church cussion, all in a minimum of space, thanks inventories called máldagar, which were to the smaller type used in these discursive published in Diplomatarium Islandicum. parts. The reader will time and again admire Although the máldagar, which were sup- two outstanding features of this book: on posed to be read in public once a year, were the one hand the caution and circumspec- essentially inventories of church property, tion with which both the sources and their alvíssmál 5 (1995): 119–21 120 Rezensionen assessment by scholars are treated, and the In Part 1 (5–68), after a historical intro- economical way in which evidence is pre- duction, the sources are presented systema- sented and discussed; it is as if the author, in tically; they include, apart from those already an act of intellectual lenten discipline, had mentioned, feasts (gildi), prayers, fasts, pil- squeezed all verbal fat from the body of her grimages. The only small quibble I have in text without, for that matter, losing in stylis- this section concerns a footnote on page 62, tic grace. The saints are listed under their in the section on relics. While in instances English name, with the Latin name given in where gifts to a church are mentioned, smjör brackets and the Icelandic names cross-ref- is, as expected, translated as “butter” (e.g., erenced, and this will occasionally prove an on p. 79), in the case of the smjör blessed by obstacle to the non-English reader who may Bishop Þorlákr and proving a curative long not know that Aegidius is to be found under after his death, the modern rationalist inter- Giles, Jacobus under James, and Blasius prets it as “consecrated oil” and adds “Con- under Blaise; also the frequent abbreviation ceivably in this case it was oil produced from BVM for the Blessed Virgin Mary may his relics at the cathedral, rather than the oil not be familiar to everyone. Another English he himself had blessed,” which is not unlike bias is that English translations of Icelandic driving out the Devil with Beelzebub or sources are mentioned but not translations rather, denying one supernatural occurrence into any other language. (which may not be recorded elsewhere in As was to be expected, the Virgin Mary hagiographic literature) by explaining it with and some of the apostles (St. Peter, St. Paul, another (which had a certain tradition). The St. John) held a central position, as else- flanking Part 3 (167–233) is an alphabetic where in the Roman church of the time. church index giving the location of each Among other saints remote in time and (with references to the very helpful map, on place, St. Nicholas was prominent, undoubt- which one would only like to see, for easier edly because of the transfer of his relics to finding, the subdividing lines of the quad- Bari, a goal of pilgrimages for Icelanders, rants drawn out not only in the areas cover- too. “Neighbours” and within living memory, ed by the sea but also on land) and, in abbre- so to speak, were St. Thomas Becket of Can- viated form, the cultus associated with that terbury, St. Magnus of Orkney, and St. Olaf church up to 1400, the date of consecration of Norway, whereas the “national” saints of when known, and the máldagar or other Denmark and Sweden, Knud and Erik, ap- documents referring to the church. parently had no following in Iceland. There The appendices contain some very use- seems to have been an initial reluctance in ful items such as a list of Icelandic bishops Iceland to venerate King Olaf and some pref- and their terms of office (247–48), a glossary erence for Olaf Tryggvason, the first Chris- of Icelandic words used in the text, an expla- tian on the Norwegian throne, but once Ice- nation of “Prices and Currency” (249–50), land was firmly tied to the Norwegian crown, and seven pages of emendations and addi- there was no stopping the cultus of the for- tions to the handlist of “Lives of Saints in mer, and by the end of the fourteenth cen- Old Norse Prose” that appeared, more than tury he was, after the Virgin Mary and St. Pe- thirty years ago, in Mediaeval Studies (25 ter, the third most popular saint in Iceland. [1963]: 294–337). The bibliography, divided No. 4 was Bishop Þorlákr of Skálholt, who into texts and secondary literature, is exten- had to await canonization until 1985, but sive (253–73); among the abbreviations used, proved very popular in medieval Iceland. Ac- the reader may first be a little surprised to cording to Cormack’s list, he was the see Jón Helgason’s (incomplete) edition of sole patron of 18 churches and co-patron of Byskupa sögur abbreviated as Þs, although another 33 and had images in 34 churches. it contains also other texts than Þorláks Jón Ögmundarson, the champion of the dio- saga; the reason is that the author wished cese of Hólar, never really had a chance to keep Bps for the old nineteenth-century against him, and Guðmundur Arason, the edition. There is also a general index and a other saintly Hólar bishop, was probably too list of manuscripts. Peter Foote’s eight-page controversial to be widely accepted. preface is probably aimed at the non-Scan- alvíssmál 5 (1995): 119–21 Rezensionen 121 dinavianist, but it is such a superb summing hillip Pulsiano, Kirsten Wolf, up of the first five centuries of Christianity in Paul Acker und Donald K. Iceland that no reader should skip it. Fry, Herausgeber. Medieval This is not a book many people will read Scandinavia: An Encyclo- from cover to cover. But with its painstaking Ppedia. Garland Encyclopedias of the and comprehensive scholarship, its compact- ness and clear organization, it is bound to Middle Ages 1.
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