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Holy Places & Imagined Hellscapes Quidditas Volume 34 Article 3 2013 Holy Places & Imagined Hellscapes: Qualifying Comments on Loca Sancta Sermon Studies—Christian Conversion in Northern Europe & Scandinavia, c. 500-1300 Todd P. Upton Denver, Colorado Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, History Commons, Philosophy Commons, and the Renaissance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Upton, Todd P. (2013) "Holy Places & Imagined Hellscapes: Qualifying Comments on Loca Sancta Sermon Studies—Christian Conversion in Northern Europe & Scandinavia, c. 500-1300," Quidditas: Vol. 34 , Article 3. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra/vol34/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Quidditas by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Quidditas 34 (2013) 29 Holy Places & Imagined Hellscapes: Qualifying Comments on Loca Sancta Sermon Studies—Christian Conversion in Northern Europe & Scandinavia, c. 500-1300 Todd P. Upton Denver, Colorado The paper uses methods from medieval sermon studies to argue that an insularity in “monastic consciousness” can be traced to earlier centuries than the more generally discussed (and better documented) scholastic environments of 13th century monastic and cathedral schools. It assesses how a monastic discourse reliant on Biblical typologies informed the Christian conversion of northern Germanic and Scandinavian peoples (c. 500-1300, including the British Isles and Iceland). Moments of encounter between Christian missionaries and pagan cultures helped delineate this discourse, most apparent in extant records that reveal Christian and Norse perceptions of geography, holy places, deity worship, and eschatological expectations. Sources include remnants of material culture (archaeological remains, runestones, and etymology), evidence of missionary activities (letters, chronicles), sermon evidence, eddic and skaldic poetry, and saga literature. It argues that shifts in a ‘monastic consciousness’ can be gleaned by contextualizing the sermon tradition for antecedent usages of selected topics —in this case, the conflicting cosmologies of Norse mythology and conversionary methods of early medieval Christianity—and also by demonstrating how monastic writers’ characterizations were understood and qualified within their own (and later) times. Methodologically, assessments occur by cleaving to the historical milieus that informed each discrete stage of homiletic development.1 Christian monastic culture and missionary preaching informed a discourse that shaped late antique and early medieval educated elites’ beliefs about northern Europe and Scandinavia.2 The goal a guiding light and ,(הכרבל קידצ רכז) This article is dedicated to Michael T. Walton 1 inspiration for my work in medieval studies, whose friendship, laughter, conversations, and support will be much missed. A preliminary version of this article was presented at the 45th Annual Conference of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Associa- tion (Denver, CO, April 11-13, 2013); many thanks to those audience members who at the session (and afterwards) asked helpful questions and made thoughtful critiques. Also, I am very grateful to the anonymous readers at Quidditas for critiques of an earlier draft; any errors, of course, remain my own. 2 For qualifications as to how “discourse” should be understood here in the early medieval context, especially in the way that I’ll use terms such as “accommodation” and “appropria- tion” when assessing Christian missionaries, see Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 120-154. Also, in qualifications that will be further outlined in a forthcoming monograph I’ll be framing my approach to identifying a medieval “discursive formation” with qualified aspects of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Order of Things); for preliminary discussions of this methodology, see Akbari, Idols in the East, 6-19: esp. p. 7: “...by a discourse we mean a system of classifica- tion that establishes hierarchies, delimits one category from another, and exercises power through that system of classification....” Quidditas 34 (2013) 30 of this study is to identify some of the processes by which this discourse developed in encounters between Christians and pagans (c. 500-1300) in the regions and cultures of northern Europe, Britain, Ireland, Iceland, and the Scandinavian countries. By proving or disproving this insularity, I also hope to demonstrate that a “monastic consciousness” reliant upon biblical typologies is discernable in sermons produced in the scholastic environments of monastic and cathedral schools, particularly as they developed into their fully realized forms by the thirteenth century. Specifically, I will look at what kinds of religious and mythological factors informed the perceptions of monastic sermon writers during the sixth to thirteenth centuries’ conversion of the Celtic, Germanic, and Scandinavian peoples, with attention to geographical knowledge, pagan sacred spaces (and their appropriations by Christian missionaries), aspects of eddic and saga literature, and sermon texts. Sources will include archaeological remains (carvings, coins, runestones, mounds), evidence of missionary activities (letters, chronicles, and sermons), eddic and skaldic poetry, and saga and visionary literature. Throughout I will demonstrate how missionaries and writers consistently appropriated both pre-Christian Scandinavian beliefs and pagan holy sites, while developing a monastic discourse that engaged the conflicting cosmologies of Norse mythology and early medieval Christianity.3 Patristic Views of Loca Sancta When the Scandinavian and Norse-influenced regions of modern Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland were Christianized between the eighth and twelfth centuries, the medieval Church had developed a means of “re-sacralizing” pagan sacred spaces that adapted Patristic and Augustinian priorities of spiritual salvation 3 All the while trying to observe Philip A. Shaw’s caveat to “be wary of such ideas as “pan-Germanism or pan-northernism” during this centuries-long process. See Shaw, Pa- gan Goddesses…, 99; also, Jonas Wellendorf, “The Interplay of Pagan and Christian Tradi- tions in the Icelandic Settlement Myths,” in Journal of English and Germanic Philology 109.1 (2010), 1-21. Quidditas 34 (2013 31 over veneration of an earthly site.4 For the loca sancta in the Holy Land, that meant a redirection of a Christian pilgrim’s attention from holy sites within an eastern Roman imperial world to the spiritual space of Augustine’s “heavenly city.” That is, in laying out a spiritual framework for Christians (and especially monks), Augustine explicitly tied his civitas peregrina to the Christian pilgrimage tradition, a loca sancta of the soul that could be reached by an interior spiritual journey, without the physical exertion of a pilgrimage to an earthly holy site.5 Augustine’s contrast of the soul’s inner workings (interioria) against a preoccupation with things of the world (exterioria) became a clerical mainstay by the twelfth century.6 It also explains in part why many sermon authors who wrote about Jerusalem and the Holy Sites did not describe these places with reference to contemporary realities: the experience of those external realities (such as the Crusades) had nothing to do with what was occurring in the Augustinian mental landscape of a monastic sermon writer.7 For missionaries and monks who assessed the Scandinavian lands of the Viking Age, however, the Christian encounter with sacred spaces took a completely different course. Unlike the Judeo- Christian settings of Jerusalem and the Levantine coast, the northern European and Scandinavian lands through which missionaries traveled had no Biblical context that could serve as referents for the creation of a new monastic discourse. Instead, the variety of writers who left written evidence about the Christian conversion (court scribes, skalds, missionaries, archbishops, and monks) developed 4 Augustine’s (354-430) perceptions of the city took those of Origen and transformed them into a coherent theological construct that divorced a Christian’s belief in the impor- tance of Jerusalem as a holy site from what Augustine saw as the basic otherworldliness of Christianity. In that construct, Jerusalem had been destroyed as a city on earth, leaving behind only shadows in the minds of men that Christians might recognize when they be- held the true City of God. [Augustine, De civitate dei, CCSL 47, 17.13.] Rome, of course, also “fell” in Augustine’s mind as an earthly city (and representation of empire), but its subsequent seat in the medieval period as the primary bishopric in the west would create an alternative presentation of the city for later writers and theologians. 5 Augustine, Ennarationes in Psalmos, in Aurelii Augustini Opera, CCSL 38, 39.6. 6 Fulbert of Chartres, “Epistle 126,” in Letters and Poems of Fulbert of Chartres, ed. F. Behrends (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 227. 7 For how this process might have occurred in the medieval monastic environment, see Carey, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self…,142-144. Quidditas 34 (2013 32 their own discourse about northern geography and pagan sacred spaces. In short, the northern letters, chronicles, sermons, eddic and skaldic
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