Christian Life in Twelfth-Century Scandinavia: A Comparative Approach Erik Niblaeus 1. Introduction In 1152 Pope Eugenius III sent his legate Nicholas Breakspear, cardinal bishop of Albano, on a two-and-a- half-year tour of Scandinavia. Nicholas, who was to be- come pope himself shortly after his return to Rome, as Adrian IV (1154–9), went, according to his biographer, to partes Noruegerie to «preach the word of life in that province and apply himself to the winning of souls for the Almighty God», and thus «diligently instructed that barbarous and rude people in the Christian law and en- lightened them with Church teachings»1. The missionary language recurs elsewhere in a reference to the next papal legate to visit Scandinavia, Stephen of Orvieto, a decade later: he was stranded in Britain, on his way to «convert or correct» Noruuagæ gentis barbaria. For the first of these writers (writing in Rome), Norway was far away2. For 1 Boso, Vita Adriani IV: Processu vero modici temporis, cognita ipsius honestate ac prudentia, de latere suo eum ad partes Noruegerie legatum se- dis apostolice [Eugenius] destinavit, quatinus verbum vite in ipsa provincia predicaret et ad faciendum omnipotenti Deo animarum lucrum studeret. Ipse vero tamquam minister Christi et fidelis ac prudens dispensator misteriorum Dei, gentem illam barbaram et rudem in lege christiana diligenter instruxit et ecclesiasticis eruditionibus informavit; the text is edited and translated into English in Adrian IV The English Pope (1154-1159): Studies and Texts, eds. by B. Bolton and A. Duggan, Ashgate, Aldershot 2003, pp. 214-33; this pas- sage is from pp. 214-5. See also the sensible overview by A. Bergquist in the same volume: The Papal Legate: Nicholas Breakspear’s Scandinavian Mission, pp. 41-8. 2 It is possible that Boso had followed the subject-to-be of his writings to Scandinavia in 1152-4; the oft-repeated tradition that he was Nicholas’s nephew has however been discounted: A. Duggan, Servus servorum Dei, in «Storica», n. 40 Adrian IV The English Pope, p. 182. 34 Filo rosso the second (writing in Durham) it was closer3. They both, however, seem strangely off the mark: Norway, by this stage, had been ruled over by Christian kings for over a century and a half; scribes were already copying national histories in Latin and the vernacular; there were commu- nities of nuns, monks, and canons; the cult of the royal saint, Olav Haraldsson, had been flourishing since soon after his death in 1030, and his shrine in Nidaros (mod- ern-day Trondheim) was a popular site of pilgrimage; in rural areas, churches were being built in stone or delicate- ly carved wood, at great speed and in great numbers; as elsewhere in Europe, internal strife was couched in terms of a struggle between secularists and church-reformers. In fact, although both Cardinal Nicholas and Cardinal Stephen probably saw fit to catechise while they were at it, they were not primarily in Scandinavia to preach: they were there on a delicate diplomatic mission to reorganise the Scandinavian church. In 1153, Nicholas conferred the pallium on the first Norwegian archbishop; in 1164, in the wake of Stephen’s visit, the first archbishop of Uppsala in Sweden was consecrated in the cathedral of Sens, in the company of two illustrious exiles: Pope Alexander III and Eskil of Lund, the second Scandinavian archbishop – until 1103/4, metropolitan authority in Scandinavia had rested in Saxony, with the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen. The language used in the two texts cited must nevertheless not be discounted; for it reveals something of the attitude in the old lands of Latin Christianity to its new lands, to the lands that expansionist popes and Cistercians declared – not without a little pride to have established themselves there – to be in extremis finibus mundi. The process of Christianisation has concerned Scan- dinavian historians for as long as there have been Scan- 3 Reginald of Durham, writing in the 1160s and 70s: Reginaldi monachi Dunelmensis libellus de admirandis Beati Cuthberti virtutibus, ed. by J. Rain, J.B. Nichols and son, London 1835, pp. 108-9 (Publications of the Surtees Society, 1); Reginald in fact seems to have been rather well-acquainted with Norwegian conditions, as he revealed elsewhere in the work: ibid., pp. 248- 54 and A. Conti, S. Crumplin, H. Antonsson, A Norwegian in Durham: An Anatomy of a Miracle in Reginald of Durham’s Libellus de admirandis Beati Cuthberti, in West over Sea: Studies in Scandinavian Sea-Borne Expansion and Settlement Before 1300, eds. by B. Ballin Smith, S. Taylor and G. Wil- liams, Brill, Leiden 2007, pp. 196-226 (The Northern World, 31). Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 35 dinavian historians, and their interest shows no signs of abating4. The last couple of decades have seen significant development in the discipline, however. A symposium in Sweden in 1985, with proceedings published in English, set the tone for much of what was to follow: interdisci- plinary ideals, collaboration, skepticism towards written sources5. A culmination of sorts occurred in the 1990s, with two large-scale collaborative projects in Norway and Sweden6. These and similar investigations, although far from presenting a simple, unified picture, have often pointed in the same general direction. First, the chronolo- gy of the process has been expanded: from the first Frank- ish missions in the ninth century, well into the twelfth century, when the archiepiscopal organisation was com- pleted. Second, the links between Christianisation and the consolidation of royal power in the three Scandinavian kingdoms have been greatly emphasised; thus allowing political historians to, in a sense, universalise the tradi- tional state-formation narratives of national historiogra- phies by introducing a religious element. Third, scholars have pointed out the apparent disparity between written and material sources, often with a certain penchant for the latter. A prominent example: Adam of Bremen, a German chronicler writing in the 1070s, described in some detail a great pagan temple in Old Uppsala, north of present-day Stockholm7. By contrast, the same region saw vast num- bers of rune stones, Christian commemorative monu- 4 Beginning in 1122×32 with A. Þorgilsson, in his Íslendingabók, ed. by J. Benediktsson, Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, Reykjavík 1968 (Íslenzk fornrit 1.1); The Book of the Icelanders (Íslendingabók) by Ari Thorgilsson, ed. and transl. by H. Hermansson, Cornell University Library, Ithaca (N.Y.) 1930 (Islandica, 20). 5 The Christianization of Scandinavia: Report of a Symposium Held at Kungälv, Sweden, 4–9 August 1985, eds. by B. Sawyer, P.H. Sawyer and I. Wood, Viktoria bokförlag, Alingsås 1987. 6 For a summary overview, see S. Brink, New Perspectives on the Chris- tianization of Scandinavia and the Organization of the Early Church, in Scandinavia and Europe 800–1350: Contact, Conflict and Coexistence, ed. by J. Adams and K. Holman, Brepols, Turnhout 2004, pp. 163-75 (Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 4). 7 Magistri Adam Bremensis Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontifi- cum, ed. by B. Schmeidler, MGH scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum, 3rd ed., Hahn, Hannover and Leipzig 1917, IV, pp. 26-8, pp. 257- 61; History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen (trans. F.J. Tschan), Co- lumbia U.P., New York 2002, pp. 207-9. 36 Filo rosso ments, raised at the very time when Adam claimed the Uppsala temple was still going strong. Recent scholar- ship has tended to respond to this perplexing situation by accusing Adam of being unreliable, even of fabrication, and by minimising the strength of late-eleventh-century paganism and stressing the overwhelmingly Christian na- ture of the landscape8. Similarly, there’s been an increased emphasis on English, or even Russian, missions and in- fluence – elusive in written sources – and a tendency to downplay the German contribution – carefully chroni- cled by Adam of Bremen. In Sweden, this flourishing in Christianisation stud- ies coincided with the accession to the European Union in 1995, and the scholarly rhetoric came to reflect this, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes no doubt deliber- ately. «Europeanisation» became the buzzword du jour, and publications were given titles such as When Sweden Became European9. The most successful exploration of the Europeanisation topos in the 1990s, taking it well be- yond the clichés of contemporary politics, was however by a British historian, Robert Bartlett, in his The Making of Europe, subtitled Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350. English-language scholars have tradi- tionally put great emphasis on the central Middle Ages, and the twelfth century in particular, as a period of in- tensified development of lasting institutions, ideologies, and mentalities (their titles sometimes seem to compete in bombast: the period saw the Creation of This, the Birth of That). Bartlett, however, expanded the usual focus on Western Europe, and France and England in particular, and described a process of transformation at its most intense at the frontiers of Latin Christendom, an often violent imposition (successfully likened to modern colo- nialism) of strong but modifiable «legal and institutional blueprints or models», which resulted in considerable 8 Uppsala och Adam av Bremen, ed. by A. Hultgård, Nya Doxa, Nora 1997 (Religionshistoriska forskningsrapporter från Uppsala, 11); H. Janson, Templum nobilissimum: Adam av Bremen, Uppsalatemplet och konflik- tlinjerna i Europa kring år 1075, Gothenburg University, Historiska Insti- tutionen, Gothenburg 1998 (Avhandlingar från Historiska institutionen i Göteborg, 21). 9 C.F. Hallencreutz, När Sverige blev europeiskt: Till frågan om Sver- iges kristnande, Natur och Kultur, Stockholm 1993. Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 37 cultural homogeneity: Europe as a concept rather than a geographical entity10. By introducing problems tradition- ally treated only in national historiographies into a large context and time period, he managed to convey the dyna- mism of subjects as infected the as German settlement of Prussia, productively, without causing offence.