"Forvandling:" Christianity in Medieval Norway

Poking around the new web site of the Norwegian Historical Museum – you have your hobbies, I have mine – I found the remarkable materials for an exhibt titled Transformation: Faith and Sacred Objects in the Middle Ages. These are late medieval works, mostly 1350 to 1500, the part of Norwegian history that nobody outside the country knows anything about.

Above and top, the Tretten Crucifix

The text says,

In this exhibition you will be able to view some of the objects that gave people hope in the Middle Ages. Faith transformed the objects, and served as a bridge to the sacred and holy.

From a young age, people learnt that life on Earth was brief and difficult, but that something different and better awaited them, both in their daily lives and in the hereafter, if they lived as good Christians. Churches were designed to provide a foretaste of paradise, a small part of God’s kingdom manifest on Earth. 

Renderings of the Holy Family

Pilgrim Badges

Here's a fascinating object, a runic calendar that lived for years in the church at Åmot, Hedmark. Around this object on both sides are carved runes signify the days of the week, the whole making a cycle of 52 weeks; extra notes plot the dates of twenty different saints' days. The curators make much of the way this object represents the year as an ever-repeating cycle; I keep thinking that it's wrong, in that it implies the saints' days would fall in the same place and the same day of the week every year. Are we to suppose that is how they did things in Åmot?

Delightful carving of pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem.

And a wonderful bit of folklore:

Curse bundles (pjåtrepakker) have been found under several church floors. These are  pieces of cloth tied up in various ways. The old Norwegian verb pjå-tre means to mumble or speak softly or indistinctly: What one did was to mumble a magical formula into the cloth. The bound-up cloth could then be clandestinely inserted in between the wallboards of an enemy’s house, or by the side of a road where the enemy would walk. He or she would then suffer terrible stomach pains. When a curse bundle was put by the roadside, it was called “throwing evil across someone’s path”. When it was placed beneath the church floor, it was probably in order to bring it into the Christian sphere and thus break its magical effect. A parallel to this is the “black book” (a collection of spells) that was discovered under the floorboards of Vinje Church in Telemark.

But the glory of the exhibit is the ceiling of the former stave church at Al, dating to 1375 to 1400. It is installed as the ceiling of the main exhibit room.

What a wonderful series of paintings, and a splendid look at the kind of documents from which medieval people learned much of what they knew about their religion. 

Imagine if you had grown up in a tiny town on a Norwegian fjord, and for the first dozen years of your life these were the only paintings of this size and quality you had ever seen. These would dominate your imagination, and bring the stories of the Bible to life for you in unique way.