Life Illumined
Migration to Nidaros
This evening I was part of a panel debate, co-organised by the University of Trondheim, NTNU, and the city, on migration. Having been asked to speak about religious migration to Trondheim, medieval Nidaros, I wished to say something about what got, and still gets, people moving. Here is the talk I gave.
‘Migration’ is a word that these days is negatively charged, tied up with precarious circumstances. We associate it with removal necessitated by poverty, war, or climatic change.
Migration also has another aspect, though. It can be freely embraced in pursuit of a yearned-for, desirable goal.
Biblically speaking, measurable historiography, after Genesis’s archaic accounts of creation and the fall, begins with a scene of targeted migration. Abram, a Hebrew from Haran, is told: ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you’. The dream of setting out for a homeland still unknown saturates Scripture. That dream has left its mark on our whole culture.
Positively proposed migration occurs in Greece, too. While the Hebrews regarded the sea sceptically — preferring movement inland — the Greeks pined for the waves. Odysseus’s daring voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules is an image of an urge defining national sensibility.
Tolkien, in The Lord of the Rings, unites these two tendencies (the Hebrews’ towards Home, the Greeks’ towards an open horizon) in his notion of the Sea-Longing that stirs generous hearts, like that of the Hobbit Frodo when, safely slumbering deep in the Shire, ‘he heard a noise in the distance. He knew that it was not leaves, but the sounds of the Sea far-off; a sound he had never heard in waking life, though it had often troubled his dreams. A great desire came over him to climb the tower and see the Sea.’
Once you are possessed of Sea-Longing it is a costly business just to wander up and down along a furrow in a walled-in field. You yearn then to be away, your heart, soul, and body filled with a homesickness that makes any temporal or spatial belonging appear absurd. You wish not only to see the Sea from a high tower, but to immerse yourself in it and remain there, freed of limitation, drawn ever further towards what is open, eternal, absolute.
This perspective is needed, I believe, to understand faith-based migration to Nidaros through the centuries. People came as pilgrims here to pray before the shrine of St Olav, to venerate his relics, not because they thought of his remains as talismanic, but because they recognised Olav (not the idea of him, but the person, physically present) as a tool chosen by God to communicate divine power.
Olav, the seafarer, carried a rush of the Sea in himself across death’s boundary. People heard that rush here in the Christchurch, our cathedral, even as it echoed in the numerous Olav’s wells throughout the country. Pilgrims sought living water here. And found it.
The first migrant known to us who set out to honour Olav’s relics was no sailor. The text known as Passio Olavi, written in the mid-twelfth century, speaks of a blind man who, in the evening of 29 July 1030, the day Olav died, walked past the house up near Stiklestad where the fallen king’s body had been washed. The man turned up late, perhaps to examine whether there were things of value left on the battlefield. The king’s servants had poured the bloody water used for washing out in front of the door. The blind man slipped in it and fell. We can imagine him uttering words not found in a prayerbook. But as he lay there, struggling, he touched his face with his moist hands — and at once he, a blind man, could see.
This miracle fits into a genre well known to us from the Gospels. Jesus’s power reveals itself above all as illumination. Think of the man-born-blind in St John’s Gospel. Jesus takes dust from the ground, mixes it with spittle, materialised breath, and forms clay like that used by the Lord God on the Sixth Day to make Adam. Sight was given him who had never seen. Think of the beggar Bartimaeus who, sitting by the roadside, having called out to Jesus, bound for Calvary, ‘Lord, that I might see!’, could suddenly see and followed Jesus on his Passion-path. Think of the theologians, so sure of their clear-sightedness, who were told they were blind. And think of this: in the early Church, baptism, the gateway into Christian experience, was referred to as Photismos, ‘Enlightenment’, to designate, precisely, a definitive transition from darkness to light, death to light, blindness to sight.
Pilgrims sought out St Olav sure that he, recognised by the Church as a friend of Christ and a witness to death’s defeat, could effect for them illumination in the name of Jesus at every level. Many prayers were heard. As Sigvat Tordarson sang in Erfidrápa, a poem composed about 1040, ten years after Olav’s death: ‘The king is now with God; many a blind man come to him goes briskly away from the royal tomb, eyesight restored to him.’
Not only the physically blind turned up. Others, like Kristin Lavransdatter, sought a remedy for soul-darkness: they would atone for some unkind deed; they hoped for reconciliation after doing wrong. It is far from banal that places should exist where women and men might come without shame, though conscious of having comprised their dignity, to confess, ‘I am not, like the trolls, sufficient unto myself; I am wounded, imperfect’, in order, then, to be concretely helped to repair inward and outward damage, and to get courage required to set out afresh.
For hundreds of years Nidaros was a place where such things happened.
We now ascertain that the wave of pilgrims is rising again. It says something about awareness of fragility in our precarious world — also, I’d say, about a growing recognition that God might not, after all, be a fairytale, but supremely real. There is to this day a ray of dawn to be found in Nidaros, and the rush of the Sea.
In a late poem Tolkien wrote: ‘I sat on the ruined margin of the deep-voiced echoing sea/Whose roaring foaming music crashed in endless cadency’. He called the call he heard an ‘unfathomed breath’, sure that he would hear it ’till my death’, and even beyond.
Such luminous music resounded here in this place a thousand years ago. Listening people heard it, perceived it as a call, and followed. Some still do.
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