Anglo-Saxon Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Anglo-Saxon Era’
In 1014, Norwegian prince Olaf Haraldsson sailed to the aid of King Ethelred the Unready in his struggle with the Danes.
In 1014 Danish King Sweyn Forkbeard, who had ousted Ethelred the Unready, unexpectedly died. Ethelred and his Norse ally Olaf Haraldsson each raised a fleet and swept up the Thames to London, but Sweyn’s son Cnut was barring their way, his Danes strung right across the Thames on a wooden bridge.
Zealous convert Olaf Tryggvason went from England to Norway to spread the Gospel, but it seemed the Lord did not like Olaf’s way of doing it.
When Olaf Trygvason returned from England to Norway in 995, he seized the crown of Earl Hakon and declared himself King with the intention of converting all Norway to Christianity. His method was to ask nicely and then slaughter anyone who refused; happily, in Rogaland a higher power than Olaf was at work.
An aristocratic widow advertises for a husband, and among the line-up of natty and noble suitors is a rough-and-ready Olaf Tryggvason.
In 984, exiled Norwegian prince Olaf Tryggvason lost his wife Geira, and went on a four-year grief-stricken rampage through Britain, before suddenly becoming a Christian in the Isles of Scilly. Hearing that Gyda, the King of Dublin’s sister, had summoned a Thing (a Viking council) to choose a husband, Olaf returned to England.
The Northumbrian monk was touched by two thieving birds who repented of their misdeeds.
Cuthbert had a particular attachment to the many wonderful birds of the Farne Islands, which remained a key feature of devotion to the saint at his shrine in Durham. He was not, however, a bird-pleaser any more than he was a people-pleaser, and if his birds needed a little moral correction he would steel himself to provide it.
Bede is reminded of another great Christian saint when St Cuthbert shoos some troublesome crows from his barley crop.
A good example of the way Bede uses miracles comes from the story of Cuthbert’s barley. Some later chroniclers took a story about Anthony of Egypt and some wild asses and transposed it, donkeys and all, onto more recent saints. Bede, however, was content to draw parallels with a quite different miracle attributed to St Cuthbert.
The way St Cuthbert found water for his island retreat confirmed that Northumbria’s church was the real thing.
Unlike some later chroniclers, Bede did not transpose well-known miracles from one saint to another. He researched authentic miracles of Northumbrian saints and found close (but never exact) matches in the lives of saints from the Roman Empire, to show that Christianity in the British Isles was cut from the same cloth.