Tea at Trianon: Saint Olaf and the End of the Viking World

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, August 8, 2022

Saint Olaf and the End of the Viking World

From Catholicism:

One thousand years ago, an entire world was coming to an end. It was the world of the pagan Vikings. It would be replaced by another: that of Christian Scandinavia. The vanished world and the one that replaced it are not very well known to most U.S. Catholics. Most of us tend to think of the history of the Faith largely as it has been lived in Ireland and in lands that were once part of the Roman Empire, especially ones whose shores are washed by the Mediterranean-Italy, France, Spain.
Such an outlook is deplorably narrow. It ignores the very large role that the Scandinavians were playing in Europe one thousand years ago, that their activities as traders, artisans, mariner-explorers and warriors were far from being confined to the Scandinavian lands. For example, St. Vladimir, Prince of Kievan Rus in what we now know as Ukraine and whose conversion to the Faith presaged the conversion of all Russia, was certainly of Viking stock, certainly a descendent of a long line of Scandinavian trader-warriors who built fortified towns, including Kiev, all along the north-south waterways of Russia from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Further, the Scandinavian influence has extended all the way over here to America, especially to the American heartland, the Midwest, especially the northern Midwest, where so many descendants of the Vikings settled in the 19th century and early in the 20th. We want with this article to dispel some of the ignorance of Scandinavia that prevails among U.S. Catholics. Special attention will be paid to the Scandinavian saint whose name is probably best known after that of St. Bridget, a Swede. This is to speak of St. Olaf, who was King of Norway at the dawn of the Second Millennium.
The year of his birth is usually given as 995. It is certain that he died in battle on July 29, 1030. His death can be dated with certainty because it took place during a total eclipse of the sun-dramatic circumstances for the men on the scene who did not know the eclipse was coming. “God help me!” he cried as he fell, and then continued to pray as his lifeblood flowed from his wounds.

His praying thus is not the only edifying thing that can be told about him, as we conceive the edifying in modern times, but there are no pious legends attached to St. Olaf, no legends of the sort often associated with saints-especially martyrs-who died before rationalism turned history into-historicism. On the other hand, legends about his ferocity-most would say brutality-abound. A couple will here be related, but readers must be warned the stories may shock. That is because we are used nowadays to killing being done out of sight, as by cluster bombs dropped on a marketplace from three miles in the Serbian sky, instead of with a battle-axe face-to-face with an armed opponent. The stories can even leave us wondering how such a one as Olaf could be so widely venerated for his sanctity that within a year of his death his remains would be disinterred by a bishop, put by that bishop in a new coffin and placed on the high altar of the grandest church in the land, St. Clement’s, in what is now the city of Trondheim. Yet, that happened, even as the national arms of Norway, a nation that has been Protestant since the 16th century, show a lion with St. Olaf’s battle-axe in its forepaws. Those arms tell us that Olaf is a national hero to his countrymen as well as a saint in the calendar of the Church. (Read more.)