Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1968, Side 19
their coasts, but always sparing the ecclesiastical centres). King Magnus
Barefoot (i. e. the Kilted) begot in Ireland his youngest son Gilchrist
(later King of Norway). Magnus (d. 1103) lies buried in St. Patrick’s
Church in Down. One of his older sons, Sigurd, spent his childhood in
the Orcades, and was, when still a boy, married to an Irish princess.
This Sigurd, King of Norway 1103-30, got the surname Jorsala-fare
(Jerusalem-traveller, Crusader) because of his expedition to the Holy
Land (1107—11). It is significant that his fleet, on its way through the
Mediterraneum, did not visit Italy; he evidently had no business with
the Pope. Instead, after his military prowess in Palestine, he went to
Constantinople, where he took directions for the Norwegian Church
from the Patriarch — notwithstanding the faet that a Roman Catholic
Archbishop’s See had newly been established in Denmark, or perhaps
because of that.1
But after King Sigurd’s death great changes were brought about. Civil
war raged for more than a century, weakening the nation both inter-
nally and at sea. The Baltic, through which Norwegian ships had had
free passage to Russia, began to be dominated by the fleets of other
nations, Swedes, Danes and Germans, which more or less blocked the
intercourse between Norway and Constantinople. Thus, the middle of
the 12th century was a favourable time for the Pope to send a legate
to Norway in order to establish a Roman Catholic Archbishopric for the
Norwegian Church, with its See in Nidaros (1153), about the same
time as the Irish Church was made Roman Catholic. But still, many of
the Norwegian clergy adhered to the previous intercourse with the
Church of the British Isles, for several centuries at least. As an example
it may be mentioned that in the middle of the 13th century the book
Konungs skuggsid (The King’s Mirror) written in Norway (perhaps by
the Archbishop), praises Ireland above all other countries for its holi-
ness.
The ecclesiastical history of Iceland is different from that of Norway.
1. It is worth mentioning in this connection that two Norse (Icelandic) scalds
from the llth century paraphrase Christ - one by saying: “The keeper of Greece
rules the Kingdom of Heaven”, and the other by calling him “The Protector of
Greece and Russia”. It is also suggestive that among the wonders which St. Olaf
was said to have accomplished after his death, both in Norway and abroad, none
are located in Rome or Italy, but several in the Byzantine Empire. Also, in
Constantinople a church was built in his honour, none in Rome.
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