Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2003, Side 75

Liturgy of St Knud Lavard - Introduction
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1170 might be considered, namely the completion in or about 1268 of
the new monastic church at Ringsted.103 Over a period of seventy years
after the Translation the church had achieved added prestige as the buri-
al place of the royal family. It had been partly destroyed by fire in 1241
and was now (according to a rather doubtful notice in the Danish annals)
reconsecrated by the English bishop of Winchester.104 It would not be
difficult to imagine that a new and elaborate proper liturgy was projec-
ted for use in the rebuilt edifice. It would also have served to underline
the precedence of Knud Lavard over the murdered King Erik Plovpen-
ning, who had been interred at Ringsted in 1258 and whose miracles
were enthusiastically recorded during the next half century.105
These lines of speculation should not be pressed too hard, since the
dating of the liturgy in K must, as I have emphasised from the outset, de-
pend to a large extent on future study of the chant by musicologists. It is,
however, of essential importance that the textual analysis carried out
here has yielded a rational chronological stratification of the material.
The Vita altera and the metrical propers (not to mention the homilies,
which also await study by specialists) each have their own history and
must not be thought of as due to the Creative effort of a single individual.
That was what Gertz simplistically urged, ignoring the faet that his pre-
decessors had at least tentatively differentiated the Vita from the re-
sponds of the Office.106 The latter, together with the proper hymns and
antiphons and the sequences of the two Masses, make up a distinet layer
in the liturgical tradition: they are a versified proper liturgy or historia
(so named at K 696, where the term seems to apply narrowly to the re-
sponds only) of the type that flourished from the thirteenth to the six-
teenth century, and possess all the formal characteristics mentioned in
that connection by Suitbert Baumer and Robert Abraham Ottosson -
103 This idea was originally suggested to me by the Danish art historian Ulla Haastrup.
104 Erik Kroman (ed.), Danmarks middelalderlige annaler, Copenhagen 1980, 314 (annals
in AM 1030 4to, here f. 38v, s.a. 1268); previously edited in: Annales Danici medii ævi,
editionem nouam curauit Ellen Jørgensen, Copenhagen 1920, 201 (and in SRD IV 24,
where the suspect character of the entry is already pointed out in the commentary). The
consecration of the church at Ringsted supposedly took place on the fifth Sunday after
Easter 1268, but Bishop John Gervays of Winchester had died at Rome on January 20 that
year (see C. L. Kingsford in: Dictionary of National Biography 29, London 1892,
448-49).
105 Cf. n. 113 below; Olrik DHL 377-78; Gertz VSD 420-21.
106 Cf. Waitz1 20; Reich 239; Usinger 21; Waitz2 8.