T

he thirteenth century was a dangerous time in Iceland.

On 21 February 1234 a big landowning magnate in the northern

region of Skagafjörðr, Kálfr Guttormsson, was executed at the

order of the chieftain Kolbeinn the Younger Arnórsson. This was the day

before the Feast of St. Peter in the winter, and as he became aware that

his enemies were upon him Kálfr said: “Nú skal í dag segjast í þing með

inum helga Pétri postula. Valtir verða þeir oss nú þessa heims höfðing-

jarnir” (Sturlunga saga I:369) [Today we shall declare ourselves to the

chieftaincy of the Holy Apostle Peter. The chieftains of this world can

no longer be trusted]. Although Kálfr protested his innocence against

the men who came to slay him, he did admit that two men that were

not present would have had legitimate cause against him. Before he

and his son were killed, they both confessed their sins to a priest. Kálfr

had been ordained as an acolyte, but another man who was in cohorts

with him, Jón Markússon, was spared, which “Naut Jón þess í þat sinn,

er hann komst heill í brott, er hann var prestr” (Sturlunga saga I: 368)

[was chiely due to his being a priest].

There are at least two noteworthy ramiications of this sad episode.

Firstly, there is the question of body, space, and immunity. The sacred

ofice of Jón Markússon guaranteed him immunity that Kálfr did not

enjoy, in spite of his personal piety. Secondly, the temporal aspect of

the episode, the signiicance of Kálfr’s death occurring on the eve of the

mass of St. Peter, is emphasized by Kálfr himself who seems to regard it

of vital importance for his passage from this world to the afterlife. His

death becomes a liminal experience, to use the terminology of Victor

Turner (Turner 95–6). The presence of St. Peter at the time of his death

Heaven is a Place on Earth

Church and Sacred Space in Thirteenth-

Century Iceland

Sverrir Jakobsson

University of Iceland

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is a fortunate occurrence as it gives Kálfr a bond with the saint that is

of signiicance in the afterlife.

Immunities, such as the priest Jón Markússon enjoyed, can be seen

as a way to construct space, deine boundaries, and prohibit entries.

1

The body of the priest is deined as a sacred space that is exempt from

the customary violence of pre-state Iceland. At this time, in the turbu-

lent 1230s, physical violence against priests in Iceland was on the wane,

becoming obsolete in a relatively brief time. This type of immunity

was not only accorded to certain people but to certain places as well.

Ideologies of the body were mirrored in the social and political uses of

architectural space and landscape. For example, St. Peter was invoked

again in 1255 when the young lord Þorgils the Harelip (on. skarði) Böð-

varsson wanted to let his horses graze in the ields of Reykjaholt but was

warned against it as “Pétr postuli á töðuna, ok heir hann ekki til saka

gert við Þorgils” (Sturlunga saga II:171) [the Apostle Peter owns the hay

and he has not committed any offence against Þorgils]. The Church at

Reykjaholt was consecrated to St. Peter and this seems to have entailed

immunity for the land from any type of outside aggression.

The temporal and spatial presence of St. Peter in the harsh sur-

roundings of thirteenth century Iceland, and the complex and shifting

circumstances in which some places and individuals managed to gain

immunity against the ever-present violence in this stateless society,

are an illustration of the complex ways in which time and space had a

social meaning in thirteenth century Iceland—and how the Church

had succeeded in imposing a religious interpretation on these underly-

ing frameworks of the world-view. This spatiality was socially based,

the created space of social organization and production. Following

the introduction of the tithe system in 1097, and the creation of an

annual levy on the community of farmers, the sacred space of the

Church was also the vehicle for new forms of class distinctions and

the redistribution of wealth.

The structure of organized space was homologous to power rela-

tions. That the examples cited occurred in a society probably “unique

in existing without any central power for centuries after Christianity

had brought to the country the art of writing on parchment in the

Latin alphabet” is of much signiicance (Gunnar Karlsson 1). The state

1. Medieval immunities had an inherently spatial dimension as has been the subject of

several inquiries, cf. Rosenwein 18; Tyler 28–9.

Heaven is a Place on Earth

3

had no monopoly on force and the proponents of clerical values had

to contend with many different actors, in order to have room for the

pursuit of their own agenda. The abundant sources that stem from pre-

state Iceland are of inestimable value for the study of the discourses of

space in a pre-state society, and the social interaction of the Church as

an ideological force with ancient and novel forms of power relations.

This study focuses on how the formation of sacred space went hand

in hand with the advent of literacy, the development of a new hegemonic

discourse and new types of redistributing surplus wealth in a stateless

agricultural society. The situation of the Church is of special interest,

as it was an institution that had no executive powers and was for the

most dependent on the good will of secular authorities. Nevertheless

it managed, through the medium of literate culture and by the use of

symbolic capital, to shape thirteenth-century discourse of time and

space, and, in parallel, the habitus of social practices.

2

Through the

creation of embracing, instrumental and socially mystiied spatiality, the

Church was able to inluence the exercise of power and the conduct of

warfare in a violent stateless society. The very neutrality of the Church

in the power struggles of the twelfth and thirteenth century made it

an ideal agent for the perpetuation of a hegemonic discourse of sacred

places which was instrumental in organizing power relations, as well

as creating new social distinctions.

Space as a Historico-Political Problem

Michel Foucault once stated, “Il est surprenant de voir combien le

problème des espaces a mis longtemps à apparaître comme problème

historico-politique” (“L’Œil du pouvoir” 12) [“It is surprising how long

the problem of space took to emerge as a historico-political problem”

(Foucault, Power/Knowledge 149)]. According to him a whole history

remained to be written of spaces, which would at the same time be

the history of powers. For Foucault, power is always spatially situated

somewhere within society, and social relations infuse all spacial sites

and concepts.

The lack of interest in spatial analysis in history stems from the fact

that historical discourse has too often concentrated on the essentially

2. Pierre Bourdieu deines symbolic power as the power to consecrate things (23).

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physical view of space, which is seen as imbued with a sense of pri-

mordiality and objectivity. This has been a misleading epistemological

foundation upon which to analyze the concrete and subjective meaning

of human spatiality. The organization of space is a product of social

translation, transformation and experience. Space, along with time, is

a cultural subtext, i.e. a fundamental cultural framework. Subtexts are

cultural presuppositions that are generally unexamined because they

are assumed to be “the way things are.” Socially produced space is a

created structure comparable to other social constructions, in the same

manner as history is a social construction of time (Soja, Postmodern

Geographies

79–80). As David Harvey argues, “neither time nor space

can be assigned objective meanings independently of material processes,

and ... it is only through investigation of the latter that we can properly

ground our concepts of the former” (204).

In 1974 Henri Lefebvre, in his groundbreaking work La Production de

l’Espace,

argued that space is a complex social construction based upon

values and the social production of meanings. Every society produces

its own space or rather, the production of spatial relations is ongoing

in every society. According to Lefebvre, “l’espace (social) n’est pas une

chose parmi les choses, un produit quelconque parmi les produits; il

enveloppe les choses produites, il comprend leurs relations dans leur

coexistence et leur simultanéité: ordre (relatif) et/ou désordre (relatif)”

(Lefebvre, La production de l’espace 88) [“(social) space is not a thing

among other things, nor a product among other products: rather, it

subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in

their coexistence and simultaneity—their (relative) order and/or (rela-

tive) disorder” (Lefebvre, The Production of Space 73)]. Lefebvre also

argued that social and spatial relations are dialectically inter-reactive

and interdependent; that the social relations of production are both

space forming and space-contingent.

Social space is thus a set of relations that are produced through praxis.

Lefebvre outlined distinguishable, separate ields and modes of spatial

thinking that he identiied as:

1. Spatial Practice (espace perçu) is the process of producing the material

form of social spatiality, both medium and outcome of human activ-

ity, behavior, and experience. This materialized, socially produced and

empirical space is directly sensible and open to accurate measurement

and description.

Heaven is a Place on Earth

5

2. Representations of Space (espace conçu) are the conceptualized space

of scientists, planners and others who identify what is lived and per-

ceived with what is conceived. It is tied to relations of production, and

to the order or design that they impose; such order is constituted via

control over knowledge, signs and codes, i.e. the means of decipher-

ing spatial practice. This, for Lefebvre, is the dominant space in any

society, a storehouse of epistemological power. This conceived space

tends towards a system of verbal signs, texts, and discourse.
3. Spaces of Representation (espace vécu) are seen by Lefebvre as distinct

from the other spaces and as encompassing them. They are linked to

the clandestine and underground side of social life; this is space as

directly lived; the dominated and hence passively experienced space and

here we can ind not just the spatial representations of power, but the

operational power of spatial representations (Lefebvre, La production

de l’espace

48–9; Soja, Thirdspace 66–8).

According to Lefebvre and some of his followers, especially the

geographer Edward W. Soja, lived space has a potential relevance as a

strategic location from which to encompass, understand, and potentially

transform all spaces simultaneously.

It can be connected with the “other spaces” explored by Michel Fou-

cault, in contrast to representations of space that tend to see spatiality

entirely as a dematerialized mental space, and the reduction of spatial

reality to empirically deinable spatial practices, to the geometry of things

in themselves (cf. Soja, Thirdspace 157). These other spaces “ont la curieuse

propriété d’être en rapport avec tous les autres emplacements mais sur

un mode tel qu’ils suspendent, neutralisent ou inversent l’ensemble

des rapports qui se trouvent, par eux, désignés, relétés ou réléchis”

(Foucault, “Des espaces autres” 47) [“have the curious property of

being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect,

neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate,

mirror, or relect” (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” 24)]. Among such

sites are utopias, fundamentally unreal places, and heterotopias, real

places in which other sites are simultaneously represented, contested

and inverted. Examples of such places are an oriental garden, a cinema

screen or a mirror. A heterotopia can function as a space of illusion

or of compensation. Foucault touched upon the connection between

heterotopias and the sacred spaces of the Middle Ages, although he did

not make it the subject of a thorough analysis.

The central point that Lefebvre and Foucault make in their different

conceptualizations of spatiality is that the assertion of an alternative

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envisioning of spatiality directly challenges and disrupts all conven-

tional modes of spatial thinking. In practical terms, however, can this

theory be applied to structures such as the Medieval Church and other

sacred spaces?

The Church as a structure has ambiguous spatial aspects. In con-

crete terms, churches are buildings that are made by people. In them

a professional class, the priests and other dignitaries perform certain

functions and ceremonies. People gather there on particular occasions.

In this manner, the space of a church can be directly perceived.

3

But

churches also have other functions, as their designation to certain saints

bear witness. They create a bond between heaven and earth, between

events in far-away places and the everyday practices of the parishioners,

between the sacred time of the New Testament and early Christianity

and a contemporary world with new challenges. In this way, a church

functions as a conceived space, a place that can easily belong to St.

Peter, there is a feast-day, which similarly belongs to the same saint,

and also home-ields that are immune from intruding horses because

they belong to the saint.

And yet, there is more. The sacred space of the church acquires a

new function when an individual lees there in fear of his life. Suddenly,

practical concerns and holy representation become intimately connected.

The clandestine and underground side of social reality is brought into

light, as the idealized space becomes the venue for the breakdown of

social order. The spatial representations of power are apparent, as the

body of the Church can only be violated with serious consequences.

As Joan Branham has noted, the body of the Church symbolized that

of Christ himself:

In fact, the New Testament’s symbolization of the church as Christ’s

body lays the textual foundation for extending spatial prohibitions

connected to sacriicial sites to the larger ecclesiastical contexts. To

encounter the body of the church, then, is already to encounter the

very body of Christ—the Eucharist, itself. (Branham 21)

Equally, one can see the operational power of spatial representations at

work in that the weaker participant in a ight, the one who has to seek

refuge, can thereby alter the rules of the game.

It seems, then, that the analytical tools of current research into spa-

tiality are of value for the study of sacred spaces in the Middle Ages. Of

3. On the importance of the structure of medieval churches cf. Graves.

Heaven is a Place on Earth

7

particular interest is how the Church used spatial discourse to redeine

power relations in a society where the state was not present as an agent

of support to the agenda of the Church. How was an institution that

put an emphasis on non-violence able to promote social change and

create spontaneous consent for a hegemonic view of sacred space that

did, in some cases, deter violent actions against people and places in

pre-state Iceland? The discourse on sacred space in thirteenth century

Iceland is especially interesting in light of the brief history of the Church

in Iceland up to that time, and its subordinate status in relation to local

power structures. To these we now turn.

The Church as a Practical Space

The eleventh and twelfth centuries were a time of church building

in Iceland. Contemporary historians viewed the Christianization of

Iceland as a miraculous event of truth, which occurred at the parlia-

ment of Iceland in 999 (Íslendingabók. Landnámabók 14–18).

4

From the

viewpoint of modern historiography, the Christianization is rather to be

seen as a gradual process, which took place in the following centuries,

in which the Church gradually became more inluential on the daily

life of Icelanders (see esp. Orri Vésteinsson 67–80).

At irst, however, the ruling elite of Iceland kept the Church on a

tight rein. The rise of churches and creation of parishes was a private

enterprise, but it was nevertheless far from chaotic. Church centers

were habitually created on lands that had a traditional role as regional

power centers. The people who endowed the churches with property

belonged to the class of magnates, which wielded local power and stood

irmly behind the 9–12 chieftains who had a key role in arbitration and

conlict management within each Quarter.

In 1097 the tithe was introduced in Iceland. Church income was now

guaranteed through taxation, with the tithe divided into four quarters:

One to the bishop, one to the local priest, one to the parish church, and

one to beneit the poor (Íslendingabók: Landnámabók 22; Grágás 35–42).

The main beneiciaries were the owners of church lands who could

usually collect half of the tithe, for the parish church and the wages of

the local priest. It was not uncommon for a local magnate to serve as a

4. Such truth-events are a fundamental feature of Christian discourse, cf. Badiou, Saint

Paul,

23–25.

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priest, but even if that was not the case, the priest was then usually an

employee of the magnate. The secular elite thus had a strong hold on

the organized Church in Iceland.

An example of this is the church at Reykholt where the local chieftain

also served as a priest for generations. The charter of the church stems

from 1185 and is the oldest surviving original document in Iceland (cf.

Diplomatarium Islandicum

279–80). On the other side of the vellum the

church is dedicated to several saints, including the Apostle Peter. Thus

in a single document, concerns about the property of a church were

intermingled with larger issues, such its connection with the interna-

tional hierarchy of saints.

During the twelfth century, the Icelandic elite were remarkably close-

knit, as the same people amassed secular and clerical powers into their

own hands. The Church was in a partnership with the farming elite and

this relationship seemed very much oriented towards the interests of

the magnates. Moreover, the Church had little actual powers within a

system that seemed to guarantee its dependence on the secular elite.

And yet there was a ield of activity that was almost monopolized by

the clerics; the production of books through the new medium of literate

discourse. From its inception, literature was the medium of clerics, and

it was used in the interests of the Church. Written charters and docu-

ments pertaining to the rights and possessions of individual churches

came into existence, also sermons and hagiographic literature for the

ediication of the clergy. One has to assume that beside this functional

literature, there existed a thriving oral culture where different interests

had their outlet, but of that we have no trace. Literacy was irst and

foremost the medium of the Church, and it had a functional use for

clerics.

In a way, the literary scene was more of a sub-culture in twelfth cen-

tury Iceland. It was chiely aimed at a subgroup of the population and

did not have a central position in relation to other types of discourse.

An indication of this is perhaps the relative lack of written documents

concerning rigths and property in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,

in contrast to their ubiquity in the fourteenth century. But as the uses

and functions of literacy proliferated, the hegemonic status of the cleri-

cal world-view within this mode of discourse began to have a greater

impact on society.

Within the safe conines of the literate subculture, a new discourse of

space and time was introduced, a discourse based on the international

Heaven is a Place on Earth

9

models already prevalent in Latin Christianity, as noted by Dawn Hayes

who claims that “Medieval Christians built an entire subculture around

a belief in the miraculous and spontaneous intercession of saints in

everyday existence” (Hayes 5). In the Middle Ages a person, object, or

place that came into contact with a source of sacredness was considered

to have the opportunity to appropriate its energy—there was no irm

dichotomy between heaven and earth in this respect.

Literate culture facilitated the quick absorption of this mindset

among its relatively few practitioners in twelfth century Iceland. New

ways of deining space, computing time, writing history and describ-

ing the world went hand in hand with the adoption of ecclesiastical

world history. This was the essence of the literary genre known as

encyclopedic literature (alfræði), which was based on the models offered

by the giants of the contemporary European clerical literature, clerics

such as Honorius Augustodunensis or Petrus Comestor. This literary

world-view was already taking shape in various types of twelfth century

Icelandic works such as computistical tracts, geographical treatises, and

the universal history Veraldar saga (cf. Sverrir Jakobsson, “Hauksbók

and the Construction of an Icelandic World View”).

The construction of the Icelandic Church as an institution was

not limited to the parish churches rising all over the country, where

a dedication to a universal saint often underlined that the property

was a part of an international network connecting different times and

spaces (cf. Cormack). It was not only relected in the introduction of

the ecclesiastical year where the saints were commemorated in days

dedicated to them, the building blocks of a new type of literary time

keeping. It was not conined to the sacred geography or sacred history

introduced in some of the irst works of literature available in the Old

Norse tongue. It was present in all these things, and in most aspects of

the organization that was taking shape in twelfth-century Iceland.

Inventing Sacred Space in Thirteenth-

Century Iceland

In his book on medieval space from 1996, Dick Harrison makes a

distinction between microspace and macrospace. According to his

deinition of these terms “microspatial attitudes refer to the empirically

known world, while macrospatial attitudes refer to the geographically

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conceptualised cosmological framework of the mind” (Harrison 2).

Within the framework of this duality, no recognition is made of spaces

of representation or thirdspace. However, the concepts of microspace

and macrospace it roughly the irst two categories of Lefebvre’s deini-

tion of social space.

The churches dedicated to saints were a material representation

of saintliness; they were empirically veriiable just as the foreign sites

dedicated to saints depicted in the geographical treatise Leiðarvísir by

the twelfth century Abbot Nikulás. The relationship of the saints to

these local and foreign sites was, on the other hand, much rather the

product of conceived space. Theirs was the space of signs and codes,

which inluenced the behavior of people to a great degree, as the example

of St. Peter at Reykjaholt demonstrates.

This dichotomy was an important part of the status of churches in

social life. On one hand, they contributed to a new sense of community

within each parish, not only providing “a forum for community gather-

ings,” but also “a focus for community pride and concern” (French 224).

They had an important role in consolidating social networks or creating

new ones. As important centers of community they were a vital factor

in shaping power relations, both through social control and wealth

redistribution. For the owners or possessors of church centers this

social function was of much signiicance. They became a consolidated

power elite who could dominate farmers in the vicinity.

A distinction was made between churches that were donated to the

Church as autonomous institutions and privately owned churches. The

autonomous churches were known as staðir, which is paralleled by Latin

terms such as locus sacer or locus religious (cf. Magnús Stefánsson 186–8).

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, chieftains and local magnates kept

a tight hold on such property, but the distinction became meaningful

when Icelandic bishops made a concentrated effort to gain supremacy

over church property. They became the object of dispute between the

Bishop Þorlákr and several magnates, led by Jón Loftsson and Sigurðr

Ormsson, in the 1180s, and the uncertainty of their status was not solved

until 1297. The use of a special term for church property of this type also

indicates that there was something special about them. Reykjaholt was

a staðr and as such regarded as the property of St. Peter.

The church as a center of wealth and social control within the com-

munity is obviously to some degree a space of representation. But the

conceived space of the Church had more intricate forms, not least the

Heaven is a Place on Earth

11

way the Church was dedicated to a particular saint and was a space that

represented him in one of the remote corners of the World. This type

of representation is perhaps less evidently connected to power relations

than the role of a particular church as a community center and a place

for distributing wealth. Nevertheless it was of major signiicance as it

inluenced people’s behavior.

As a sanctuary, the space of a church had a qualitative signiicance,

which is characteristic of medieval thought, and precedes the quantita-

tive perception, which is prevalent in modern science, technology, and

business. The origins of this paradigm shifts have been explored by Alfred

Crosby, who claims that in this period Europeans acknowledged real-

ity’s essential heterogeneity in even the most immediate manifestations:

“Reality, however, was not absolutely chaotic ... but its predictability

derived not from itself per se, but from the one and only God”(Crosby

24) Whereas Crosby depicts this as a “venerable model” and is interested

in the period of its unraveling, the examples from thirteenth-century

Iceland that are the subject of discussion here, offer an insight into how

the model functioned as it was being introduced into a new society.

If church property in general was considered to be a kind of heterotopia,

the monastery was the most extreme kind of “other place.” The monastery

was a new type of exile, different from the kind prescribed in Icelandic law.

It was a voluntary withdrawal from the vicissitudes of secular life, and a

popular one for people who had been immersed in worldly concerns. It

served as a sanctuary for all kinds of people, but the best-known cases are

the chieftains that retired to a monastery when they felt no longer able

to continue their secular activities, noblemen such as Þorgils Oddason

in the twelfth century, or Guðmundur the precious [dýri] Þorvaldsson,

Sigurðr Ormsson, and Þorvaldr Gizurarson in the thirteenth century.

Icelandic monasteries were as a rule not conined by walls but this was

not a necessary prerequisite for a place of distinctiveness.

It must be emphasized that even the traditional involuntary exile,

which by now included contrite trips to Rome, could have the effect of

exalting the exiled. For example, Sturla Sighvatsson used his amendatory

journey to Rome in 1233–1235 to gain the favor with the Håkon Håkons-

son, king of Norway, and he used the opportunity to offer himself as

the enforcer of royal power in Iceland (Sturlunga saga I:360–4). After

falling from the favor of king Håkon another courtier, Gizur Þorvalds-

son, journeyed to Rome in 1247–1249, but then he spent the following

three-year period within the king and managed to regain his favor, in

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the end being made one of his representatives in Iceland (Sturlunga

saga

I:476). Exile was a time of opportunity, especially if it was spent

in places of opportunity, in Rome or at the court of kings.

Was a trip to Rome a necessary precursor to royal favor? It certainly

made a difference. The king could not be seen to support persecutors

of priests, such as Sturla, or breakers of oaths, such as Gizur, until

they had demonstrated their remorse in a spectacular manner, and a

journey to gain absolution in Rome was an important point in the

favor of a particular chieftain. Indeed, the upholding of courtly ideals,

inspired by the ideology of Peace of God, was an important criterion

to demonstrate that a chieftain was worthy to rule in the name of the

king, a point emphasized in the biographies of the Icelandic courtiers

Þórðr kakali Sighvatsson and Þorgils the Harelip Böðvarsson.

5

Both

of them were singled out for the manner in which they respected the

immunity of women and churches, whereas their rivals are slighted for

not upholding those standards (cf. Sverrir Jakobsson, “The Peace of

God in Iceland in the 12th and 13th centuries”).

The signiicance of churches as spaces of representation can hardly

be overstated. They served a conceptual link between this world and

eternity, between the mundane and the holy, between the present time

and the sacred time of Christ and the saints. A church dedicated to Saint

Peter had a typological connection with the Holy Land or the See of

St. Peter in Rome. It also had a typological link with the era of Christ

and the Apostles, a link that transcended the intervening centuries. The

cultural capital enjoyed by individual parish churches, and the Church

as an institution, was enormous. It provided links that connected space

with hallowed human experience, ancient and new.

The typological links created by the institution of the Church had an

important temporal aspect that also needs to be considered, alongside

the spatial aspect. The creation of sacred time is an important feature

of the sad story of Kálfr Guttormsson’s killing in 1234.

Immunities were not limited to people and places; they were also

dependent upon time. Certain periods of the year were considered more

sacred than others. This was the reason for the Truce of God (Treuga

Dei), an attempt by clerics to limit ighting during holy days. In the

eleventh century Church Councils went further and proclaimed Truce

5. Þórðr’s nickname is not easily translated; it probably refers to a clay-oven or an earthen

pot. It is possible (but less convincing) to translate it as “stutterer.”

Heaven is a Place on Earth

13

of God from Thursday to Sunday and on major Church festivities. At

the Narbonne Church Council in 1054 it was decided that war and

vengeance killing could only take place eighty days a year.

In Iceland this ideology was present in the rhetoric of clerics, who

criticized chieftains for not subduing “ákefð sína ok reiði fyrir hátíðar

sakir Máríu drottningar” (Sturlunga saga I:125) [their rashness and anger,

even for the sake of the solemn feast of Mary Our Queen] and other

saints. In The Saga of Þorgils and Haliði, probably composed around

1240, Bishop Þorlákr Runólfsson is quoted as saying to Haliði, who

is gathering forces on the eve of midsummer, that he as “vitrum manni

missýnist slíkt í meira lagi, ef þú vill alla ina heriligstu menn með þér í

sinni, en þenna inn dýrliga mann á móti þér, er messudaginn á á morgin

ok göfgastr er nær einn af öllum guðs helgum mönnum at vitni sjálfs

guðs” (Sturlunga saga I:40) [a clever man is deluded in more ways than

one, if you want on your side all the most wretched people and against

you the noble man, whose feast day is tomorrow and whose splendor is

second only to one of God’s saints, according to God’s own witness].

From the narrative it is clear, that the bishop expected Haliði to refrain

from ighting on the Feast of John the Baptist.

Þorgils saga and Haliða is quasi-historical at times, and clearly

impregnated with Church ideals of the Peace of God and Truce of

God. But contemporary sources conirm that fear of violating the feast

days of saints actually inluenced people’s behavior. In 1236 Snorri

Sturluson was not ready to move against his brother “á þeim hátíðum,

er þá fóru í hönd” [in the holy days that were upon them], i.e. during

the Lent. When his brother, Sighvatr Sturluson, made a move irst

during Palm Sunday, he was castigated by the third brother, Þórðr

Sturluson, who “veitti ... Sighvati átölur miklar um þat, er hann fór at

bróður sínum á hátíðum, ok segir, at hann myndi stór gjöld fyrir slíkt

taka af guði, gamall maðr” (Sturlunga saga I:390, 392) [reprimanded

Sighvatr severely because he was moving to attack his brother during

the holy days; he said that God would punish him severely, old man

that he was, for such an act]. As Sighvatr was soon to meet with a

violent death, the audiences to whom this is recounted might have

regarded Þórðr’s statement as prophetic.

In 1241 Órækja, the son of Snorri Sturluson, attacked Klængr Bjar-

narson on Christmas Eve, in order to avenge his father. Klængr and

his men “báðu sér griða. En Órækja kvað þá grið skyldu hafa þann inn

helga dag, er þá var yir þá kominn” (Sturlunga saga I:456) [asked for

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quarter but Órækja said they should have quarter on the holy day, which

had just started]. On the second day of Christmas, when the matins

had been sung, Órækja had Klængr executed. Even if the respect for

the holy day did not persuade Órækja to show leniency, at least he felt

compelled to grant a reprieve of execution as a token of respect.

In contemporary sagas from thirteenth century Iceland, times and

dates are usually exact, and the reference is almost always to the near-

est saint’s mass or church feast-day. This marks a stark contrast to the

Sagas of the Icelanders, and other such narratives, composed around

the same time. These stories take place in earlier times and the time-

frame is that of pre-Christian Iceland, where the main cycles of time

are summer and winter. A comparison between these different types

of sources thus reveals how the Church had managed to conquer time

and change popular perceptions of it.

This conquest of time did not only take place in the present. It is also

relected in works of history, such as the twelfth century Veraldar Saga.

In such works, the timeframe of the Biblical narrative was imposed

upon the history of the world in general with other known events from

Trojan, Greek and Roman adapted into this framework. The narrators of

Scandinavian history also tried to it their history into this timeframe, con-

necting the legend of Trojan migration to the North, or the long period

of Fróðafriðr (the Peace of Frode) with the time of Emperor Augustus

and the birth of Christ (cf. Bjarni Guðnason 17, 125, and 198).

Thus the institution of the Church can be seen as the creator of a

new type of time-measuring, a more exact timekeeping that exalted

the importance of feast days, and underlined their inherent sanctity.

6

This shift in attitudes towards temporality was connected with a cor-

responding shift in social attitudes—a more exact dating was necessary

to locate the temporal links between Heaven and Earth. The Sacred was

a presence to be reckoned with, on some dates more than others.

The Sanctuary as a Space of Representation

Representations of space have a practical impact; they intervene in and

modify spatial textures, which are informed by effective knowledge

and ideology (Lefebvre, La production de l’espace 52). By contrast, the

6. On further typological features of feast-days cf. Ármann Jakobsson 130.

Heaven is a Place on Earth

15

only products of representational spaces are symbolic. The space of

representation is the lived and dominated space, which the imagination

seeks to dominate and change.

This contrast is exempliied by the reality of the churches as sanctu-

aries. This was a product of their symbolic and ideological signiicance

as sacred places, as the places on Earth were Heaven was represented,

but also the hallowed sites of sacred events and the past that belonged

to the Bible and the saints. A Church devoted to St. Peter was a rep-

resentation of the heavenly gatekeeper, of the Holy See of Rome but

also of the sacred time when Christ walked on the Earth and Augustus

was emperor of Rome.

This signiicance, however, gains another dimension, when a fugitive

knocks on the door of the Church and gains entry to its sacred space.

In such instances, the ideological and cultural representation present in

a church was tested in action. The operational power of these ideologi-

cal constructions could not have been made manifest in a more explicit

manner although it was also tested when people went to great lengths

to avoid bloodshed on the feast days of saints.

The oldest source about Church sanctuary in Iceland would be

Archbishop Eirik’s letter from 1190 prohibiting killing in churches or

churchyards (Diplomatarium Islandicum 291). Carrying weapons in

churches is banned in some manuscripts dealing with Christian law,

but Icelandic historian Jón Jóhannesson believed this ban to be from

the inal years of the Commonwealth Age (Grágás 43; Jón Jóhannes-

son, I:304–5).

In the thirteenth century, those defeated in battle increasingly sought

churches for sanctuary. In 1206 the Bishop had two chieftains banned

for taking a man from a monastery with injuries and mutilation. The

chieftains who besieged the see of Hólar in 1209 were not inclined

to give heed to its sanctity; they gave the Bishop an ultimatum, “ella

myndi þeir drepa þá alla, er í kirkju váru, ok eira engu vætta” [otherwise

they would kill all those who were in church and spare no witnesses]

but when the Bishop had departed, they went “í kirkju með vápnum

ok eggjuðu út hina, er inni váru ... ella kváðust þeir mundu sækja þá

eða svelta þá í kirkjunni” (Sturlunga saga I:252) [into the church with

weapons and goaded the others who were inside to get out, ... otherwise

said they would attack them or starve them in the church]. For this the

Archbishop in Norway later condemned them.

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However, such behaviour was on the wane. Although there was a

marked increase in strife during the Age of the Sturlungs (from 1220

onwards), there is little to suggest that Church sanctuary was violated more

frequently. And even if there were some cases of rash actions against priests

and churches, the prescribed immunity could not be violated without

consequences, even for the most powerful chieftains. Hence, the trips

to Rome were a necessity for Sturla Sighvatsson and Gizur Þorvaldsson,

for them to continue to be active in the struggle for power.

In 1237 there was a battle near the church in Bær in Borgarfjörðr, but

those who sought sanctuary the church were spared. After the battle

of Örlygsstaðir in 1238 some on the losing side led to the church at

Miklabær, but the chieftains Gizur Þorvaldsson and Kolbeinn the Younger

drove them out. All except six were spared. Gizur actually threatened

to burn down the church, but in the end, the six fugitives came out and

were slain. Though Church sanctuary was formally recognized in such

instances, this did not mean it was always applied in reality.

In 1242 the bishopric in Skálholt was twice threatened when men

sought refuge there. Both times the bishop intervened to stop the

attacks, and was successful. The chieftain Þórðr kakali Sighvatsson was

one of those who threatened Skálholt that year, but he later acted as

guardian of women and churches. At a feast at Mýri in 1243, he “strengði

þess heit at láta aldri taka mann ór kirkju, hverjar sakir sem sá hefði til

við hann, ok þat efndi hann” (Sturlunga saga II:40) [swore an oath to

never have a man taken from a church, whatever the offence the man

had committed against him, and he kept that oath]. Later on, when

the chieftains Sæmundr Ormsson and Guðmundr Ormsson intended

to kill the farmer Ögmundr Helgason in 1250, he took advantage of

the close proximity of his farm to the church at Kirkjubær and went

to the church with his armed followers. Although Ögmundr had the

Ormssons killed in 1252, he was not slain in revenge, partly because

he lived so close to the church that he was practically untouchable

(Sturlunga saga II:92–3, 103). When the chieftains Sturla Þórðarson

and Hrafn Oddsson went to seek out Þorgils the Harelip in Stafaholt

in 1252 they were reminded that the church belonged to St. Nicholas,

and they could not do the saint such a disgrace. And, as mentioned

before, Sturla Þórðarson did not want to let horses graze in the ield

at Reykjaholt because the apostle Peter owned the hay.

All this occurred gradually and without the Church enjoying any

form of state-guaranteed or protection although it has been noted

Heaven is a Place on Earth

17

that courtiers of the Norwegian king seem to have been more reluc-

tant to violate the sanctity of churches than other participants in the

power struggle. Yet, this was a remarkable testimony to the power of

a hegemonic ideology that needed little help from external enforcers.

The sanctuary was the product of violent society itself; a haven that was

necessary so that traditional conlicts could continue.

Within the violent society of thirteenth-century Iceland, a church was

a kind of heterotopia, a counter-site of the kind that Michel Foucault

might call “a crisis heterotopia,” where the common structures of society

were suspended. When a person sought sanctuary in a church there was

a temporary break or rupture in the traditional strife; that person was

momentarily exempt from the rules of the game that went outside the

conines of the church.

Conclusion

The event of how Kálfr Guttormsson’s death came about was of major

signiicance, most of all for Kálfr himself, but also for the political power-

play in the region of Skagafjörðr in Iceland in the 1230s. Looking back at

it many centuries later, this example and others from thirteenth-century

Iceland also highlight some fundamental structures of thought in the

society in which these events took place, especially how the hegemonic

discourse of the church inluenced people’s view of the world, and its

spatial and temporal structure. The nature of sacred space and sacred

time in this violent society is one of its distinguishing features. Of special

importance is the role of the church as a sanctuary, a place of exile even

from the most pressing and immediate events. At the time of Kálfr Gut-

tormsson’s death, this idea of the church as a sanctuary was still taking

shape; it had grown markedly stronger by the 1250s.

Command of space is a fundamental and all-pervasive source of social

power. This is why the formation of heterotopias is such a fundamental

element of the hegemonic discourse at any given location or period.

These places that are different from other sites within a culture are

nevertheless symptomatic for the workings of that culture. The inves-

tigation into pre-modern heterotopias has hardly begun, but a good

place to start is a pre-state society, where the dominant institution of

the state with its real and presumed enforcing power was not present

to obscure other factors at work in society.

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Scandinavian Studies

In thirteenth-century Iceland the Church was still a weak organi-

zation, which had only recently gained some independence from the

class of magnates to which it had been intimately tied from the advent

of Christianity. It had very little real power within a society that was

imbued with violence and private gangsterism. And yet the discourse

of the Church became so dominant that it actually managed to affect

people’s behavior within the sphere where vested interests were the

strongest—that of power politics and warfare. That this coincided

with a period characterized by the breakdown of traditional structures

and the escalation of warfare was even more remarkable. To hold up

the church as a generally acknowledged place of sanctuary would not

have been possible without a broad consensus, which in itself was a

testimony to the strength of ecclesiastical discourse. One also has to

keep in mind that in the thirteenth century this discourse was innova-

tive rather than traditional in a society where a high value was placed

on tradition and little on innovation.

For churches to become sacred places within society, places of intimate

connection with holy events of the past and holy places in the world,

places were a saint was present although he had never himself been there,

places were the usual rules of society did not apply and the losers had

some respite from the winners, ideas about space and time had to be

modiied through a new conception of space, a conception which had

an operational power. When literate culture changed from a subculture

to hegemonic discourse, the social concept of space changed with it.

Space was never without meaning; at some places the connection with

the sacred was closer than at others. This applied also to the concept of

time. The proliferation of feast days not only made timekeeping more

precise; it also changed the way people experienced time.

The role of the sanctuary places an important light upon the nature

of medieval space. The ensemble, or intersection of places in the Middle

Ages, was hierarchic: there were both sacred places and profane plates;

protected places and open, exposed places; urban places and rural places;

supercelestial places, celestial places, and terrestrial places. This hierarchy

decided how a sanctuary was created and how it would work. A sanc-

tuary had to have a credible, sacred, celestial and temporal connection

with both humanity and divinity. It had to be a Heaven on Earth.

Heaven is a Place on Earth

19

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