© 1977 by American Academy of Religion
Abstracts of Articles |
Olav Engelbriktson—Anti-Hero of Norway's Reformation
Kenneth E. Christopherson is Professor of Religion and Chairman of Humanities at pacific Lutheran University. Research for this paper was done in Norway while writing an unpublished doctoral dissertation, Norwegian Historiography of Norway's Reformation. He has presented five papers on Norwegian Reformation topics at recent meetings of the Pacific Northwest Region of the American Academy of Religion.
Norway has not produced a unified history of her Reformation—a remarkable fact in a country so Protestant and Lutheran. Archbishop Olav, last Catholic primate of Norway before the Reformation, has been the one from the sixteenth century about whom most has been written, partly because Norway had no great Reformer heroes like those elsewhere. He offers a good case study in Norwegian Reformation historiography.
Historiography in Norway matured after the early nineteenth century revolutions, as part of her remarkable nationalistic cultural outburst that produced so many artists and scholars. Virtually all, like Ibsen, looked back with shame on the "400-year night" of their joint kingdoms with Denmark (1397–1814) and regarded that Danish domination as the cause of Norway's cultural unproductivity in the period. Events of 1536–37, including the official religious shift and a royal charter article purporting to end Norway as a kingdom and incorporte it into Denmarek, are seen as the nadir of Norway's political history. Hence Norwegians feel ambivalent about their Reformation: if strongly Protestant, they are thankful for it; acutely patriotic (no "if" here), they see it as part of foreign-imposed degradation.
It was Olav's dual role, as Catholic primate, to oppose increeping Lutheranism and, as head of the national council, to oppose royal and Danish encroachments on Norwegian independence. He was bound to catch the later attention—and varying appraisals—of Norwegian historians. Was he both national and church hero, or did he favor one role and neglect the other—and if so, which one? Was he incompetent, scoundrel, or doomed victim of circumstances?
The first generation of historians after the Norwegian Constitution of 1814 largely avoided writing on the Danish Period—and thus on the Reformation and Olav. The generation after 1850 took up the period but disparaged or neglected the Reformation by lumping it with the other events of 1536–37 as the nadir of the nation's history—thus they tended to make a national hero of Olav as Reformation-resister. The twentieth century has had increased writing on the period, but mostly as special economic, social or political studies, aiming for less stridently nationalistic history. There follows a study of all the varied major treatments of Olav. In all, the writing on the Archbishop stands as an index to Norway's unique Reformation historiography problems.