Peter Costello
World of Books
These days we have little expectation of astonishing works of literature or scholarship from a bishop. They are all too busy with mere administration to have the mental energy to expend on scholarship or literature. It was not always thus. Look for instance at the writings of 19th-Century Irish bishops, such as Dr Healy of Tuam or Cardinal Moran.
In earlier ages too it was different. A bishop merely by the qualities of education and mind that brought him to his high position might be expected to write with some distinction.
There are numerous examples down the ages.
But the most astonishing of all, in some respects, are the works of Olaus Magnus (1490-1557), the last titular Catholic Archbishop of Uppsala in Sweden. He was forced by religious, social and political changes in Sweden to exile himself in 1530. Seven years later he settled permanently in Rome, where he devoted himself to writing. But his time there, along with his brother, the functioning bishop of Uppsala who died in 1544, was not wasted.
Olaus Magnus was a devoted patriot. His creative and scholarly life was devoted to the history, antiquities, and geography, zoology, folklore and religious traditions not just of Sweden but of Scandinavia in general from Finland to Iceland. He was especially admiring of the early Swedes, the Goths as he called them.
First creation
His first great creation was an elaborate carta magna or great chart of the Northern Seas. This was published in 1555; but it unaccountably lost to sight soon after and was even thought by some never to have existed. However, a copy was recovered, in a German library of course, hiding in plain view, so to speak. A facsimile published in the 1880s. It transformed the ideas that historians and naturalists had of the Scandinavian seas.
It seemed to some idle minded folk, a state of mind sometimes found even among academic, that it was a work of the imagination; the seas fill with images of monsters. But in fact the images are largely of whales of various kinds, fishes and mammals. There is indeed a version of the giant squid, but that is now an accepted creature; and the sea serpent too is also more acceptable to some today.
But this map when it was originally published was merely a preliminary to a far greater work. In 1590 he produced in Rome, its copyright guaranteed by the Pope for 10 years, his History of the Northern Peoples.
Just before Christmas, I happened to pick up for what seemed to be a derisory price a pristine second-hand set of the Hakluyt Society edition of the first complete English translation of this book, three long volumes running to nearly 1,000 pages, published between 1996 and 1998. This history was for Magnus not just a labour of love, it was intentionally a work of Catholic scholarship, of a kind that seems almost unique.
Excesses
Dismayed, not just by the excesses of the Reformation, but by its very existence, Magnus wished to preserve forever the true nature of medieval Catholic Scandinavia and its pagan background. These countries lay outside the Roman Empire, as Ireland did. But nothing like this was ever written about Ireland, or Scotland.
The History of the Northern Peoples represents the epitome of a lifetime’s research and reading. It is one of the great works of European historiography. The text and its remarkable woodcuts preserve a world that is largely lost forever. For Irish readers it presents the reality of the medieval achievements of people who appear in our own tales and legends as mere murderous pirates.
But because Sweden has effectively passed from the ken of most Catholics, their eyes fixed on Rome and the Renaissance, its true status is largely unknown. But as a recent Sunday reading reminded us, according to St Peter himself, “God has no favourites” – but one suspects that that if he did for Olaus Magnus the Scandinavians would be at their head.