Alexandros Tsakos
Welcome everyone to this third event of the University Libraries Day in the Medieval Week.
We have organized the events today, in the framework of the University Museums and the University Libraries festivities for the 200 years jubilee from the foundation of the Bergens Museum.
We are sharing the responsibility for very important collections, both in terms of archaeology but also written sources. We thought that it would be important to gather here people who are renowned for their work with this material and contribute to understanding their use in the past, today and for the future.
I decided to invite those that I thought would have the most exciting views and informative ways of talking about these collections. And at the same time, people that I knew have been active with these collections. This is from my little experience in Bergen, the last seven years, as the academic manager for the manuscripts and rare books collection at the special collections of the university library where we are today in.
And with me I have today, with the order of appearance from my left side
Peder Gammeltoft, who is also academic manager of another academic unit of the special collections, the language collections.
Professor Åslaug Ommundsen, professor in medieval Latin at our university.
Professor Justin Kroesen, responsible for the church collection of the museum.
Professor Alf Tore Hommedal, archaeologist also at the museum.
Professor Emerita Else Mundal, Old Norse philologist.
And Professor Kirsi Salonen, historian at the University of Bergen.
So what we will be doing will be that I will ask first a question to each of them or to the way I have grouped them conceptually. And after their responses we will then open the floor to questions, and I think that many will arise from this first round of input. And since the topic is the Jubilee of the Museum, I will first give the question to Justin and Alf Tore.
And this will have to do with the particularity of the collections that you have responsibility for, and specifically with these earliest acquisitions, how have you been working with them? What is their importance? What has attracted most of the attention of your colleagues and visitors of the museum? Who would like to begin? Alf Tore? Justin?
Alf Tore Hommedal
Thank you for the invitation. And as a medieval archaeologist scientifically responsible for the museum's medieval archaeological collection, I then will emphasize a group of objects, namely the remnants of monasteries.
Why?
1. Firstly, because these objects collected in the 19th century represent remnants and knowledge of both the buildings themselves and of life in the buildings.
2. Secondly, because both colleagues and I have done research on this material.
3. And thirdly, because monasticism for the Norwegians today mainly is seen as something exotic, something you meet and experience during visits abroad, not knowing that monasticism is part of our Norwegian roots, our heritage.
But before I come to that, I would like to tell a little story on the museum and monasticism.
For when the historian Christian C.A Lange in the 1840s prepared his important monastic publication, "Det norske klosteres historie i middelalderen", he for a period had to leave Kristiania for Bergen to spend some time at the museum then called Bergen's Museum. His task was not to investigate the museum's church collection, nor to study the archaeological collections, or to look at the building remnants of monasteries from medieval Bergen.
In his book published in 1847, he directly informed that those types of cultural heritage leftovers are not included. However, he had to study Bergen Museum's collection of diplomas, written sources concerning monasteries. This matter of fact that Bergen's museum, 20 years after the museum's foundation, had such an important collection of diplomas, clearly shows the width in the cultural heritage ideas of the museum's founding fathers. When it comes to the archaeological objects relating to monasteries, I firstly will exemplify by a marble head found in 1853 when digging a ditch at the site of Munkeliv Abbey in Bergen.
The 31 cm high head portray a king with a crown of Byzantine type and an inscription on the crown reads Eystein Rex, King Eystein. According to the sagas, the Benedictine Abbey of Munkeliv was founded by King Eystein Magnusson around 1110. The Marblehead, probably part of a founder's portrait in the Abbey Church, seems thus to support and even confirm the learning from the sagas.
This fascinates both scholars and visitors to the museum and explains partly why King Eystein's portrait is a prominent object in the museum's collection and exhibitions. At the Munkeliv site there now are not any visible traces from this large monastery. In the museum's collection, however, there are kept building stones obtained from the Abbey church when excavated in 1860. And these architectural fragments are unique sources from this very important institution in medieval Bergen, both religious, cultural, social, economic, and at least visibility in the urban landscape.
Mouldings and decorations as the building fragments, for instance, indicate architectural inspirations from Denmark and Germany in the early 12th century. And through geological research, it has been possible to connect the soapstone types used as building material to specific local queries around Bergen, creating a knowledge of the building activity both at Munkeliv and at other sites in different periods of the Middle Ages.
Another group of monastic objects from another monastery is also included in the museum's 19th century obtained collection. These smaller artifacts give a unique peek into nun's life medieval Norway.
In Bergen, two building parts of the 900 years old Benedictine nunnery of Nonneseter still exist. They are a part of our present town, and the area is still named Nonneseter meaning where the nuns are living.
In 1891 Bendix Bendixen, associated to Bergen's museum under pressure managed to organise an intense archaeological excavation, surveying the nunnery church before the site was rebuilt. Bendixen then also secured around 100 archaeological artefacts for the museum's collections.
The small finds include items for sewing and embroidery like needles, thimbles and spinning wheels, a beautiful bronze stylus for writing, game pieces for pastimes and coins, most of them probably reflecting the liturgy of the nuns. The archaeological material also includes the skeletal remains of more than 100 graves never to be anthropologically examined before 2006.
The uniqueness of this total monastic material is that in the 19th century, that was collected in the 19th century, when the research questions in medieval archaeological excavations normally were limited to the building structures and rarely show interest in archaeological small finds, Bendixen collected and contextualized such important objects for us in our study today.
This includes tiny fragments of needles and coins normally not even observed with the usual 19th century excavations methods. The University Museum's collection of monastic objects obtained in the 19th century thus ranged from massive building stones up to 900 kilos to small thin coin fragments weighing less than one gram. Some of the items have always been central in the Museum's research and communication, such as the marble head of King Eystein. When the museum's new exhibition opens, hopefully in not so many years, I hope there also will be room for more monastic history, including women's history in medieval Norway, and, not to be overlooked, to put focus on an important part of the University Museum of Bergen's institutional history. Thank you.
Alexandros Tsakos
Thank you, Alf Tore, also for doing exactly that, contextualizing, bringing together the written material that Lange among others have studied and seeing it under this specific case study, which of course was also mentioned earlier today in the talk. What is your take, Justin? Is it in similar lines that you would see the use of your collection, your research and your public?
Justin Kroesen
Both similar and a little different. Thank you for inviting me to be part of this panel. Thank you for the question. As Alf Tore, I have been thinking a little bit about what category of objects I could focus on. And I decided to focus on a category of objects that is, I think, probably the most outstanding among all our artworks from the Middle Ages in the kirken kunstsamling, which is that of altar frontals.
An altar frontal is a colourfully painted wooden panel that covered the front side of a medieval altar. And just to give you an idea, I took the catalogue here, and this is just one example of many more painted altar frontals that we have in our collection. And other less current terms for this same object type is antependium or antemensale.
You find all of them in Norwegian literature. And these were typical features of high medieval altar decorations. That's to say that were invoked between, let's say, the 11th and the early 14th century. And afterwards, in the 15th century, altar pieces that are put on top of the altar, mostly with movable wings, became dominant. So, this is a typical feature of high medieval altar decorations.
The University Museum possesses 19 of such painted panels. Some are preserved in a perfect state, while others are more or less severely damaged. In all of Norway, there are 30 such frontals preserved. So, our museum possesses no less than two-thirds of the national stock.
Painted frontals of this type from the 11th to the early 14th century are really rare in all of Europe. Together with my former PhD student Stefan Kuhn, we've tried to take stock of all examples preserved in Western Europe. And we counted around 160 examples in all countries of the Latin West together. 160.
And this means that Norway alone possesses over 20% of the European stock of such altar frontals. And our museum alone, just around the corner here, unfortunately behind closed doors at the moment, alone even 12.5%. So, we have the eighth part of all painted frontals from the period. The largest concentration of painted high and medieval altar frontals is found in Catalonia. And I will come back to that a little later.
In comparison to Norway, the panels in Catalonia have much more often been overpainted and many were heavily restored in the late 19th and especially early 20th century. So, I think there is argument to say that we have the best.
The Norwegian frontals were central to the medieval collection of Bergens Museum from the outset, from 1825 onward. In fact, the first 14 numbers, MA, which means Middelalder, indicating the medieval collection, are all taken up by frontals. So, number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, through 14, all frontals.
Around 1825, the museum's founder, Willem Friemann-Koeren Christe, had seen a painted panel during a visit of the church in Nedstryn in Nordfjord. But the parish didn't want to sell it to the museum. So, Christie wrote, and I quote, translated, "It's a great pity that this highly remarkable work cannot be obtained for the museum, whose greatest prize it would be at present. The bishop made an attempt to acquire it, but to no avail. The local community wishes to keep the frontal in their church, where it will soon be completely ruined, whereas with a little restoration it could be preserved for posterity." So, he was really after it, and he got a little angry.
So, in this case, in the end, the parish gave in, and the painted frontal was transferred to Bergen's museum already in 1826, and it received the number MA1, “Middelalder 1”.
It can be dated to around 1310, and it has a remarkable iconography that Alexandros knows very well, concentrating on the theft of the cross by the Persians and its recovery by the Byzantine king Heraklios. It has been suggested, I think with good arguments, that it originally belonged to the Apostles Church here at Bergen Castle.
Christie's access to parish churches in western Norway mostly went via his close friend, Jakob Neumann, who at that time was the Bishop of Bergen. So, his authority as a church, as a prelate, offered obvious advantages for acquiring artworks from churches.
So, Christie once wrote about his friend and colleague Neumann. His pastoral visits were harvest festivals for the museum. Never did he return without antique treasures for the museum collection. That must have been a totally exhilarating period. I go to churches a lot, but I never come home with medieval art, only with pictures.
In a recent article, I've asked myself why medieval church art was so important to the founders of the museum, and certainly also to the museum's visitors, although we have no records for that. The christian message may well have appealed to them, as well as the artistic qualities of the paintings with the vivid colours and the direct image language. But I think there was something else at stake which was even more important, and that is the fact that the oldest artifacts they could find at that time were works of church art.
As archaeology was still in its infancy, it was in the churches, especially the stave churches that were viewed as the quintessential Norwegian national antiquities. And Norway's first Christian centuries were also recorded in the famous sagas. So, the world of the stave church is the world of the sagas, and so national heritage par excellence. and all this was considered as the “Nasjonal storhetstid” although it's not explicitly stated by Christie, I believe that the church art from before the arrival of the Danes in the late 14th century was especially cherished as the art of an independent Norwegian kingdom.
Late Gothic art in Norway is traditionally called Hanseatic in Bergen but also elsewhere in Norway which expresses I think the idea that by then, foreign powers had already stepped in. So, the high medieval art is the true Norwegian.
If we move on to the 21st century, I can say that the frontals are still very central to the research that is carried out on the church art collection. They played an important role in the PhD thesis by Stefan Kuhn, which he defended in 2022, as part of what he called the altar ensemble, composite altar decorations of the high Middle Ages. To me, the frontals constitute an intriguing link to a part of Europe that I know very well, which is Spain, especially Catalonia.
While there are 30 frontals in Norway preserved, as I said, Catalonia alone has 60 more or less. Most are now found in the museums of Barcelona and Vic. The Catalan frontals are generally one century older than the Norwegian ones, from the 12th century and mainly the 13th. The Norwegians tend to be a little later, but they are very similar in shape and iconography. The oldest frontal that we have here in the museum, the one from Ulvik, dating from around 1260, follows the same pattern as many of the Catalan altars, showing Christ enthroned in the centre with the Apostles on either side. A really standard iconography.
In 2020, the Episcopal Museum in Vic, in Catalonia, hosted an exhibition that had been initiated by us here in Bergen about the striking parallels between the high medieval art from Norway and Catalonia. And it was called North and South and was based on the idea that the art from this period preserved in both countries are, you could say, survivors of a European art landscape that has elsewhere vanished almost completely. And if we follow this reasoning, the medieval art kept in our museum, as well as that in the Catalan museums I mentioned, has a message to all of Europe. It's much more than local art. Our frontals help understanding what kind of altar decorations once existed in all those churches in France, in England, Germany, etc., including my own home country, the Netherlands, where none has been preserved because of the iconoclasm of the Calvinists.
So, this way, the European periphery, Norway and Catalonia, inform us about what you could say is now the empty centre. And as an illustration of that, I can mention that two years ago more or less I was contacted by a colleague from the National Gallery in London, who is a specialist on medieval art, because they are planning in the National Gallery an exhibition about English Gothic, and the Norwegian frontals fill an essential gap where it comes to panel paintings from the 13th and 14th centuries. There is next to no examples preserved, even I could perhaps say no examples preserved in England. And given the close connections over the North Sea between England and Norway, especially in the 13th and early 14th century, the Norwegian altar frontals, the ones that we have here, give a unique impression, I would say the only impression possible to be gained, of how these may have looked like in English churches. So, this is why I hope we will collaborate with the National Gallery over the coming years. underscoring, I think, making the time lapse complete between the earliest, the foundation of the museum and the near future. The frontals are always at the centre. That was...
Alexandros Tsakos
Kirsi, and important to underline the parallel value of the objects that the museum has the custody for both in terms of material and cultural or international and international value. And closing from the museum world and moving into the university world, it's nice that you give the pass to how relevant are these objects that were central in the beginning of the museum today. So how central are these objects in your work at the university with students and research projects, Åslaug, Else and Kirsi? Shall we begin with a historian?
Kirsi Salonen
Yes, thank you. And also, for my part, thank you very much for inviting here. And now I have to give a small precision that you said that we are sort of really great experts on the museum collections. I have never used them in my own research, but I thought it is better to be honest. But I think I can answer as a historian a little bit to the question, what is the importance of the collections? and I am myself doing working very much with the written sources so the art historical or the archaeological material they are not for my own research that important but I know that there are colleagues who are also interested in in those so I think in in general all the both what is in the University Museum and what is here in the library, they are all important for historians.
For my part, I would like to of course mention the manuscript, but maybe even more importantly, the diploma collections, the medieval documents. And I will come a little bit later back to that, but another thing that I think as a historian is very important to remember of library collections, not only the old medieval ones, but that research literature from 18th century or 19th century, early 20th century, they are all also source material for us.
I've been working earlier in in the university of Turku in Finland and we got a rector who was from the medicine and his idea was that okay we save a lot of money by reducing the libraries into only digital collections only these sort of digital things because nobody needs a book that is printed in in 1875 so we just can throw all that away and his plans got very far before they sort of came to our ears and we could stop him, but he would simply have thought that no books from 1908 or 1927 are of any importance, but I think that is also very important that the university library has these modern collections.
But then coming back to the today's topic, and that is the manuscripts and diploma material. Regarding the diplomas, that is the charters or medieval documents. And that is, of course, one of the main thing for historians, that we try to find out what happened in the past by reading the old documents and finding out what is written. We need, of course, some knowledge in old languages and also old handwritings in order to decipher what is in those documents.
Luckily, almost all Elsa said now that actually all of them probably are printed in the source edition collections “Diplomatarium Norvegicum” or “Regesta Norvegica” or somewhere else. So it is not essential to get back to these diplomas, just to sort of find out what is written in them. And one might think, okay, yeah, then these diplomas, they have no… Or having them in our collections, it is not any more important for historians, because we already know what is in there. But if one thinks so, then they have a very limited idea of what historians nowadays do, because there are a lot of things.
We are not only reading what is written in the document, but we are also studying the documents themselves. Are they written on paper? Are they written on parchment? Because that has their own story. Which kind of handwriting they have written, that can tell us something about who has been writing. Has it been somebody who is used to writing? Is it somebody who has a very uncertain hand? The documents have also the seals that are actually extremely important to see whose seal is there, whose seal is probably missing. And all these small details that one can study that tell not only about the moment when they were written down the documents, but also where they have been kept afterwards.
There are library marks that, for example, we have a diploma telling that Andersson has sold his farm to the monastery of Nonneseter, then the copy of this original letter has probably stayed in the Nonneseter monastery's own archive, so that they can prove that they have a legal hold on the farm. If then the monastery sold the farm further to somebody, very often the original documentation also went to the new owner. And if there are these small marks, we can actually follow a little bit also, not only the history of the monastery, but also the farm.
So there are a lot of these things that if we only have the printed source somewhere in “Diplomatarium Norvegicum”, we miss all these small details. and therefore, it is extremely important to come and see the originals, or at least have the picture from both sides, not only the side where the text is, but there is often very interesting documentation on the other side as well.
So, in that sense, I hope that I will have now, I have been here for four years and there has been a lot of other things to do, but I'm really looking forward that I can start the next research projects and come and actually sit with the collections and do something funny with it. I think that was my...
Alexandros Tsakos
Oh, but this proves, Kirsi, why it was important that you are here, both because you bring into the forefront most probably the most important part of the medieval collections in the library, you underline a specific aspect of this collection, which is the verso side and the information character which has produced already a small project with a publication from a colleague in the library, Juliane Tieman. It was the focus of my talk earlier today, so there is already a lot happening in the library and it's a sort of a nice coincidence from such a panel further collaboration in research projects based on this material can happen. And of course, because you point our direction to all these book collections that apart from the manuscripts and especially for that material from the 18 and early 1900s, they also came from the museum bookshelves to our library, and we have been refurbishing them. It's been a constant struggle to keep them alive and accessible exactly because of such developments as the one you mentioned, you experienced in Turku. So, you see, very good that you've been here to make this intervention. Thank you for that.
Do Latinists feel the same with our collections, both the ancient and the more new ones, Åslaug?
Åslaug Ommundsen
Absolutely, Alexandros.
It is a very interesting collection from a Latinist's point of view and a medievalist's point of view because it's not a huge collection, but there is a diversity that is fascinating.
So, the university library has a collection of about 30 or so fragments from medieval manuscripts. And they may be a leaf from a missal, it may be other material, mainly liturgical, prayers and so on. and they are fragments of different types. They also represent a time span from the early 12th century on to the 15th century. So that means that there are so many examples of different types of script, different types of manuscripts. There is mainly parchment but also paper, prayers on early paper. And this collection is, for one, it's the perfect teaching collection because it is possible to show students many different types of medieval manuscripts. but it is also very relevant for research. And the fact that there is immediate access to medieval manuscript material in a place like Bergen is actually very important.
What we also have is examples of not only the usual binding fragments that you find parchment made from animal skin, so it's very durable. parchment used as covers of protocols or used in the bindings of books. You also have old liturgical books reused as documents, and there is even archaeological material fragments found underneath church floors, which is also very interesting, or used in Justins' altar frontals. And the direction in the research today is also moving along the lines that Kirsi described, that you have a document from the Middle Ages with a content that is interesting, but it is not just about the text. So, they are opening up very new parts when it comes to analysing the parchment, analysing pigments, analysing inks, and they have additional stories to tell.
For us, working with fragments, because there have been such great losses, but there are thousands of fragments in different Nordic countries, it is very easy to forget what a complete manuscript in a binding could look like. So therefore, I want to also point out the manuscripts, the medieval manuscripts, the bound manuscripts that the University Library has in their collection.
And in 1834, Christie writes with great excitement about a gift that the University Museum, sorry, that Bergen Museum got from a family of merchants, a merchant called Lund, from Farsund. This is certainly a great gift. It is a manuscript from a Cistercian monastery in Cairn Belgium, in Cambron. And the content is theological. It's a grand book. It's very nicely written. Initials have different colours in them. It's a commentary by Jerome. It is also a great example of the kind of book we always wish we had. It has been signed by the scribe and dated, so we know both when and where it was written. And what excites visitors to Bergen about this book is the binding. Because when the monastery of Cambron was dissolved and the library, the books of the library was sold in different auctions in the early 19th century. The books that were picked up by the bigger libraries, they were rebound. They were given new bindings to fit with the bindings of the library according to then modern standards. But the University of Bergen, sorry, the Bergen Museum did not have this kind of practice. So it's one of the books that have actually been kept in the original bindings, which is also very valuable. And it also links Bergen to this world of moving books and manuscripts also after the Middle Ages.
One thing is that the Flemish books are now seen, especially after Synnøve Midtbø Myking’s research, as very relevant as an active network, part of an active network, where Scandinavia was also part in the Middle Ages. And if we want to see what a Flemish manuscript from about 1200, or exactly 1200 as the scribe writes, if we want to see what that looks like, we can just go down to the special collections and ask to see it, which is a fantastic luxury.
The other book I would like to mention is the Book of hours, obviously. Because the books of hours, they were also one of the most widespread types of books all over Europe. In Norway, not many have survived at all, so it's one of the rare examples. It's also an example of a book or an item in Bergen Museum that was not a gift, but it was actually actively sought out and bought in Germany in the 1890s. So again, it's not a book that can be connected to local history, But it's an example, a very useful example of a type of book that would have been here. We just don't have them anymore. But it's very valuable to be able to show students. So thank you, Alexandros, for always being so generous and receiving us with the students in the Manlib, in the Special Collections. We really appreciate that.
And so this combination, the diversity, that we can see a lot of different material, and some of it has a local connection, so that it can add to the local history, it's connected to places and people. But other types of material, they link us directly more to the international world. And as I recently mentioned in a conversation with you, Alexandros, one of the fragments of calendars in your collection has recently been identified as part of a big group of fragments in Scandinavia, produced in London, probably on commission. So you never know which items turn out to be special and very relevant for research. A final point I would like to make about the research is in terms of the recent project we receive funding for from the ERC, the Codicum project, where we want to take a closer look at the parchment. It would be very nice to, in collaboration with the library, to be able to say and test and say something more about the parchment, the material side as well. So we hope to be able to move on along that line of inquiry.
Alexandros Tsakos
Thank you. And thank you both for the kind words and for opening also for the possibilities of collaboration. I think that this is the reason why the library is there, in order to give access to knowledge and sources of knowledge and make them as well organized as possible so that these axes will produce what researchers know how to produce. So our work with identifying provenances in all these items is of huge importance and whether it comes to the history of a poor chase mystery or it comes to the protocol from Bryggen that carried this or that fragment, I trust that as the years go by there is indeed a progress in this type of knowledge from the library and we would like to share that with you always.
Latin, of course, because of its fate of somehow arriving at an end point in Norway with the Reformation, at least when it comes to the manuscript production, carries these mysteries in a bit different manner than Old Norse does. So, I think that the Old Norse material or the Middle Norse or whatever term one would use for all these periodization’s of the language is the richest one that we have in the collection and the one which also represents the type of material that both Alf Tore and Justin were talking about. So, Else, may I invite you to tell us what has been your relationship with these collections and how do you apply them in your research today?
Else Mundal
Ja, but first I must say that like as the historians, scholars and students of Old Norse philology will normally use modern scholarly editions of Old Norse text in their everyday work. But old books and manuscripts at the university library's special collection are still very important.
When we today mostly can use modern edition and rely on that they give a good picture of the medieval text, something that is very time efficient and saves the old manuscripts from being worn out, which is also important. It is because many Old Norse scholars for more than 250 years has worked as editors and translators and made the old text easily accessible for other scholars from many different fields. and through translations, also for people worldwide who is not able to read the old language.
One should perhaps think that when an Old Norse text is edited once, the work is done. But that is not so. Therefore, we need scholars who can read and edit the medieval manuscripts. and it is important that students get at least some introduction to the fundamental field of text editing. Not all Old Norse scholars will specialize in editing. In the broad field of Old Norse philology, some will specialize in Old Norse language, Old Norse literature or in Old Norse society and culture, including mythology. However, the Old Norse manuscripts and the access to them form the foundation for all the different fields within Old Norse philology.
This makes the special collection very important and even though we do not have a very big collection of texts and Old Norse saga text compared to other places like Copenhagen and Stockholm. But we have a big collection of letters that must be said. As yes mentioned, when an Old Norse text is edited. once. The work is not done. And there is need of scholars who can read and edit medieval text today and we will have the same need in the future, I think. The principle of how text should be edited have namely changed through the ages, are changing and will most likely continue to change. Behind some of the oldest editions, it is very difficult to see that the editors have taught much about principles of editing.
They edited a manuscript they happen to have at hand.
For a long time, the principle for editing was to come as close to the lost original text as possible. And the edited text was construction or constructed text based on several manuscripts resulting in a text that had never existed. Today it's more common to edit one manuscript or one manuscript with variants from other manuscript in the footnotes. The principle behind editing one manuscript is that every manuscript in the long timeline from the original text was written and we do not have any text of that type, original text. To the young manuscripts of modern time, a lot of changes were made. And every text in the long line is by many scholars today see as a separate text more like original texts, all of them, and sources to the time when they were written or copied.
It is also a fact that scholars within different fields need different types of editions. Linguists, for example, will need editions which reflect the language of a manuscript as closely as possible. A facsimile photo comes very close to this, but it's not easier to read than the manuscript itself.
Edition with literal rendering of the manuscript letter by letter, and which mark abbreviations of words, syllables, or letters, or include the abbreviation symbol in the edited text would be helpful for linguists. But would probably irritate historians, or at least some of them, who do not need such details and would prefer edition with normalized Old Norse, if not translations. In the last decades, we have got more and more electronic editions of medieval text, which have made the work of medievalists much easier than before. But to edit such texts made them accessible and maintain and update text archives demands competence. In both old and new types of edition.
As I see it, special collection of the type we have in Bergen is a good support for the scholars in Old Norse philology. Even though the collection of Old Norse saga manuscripts is not big, but I've mentioned the diplomas really is big. I have a, I printed them out. And all these more than 400 pages are only mentioned. You can look at it if you want later. So also listening, the diplomas.
It is also very useful to have access to the manuscripts, even though we do not need them so often. And it is very useful to have access to the many old books which we have in the special collection. They are not always easy to find. And it is of course very important that medieval manuscripts is taken good care of. We will need them later for new editions. Perhaps of a type we do not even know today.
So, I'm very thankful for the cooperation with the special collections and it's very useful and very nice to have the possibility to go and knock at the door not many meters away and say can I please look at manuscript so-and-so or diploma that in that number and the answer is always yes so thank you.
Alexandros Tsakos
Thank you, Elsa, and always I welcome both you and all the colleagues. The struggle is, as you say, preserving the objects for the future or for eternity. And we are thankful that we are the only university library that has the luxury of not one, not two, but three book and paper conservators who are actively working with the preservation, and rehousing and improvement of the conditions of our collection. Which of course is not the only resource, as you all mentioned every time we go around these questions. But I think that these are these resources, Peder, that you are perhaps the most appropriate person to talk about. Because as the leader for the archive of languages, or the Norwegian Language Archive, you do sit on datasets of immense value when it comes to both the charters, when it comes to the place names, when it comes to the personal names, when it comes to the terms that one is using. And at the same time, you are working and reworking them in new digital forms.
So how do you hear all that and how do you see the use of the library sources for the improvement of accessibility and research on those?
Peder Gammeltoft
Well, I think the core thing here is availability. And we are living in such a digital world nowadays that if it's not available on the internet in one form or the other it doesn't really exist anymore.
So we need to have at least registrants available to have the document registered, have them supplied with good metadata. The next step is to have them photographed, scanned, so that we can visually inspect them. And that has also the good effect on preservation, that we don't have to handle the documents or the manuscripts anymore to a very large extent. But the availability becomes ten or hundredfold more. You can work from home and work with exactly the same materials as you do at work. or you could sit on the other side of the world to do it.
Once we have the images digitized, we need to be able to use them or make them usable for students and researchers and so on. And that's been done very well, I think, through the Marcus project, but also through various other research projects. Åslaug has also worked on this quite a lot with the fragments and so on. And I think that's tremendous work that's really necessary. That way we can make medieval material available, and it can be used in all sorts of different ways that we haven't thought about before. In the language collections, we don't have medieval manuscripts as such, but we make use of the work that has come out of working with digital manuscripts.
We have the text available through either our own resources, but also the Minota system now has diplomas available, many of them from here, and they are available for research in various forms, either in the diplomatic form or the normalized form, depending on the level of the students especially. And also, quite often, if they are available in a good quality, you can have the facsimile shown at the same time as well. I think that's tremendously good to have that available.
For my own sake, in the language collections, the words that constitute the documents and the manuscripts are what we have as a source for the Norwegian language. and also, for the development of Norwegian, for viewing the inferences from abroad that we had on Norwegian in the Middle Ages, which was large, perhaps as large as now, but just in different ways. And without medieval manuscripts, we wouldn't have been able to show that progression of language in the same way. So that's really important. And that, of course, goes into dictionaries and so on.
There's also, in the diplomas, there's lots of persons' names, there's places named, and those can be used in different ways. Many of the place names were used by Oluf Rygh in “Norske Gaardnavne”, but he only took really a small subsection of names available. He only took the names of farms, and in diplomas there are names of farms, but also names of cities of course, names of mountains, names of valleys, names of rivers, and they're not a part. We actually have a huge on-tap material that we can make use of as well. And also the personal names have been under used as well. And that's what we're going to be working on in the next years to make this available in a different way so that we have a much more comprehensive material from the medieval documents. It's a huge, enormous work, but it's doable nowadays. And it's partly available through the new technology that some, well many, and with good rights, view with apprehension, namely AI. But for actually collecting named entities in medieval documents, it's doing much better than what we have been able to with named entity recognition traditionally. So there are certain ways of harnessing new technologies and then making medieval material available through that. I think that's really what I ought to say.
Alexandros Tsakos
Very much so. I agree with you. You yourself are using quite a lot of technologies in your work. for example, GIS moving the textual data into space and creating…
Peder Gammeltoft
Well, not into space but into spatiality. So, I could move it into space as well.
Alexandros Tsakos
And this is something that not only brings us from the textuality into the spatiality but this is also something that gives me the opportunity to bring into the discussion again our friends from the museum, because it's been a lot of discussion about texts and the written sources now, but we're coming around with Peder’s comments into the way that this can transform into a knowledge of the space into which the medieval culture was developed, was flourishing or not.
So is this the way that we're going to do it in the future? Is the best practice for the custodians of both the archaeological, cultural-historical and also written material from the medieval past to go through the digital resources? Do we need to think of other ways? What do you think?
Alf Tore Hommedal
Of course, it's very important with the new way of being able to use the collections through digital sources and so on. But as we said, you have to go to the item themselves. We have to keep the items. I exemplified, for instance, with Bendixen. What he did, he collected the items but also contextualized them, making it possible for us to go in and also to study the items themselves today. Of course, at least at the archaeological items, you are going to take samples from them. So we have to have the items and keep them as… We can't absolutely not just throw away the books and not the items either, the archaeological items either. But of course, the new technique is essential in the way of studying also archaeological artifacts.
Alexandros Tsakos
Thank you, Alf Tore. Do you agree, Justin?
Justin Kroesen
I totally agree, Alf Tore, that I think if we look at all this material globally, you you can access digital sources anywhere in the world. So, you can be in the museum in Bergen from New Zealand virtually.
But the outstanding luxury that we have here is that we have the objects at hand. And I usually say that to colleagues in the US who might sometimes come here and visit. Which university in the US of what standing whatsoever can boast of sitting on a collection like ours? We are called University Museum but we are actually much more. We are, and I'm talking about I think also archaeology but the fact that the part that I know best is of course the church art. We have a top notch European medieval church art collection that is way beyond like what museum could, what any university could have collected over, I don't know, the last 100 years or so. So it's an incredible luxury that we have that. So, the object is fundamental. And also, I like really a lot listening to what the others have to say because there's so much more to explore from this medieval world that we're all interested in than only painted frontals or whatever is in my collection.
So I feel sometimes a little bit ashamed when I look back into history to people like Bendixen and also to Christie, maybe he did what he could in his time, and he was a visionary person. These people were much more generalists than we are. These people looked at objects, at imagery, at words, at the materiality of manuscripts and everything, they took it all into their research.
We are like over organized because we only look at this. Sometimes I have to laugh a bit because Alf Tore and I have this understanding that Alf Tore does everything that is “under bakken”, everything that is under the "my" belt as we say in Dutch, I don't know if this is in English, and everything over ground is my responsibility. That is wrong. We should work together and listen to each other like we do today and take into account your take on the manuscripts and you listen to me if you like and we speak about frontals. So, I don't know, we should be a little bit humble and look back into what the researchers at that time did.
Alexandros Tsakos
You almost took my closing lines there, Justin, but it's lovely.
Alf Tore Hommedal
I would like just to also stress that in the archaeological material; you have the objects themselves. But that's not all.
You have the archives. The archives, the information, the documentation about the finds are very, very important, as the objects are. So these two together, both of them are part of the museum's collections. You can look at an object without the archives, but you don't get all, the value of the object is much richer when you have the archives.
Alexandros Tsakos
You are very, very right. It was in 2023 that we had another panel about the importance of the archives for the archaeology of Sudan, being really threatened by the situation in the country, although even if you wish, have secondary value in terms of what's happening to the people and the land itself, the archives would constitute the necessary backdrop for anything that archaeology would have to show about this land in the future. It's the metadata of the items, as we would say in the library. But both these words and what you mentioned before and this thought that brought me back to Sudan also brings me to the idea about how all this work that we are doing, collaborating or not, is only in the framework of the Norwegian reality, or whether the collections that we are curating, both in the museum and the library, have an international scope. and the fact that we are doing that in English is exactly because we would be very much interested in having the podcast heard by people who do not necessarily are in the university and can see these objects but can find them. Where does the interest for the international community lies? And now the floor is open to anyone who would like to take the word and say something.
No? There is no interest for the international community?
Kirsi, then I have to challenge you. You are working with material that is of international scope, right?
Kirsi Salonen
Yes. I've been working a lot with the material in the Vatican archives, but also in different archives in Germany and England and Scandinavia and other places.
It is fantastic that you can sit home in New Zealand and see all the documents, but at the same time as a historian, I think sitting home and seeing everything online, it is so boring. Working in the Vatican archives, which is not online, the best thing actually there is that you go there, you see other international scholars coming to the same archive, and then you can talk to them, you can discuss and maybe make a common research project. There's a fantastic bar in Vatican, by the way, where you can have coffee and whatever.
So somehow, I like very much that I can read my sources online. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has a fantastic collection of manuscripts and documents online. But it also means that if I want to apply for money to go to Munich and see this, they just say no because they are all online. And that is so, so annoying somehow. But I think it is a fantastic thing for international scholarship that things are getting online and people can see because that makes the collections open. There are a lot of people who can’t travel to Norway or wherever for if they have a lot of teaching or something but in the evening they can do a little bit of the research I mean traveling to another country you need if you want to do something serious you need at least a week hopefully a month or half a year to really get some somewhere but these electronic things, it is very good for internationality. And also this getting contact with the international colleagues, I mean, like Åslaug has done with the ERC grant, I mean, alone we can do a lot, but when we can join forces, that is a totally other constellation because the colleague can do something what I myself cannot do, and together we can get a little bit higher level of professionality. So yes, of course...
Alexandros Tsakos
Else, you wanted to say something?
Else Mundal
Yeah, I wanted to say something.
I think that, as I already said, the most interesting collection we have in our collection, in Bergen, is church art. What you have already mentioned, and I think that is a collection that could attract scholars from abroad. And probably already has. Withing my own field, Old Norse philology I do not think we have saga text that is of the type that could attract many foreign scholars to Norway. We have these diplomas which you have mentioned that is so interesting that perhaps should attract foreign scholars, but they are sources to Norwegian history and I do not think that many foreign scholars will make Norwegian history their main research field. But these diplomas, they are very interesting, in many ways. We've heard, a source to linguistic Old Norse language. They are also very interesting because if you see them in connection, with the law. The law. Altså det vil. Det will show how the law is used. The Norwegian laws are very interesting sources. Because they. About other things, about, there are many things we can say about law different for many reasons. But the women’s rights according to these laws, Norwegian laws, are very special.
Women had according to these laws, meet at a ting, they were witnesses, they could even take a case to court and so on. And that is very special in a European context. And these diplomas, they show us that this really happened in reality. And in fact, that women could take a case to court. They could act on behalf of their children and so on.
And the diplomas, the young diplomas show us that even after 1604 and Christian the third's Norwegian law, and this law deprived women for the rights they had earlier. So even after this law, women continue to act at the ting. And that is very special. And I think that it is Norwegian scholars that will have to bring this into the light. But it should perhaps interest also some international scholars.
Alexandros Tsakos
I think so too. Both the law and the gender aspect that you mentioned are things that suddenly internationalize something that, as you correctly point, seem to be rather of interest for Norwegian scholarships if it concerns Norwegian history.
Else Mundal
Just another thing I would like to mention, and that is the collection of runic inscriptions in Bergen. We have an interesting collection at Bergen Museum. But a collection I haven’t talked is the collection at Bryggen Museum. No part of Bergen Museum. And not any longer under the university umbrella. Sadly. But the collection at Bryggen Museum is the biggest collection of runic inscriptions in the world and should be of interest for scholars abroad.
Alexandros Tsakos
You are absolutely right. At least to the last part, I think that Alf Tore has some comments.
Alf Tore Hommedal
I was also going to, I'll come back to what you were saying, but the University Museum of Bergen has a collection that is very, that there are big interests in from abroad by other scholars. and I think of first of all the excavations, the Bryggen excavations, the town excavations from 1955 to 1968 first of all. And because of this huge material where you had the context documented as one of the primary, it was a methodical, how to say it in English, just a minute. The development of methods of excavating, doing this excavation, very important also international. And scholars are coming to look at this material. And the University Museum of Bergen have then this also large collection of runic inscriptions. It is exhibited at Bryggen's museum, but it's a part of the University Museum's collections. But all this material from Bryggen together, I think that is... We, in fact, don't understand here how important that was and still is.
Alexandros Tsakos
Very good points, Alf Tore. Thank you. Justin, short?
Justin Kroesen
Very short. I just wanted to add one impression that I had listening to everybody. I think many of us are working on church heritage. So the church is very central. I know that because I work with that every day. But it strikes me still, listening to the colleagues, how central the church is as a generator of culture and also material heritage and everything. And if you study the church, it is per definition an international affair. Because, of course, the church is local. You have the “Maria church”, you have “Austevoll”, and you have all these parishes. But they're all linked to this much larger structure which had its centre in Rome. And there is where Kirsi comes in. So church, medieval, because after the Reformation it all balkanizes in a way. It goes every direction. But in the Middle Ages, it is one and a single church that unites all of Europe, in a way. So our material here in Bergen has relevance for people in Spain, people in the Netherlands, etc. So it's per definition international.
Alexandros Tsakos
Very good point. And I like the idea that the Reformation is a balkalization. I did like it.
Justin Kroesen
A Balkanization. I shouldn't use that word.
Alexandros Tsakos
No, no. I don't know if it's politically correct, but it made the point.
Åslaug Ommundsen
Thank you. I would just like to follow up on the... the both... the spatiality and the concept of the church and the churches and the specific churches as well, because very often when we are working with fragments, like the missile fragments that we have at the university, we take one missile fragment and we compare it to another missile fragment and then we compare those to other missiles. But of course, in the context of the Middle Ages you wouldn't have all these missiles next to each other. You would have a missile on an altar over one of Justin's altar frontals. So to have at the university also this closeness of all the items that will constitute the space that these books were used in, it's a huge privilege, it's a huge luxury and it's worth remembering and it's worth being reminded that this is how we should see things, as connected to other items that were in the same space, in the same environment.
Alexandros Tsakos
Very good point. You wanted to say something, Justin, yes?
Justin Kroesen
because your material also has it has a visual aspect but it also has an acoustic aspect because you can read the text you can really revive we could go together and revive the century experience of a medieval mass we could do that together and Alf Tore could sing and Kirsi so it actually has an incredible potential here and I just listening to you I thought myself how many Norwegians of the 13th century seen 19 different frontals in their lifetime. I don't know. Maybe not so many. We are the most privileged of history. Do you have a reply here?
The focus must always be on the collection, on the objects, because the objects are in
Bergen and not anywhere else. But people come to Bergen, that's what they are being offered, and not some sort of digital application, which is extremely interesting, but could be accessed Globally, also globally. But I think just spontaneously thinking about reviving or recreating the experience of mass, sensorial experience of mass with the visual and the acoustic and everything. If we work together, we could work it in the new museum. And I think that is apt to bring, to take advantage of all the new, but not forgetting the old. That's, I think, what it's about. The exhibition, as you have seen it, before 2022, I think, of the church art was created in the mid-90s. But it constantly needs to be redone, so I'm not offended by you saying that. We should move on and improve.
Alexandros Tsakos
The idea of creating common spaces, either recreating a past space which we will share or creating common space of activities today, is something that, pending also on the benevolence of the Norwegian government, is being planned into the future of conservation in our university. It's the first time that we are planning to have a conservation lab where both the library and the museum will be housed together. And if conservation is the basis for preserving for posterity the items that we have either at the museum or at the library, this can also be a point of convergence and a way of seeing how do we find common solutions on our hill here. But that was a side comment. Alf Tore.
Alf Tore
Just also to this with the exhibitions, because we also have then this, we have then still a medieval archaeology exhibition at Bryggen’s Museum, and that is a good example on how the cooperation of museums, because the exhibition is at Bryggen’s Museum, a part of the By-Museum of Bergen, the City Museum of Bergen, but the collection, the items, as we are discussing here today, they are part of the University Museum, but in a cooperation, So the university museum items are exhibited in another institution, in fact. But that is, when I said that, it's just because of the... and we have to cooperate with museums and also the different disciplines of the medieval study.
Alexandros Tsakos
Peder, you are leading a group of scholars who share their lives between the faculties and the library. It's a microcosm of what's happening in the university between the museum and the library, or the faculties and the collections places. But you managed to keep it together. Do you have thoughts about what else is needed apart from the digital tools and this interdisciplinarity in terms of perhaps human management or ideas about how all this interdisciplinarity can be managed together? How do you do it?
Peder Gammeltoft
How I do it? Well, I don't think what I...
Alexandros Tsakos
You're doing plural, the language collections.
Peder Gammeltoft
How we do it.
Well, in many ways, we have different projects that we have to manage, and we have different assignments for this. The important thing is always to have the communication lines open and then talk about things and discuss things as soon as we have issues that we encounter. And I think we can use that also in a wider University of Bergen context, but especially in the international context, where we can certainly flaunt what we have, because we have really good collections here. And even though diplomas may be written in Norwegian, they are very international in their scope, and they have all sorts of contacts abroad, not just clerical, there are lots of trade. There's also marriages across countries and so on, and alliances being formed and broken and so on. That's what we see in these documents. And I think we could utilize that quite a lot more.
And you've alluded to one of my hobby horses, and that's the georeferencing of places, which is something that Norway has been lagging behind for almost decades now. Norway was very early out in digitizing core source material but didn't take it any further. It sort of stopped in the middle of the tooth a few years after the turn of the millennium, and then nothing happened. And I have this idea that the spatiality of documents can say something about the outlook of people at the time. because each manuscript has a spatial extent, a geographical fingerprint, so to speak, and it's unique for each and every diploma, but it says something about who writes what and who supports it.
We know where the one's backing, documents the witnesses, where they're from. If we are fortunate to have the same person issuing documents, we can start looking at what kind of witnesses are being used. Is it the same, or is it a group, or is it different from time to time, depending on the type of document or agreement that's being made through the document. And that's what I find interesting, and I haven't done much research on it, but I'm pretty sure that there will be new patterns emerging that we will not have realized until now. And that's something we could also work on.
And the clerical side has been focused on a lot. And that also occurs as a core point in medieval documents, because the parishes and the bishoprics are anchor points in which to give a setting, not a precise one, but one that gives you a reasonable idea of where things occur and that's what we're using today also in figuring out where are these places that are mentioned in these documents.
Alexandros Tsakos
So, we create a common space through the connections that we see in these documents and the connection that we try to establish together, we who represent the library propose it to be happening in the future with good communication.
Could that be a line to end our meeting today? Then if it is the case, I would like to thank you for coming and you especially all that had all these nice input to offer and I hope that this is just the beginning for creating something good on our hill here.
So, thank you to you participants.