A Flawed Bishop, a Favorite Teacher: Lárentíus saga

Sometime in the second half of the fourteenth century, somewhere on the cathedral estate of Hólar in northern Iceland, an elderly priest began writing a biography of his mentor and teacher, Lárentíus Kálfsson. The priest, Einarr Hafliðason, had spent the decades since his mentor’s death rising through the ranks; he would spend the second half of his life continually holding the highest clerical offices in Iceland. Though he never became bishop himself, Einarr knew what it meant to be a good bishop: he believed in the importance of good education, legal knowledge, frugal management, and pious living. But while Lárentíus had been a good bishop, his biographer knew very well that he was not a great one.

Lárentíus saga byskups (The Saga of Bishop Laurentius) is a Benedictine underdog story.  With his family impoverished by the death of his father and great-uncle, Lárentíus’s fate was rescued through the charity of a bishop, and he was able to gain an advanced education at the cathedral school at Hólar. There, Lárentíus would excel; he was even sometimes charged with teaching the other students, while the schoolmaster and the bishop were busy drinking together. Indeed, the saga reminds us several times of the importance of drinking for cathedral culture, and that there was a clear and important distinction between sinful drunkenness and pious toasts to saints. Usually.

Lárentíus is serious, inflexible, arrogant, and proud, and in general a rather bad politician. He feels betrayed by his first patron, Bishop Jörundr of Hólar, and goes to Norway looking for better ones. While he finds an archbishop in need of his loyal service (ironically, also named Jörundr), he is tasked with excommunicating the canons of the cathedral, whom the archbishop was feuding with. And so poor Lárentíus ended up with powerful enemies on both sides of the North Atlantic. The canons torment him—sending servants to chase him, attack him, even steal his candles while he is attempting to perform a funeral service. When Lárentíus returns to Iceland, imbued with the authority of a formal representative of the archbishop, he consistently fails to exercise that authority: at one point he is even physically assaulted by a group of Benedictine monks for attempting to punish them for an improper burial. Years later, when he has lost all rank and authority and is working as a teacher among those same Benedictines, he is asked for legal advice by a powerful priest, and gives his opinion so tactlessly that he is forced to move to a different monastery.

Yet, somehow, he manages to become bishop of Hólar diocese in 1324—the reader has the strange impression that Einarr has been trying to cover up what an effective social network Lárentíus was actually putting together during the story of all his failures. Yet still his trials are not over: much of his time as bishop is taken up with a long dispute with a local house of Augustinian canons, Möðruvellir, which Lárentíus claims he should take over because of their inability to be financially responsible and manage their resources well. And while Lárentíus is ultimately successful, this dispute is full of setbacks, including being accused of stealing legal documents and assaulting the representative of another bishop. And when the dispute ends in his favor, even Einarr Hafliðason admits that the legal basis for Lárentíus’ case was not exactly concrete.

Einarr seemed to want to write a saga with a sense of humor, and his mentor clearly had a taste for witty mockery and pranks. The saga is not above physical humor, either: at one point, it describes an alchemist setting up an explosion, some sort of gunpowder experiment, at the Norwegian court to impress the king, and Einarr seems to relish in describing the audience getting knocked over flat. Indeed, several memorable moments in the saga have the distinct flavor of anecdotes Einarr had been told by his old mentor, stories they laughed over together, probably while enjoying some fresh batches of cathedral-brewed ale.

While the saga is full of idealized portrayals, hyperbole, and a few semi-miraculous episodes, it is also a unique and surprisingly realistic portrayal of religious life and the Icelandic church as the society entered the late medieval world. However, it is valuable not only to ecclesiastical historians, but to all scholars of Iceland and Norway, as it is the only narrative source apart from annals that describes either country during the fourteenth century. At the same time, it is by far the most entertaining of the Icelandic bishop’s sagas, a genre known primarily for rather dry hagiography. Lárentíus is not a saint: he is a teacher, beloved by his friends and students for his knowledge, poetry, patronage, and even for his great many flaws.

My translation of the saga, the first English version since Oliver Elton’s rather inaccessible 1890 text, and the first ever with a full scholarly apparatus, will be published fully open access with Leeds Medieval Studies in 2025.