The cult of Orkney’s patron saint – St Magnus – in Caithness is the subject of a new paper by Dr Sarah Jane Gibbon and Dr James Moore in a special issue of the Apardjón Journal for Scandinavian Studies.
In the paper – ‘He fared to Caithness, and was there worthily received of all’: Visualising the Impact of the Cult of St Magnus in Caithness – Sarah Jane and James present and analyse evidence for the cult in the context of the earldoms of Caithness and Orkney in the 12th and 13th centuries.
By visualising the evidence for the cult, they show differences in ways it is manifest and, by extension, consider how Magnus may have been venerated, in the three ecclesiastically, politically, and familially linked communities of Orkney, Shetland, and Caithness.
They consider the wider political and ecclesiastical concerns of the area at the time and their impact upon the spread of the cult of St Magnus in the Northern earldoms.
This research uses a similar methodology to their previous work mapping the cult of St Magnus in Orkney, published in 2019 and accessible here, and draws on Barbara E. Crawford’s historical research, combined with historical, archaeological and folkloric evidence of not only the cult of St Magnus but also Orkney bishopric and Earldom lands in Caithness.
Connections and the Church in Late Norse Scotland is the end result of an online conference in 2022, hosted by the University of Nottingham and co-organised by the guest editors Caitlin Ellis and Tom Fairfax. The conference was themed around the events retold in the Old Norse þáttr (story) Brenna Adams Byskups (The Burning of Bishop Adam), which recounts the murder of Bishop Adam of Caithness.
Each of the articles within this publication discusses and analyses the various political and social events of the time, which either directly or indirectly led to the murder of a Catholic bishop by his own congregation.
The full publication is available to download here.
