KATHERINE WELCH

Stave Churches: Evidence of Syncretism as an Aid of Christianization

After the immigration of Anglo-Saxons from Southern Scandinavia and Northern Germany to England beginning in the early fifth century, they had many interactions with Scandinavians over the following centuries, facilitated by Viking raids and religious missions. In this period (the ninth to twelfth centuries), Christianity was at a high point and many of the Norse rulers would align themselves with the most powerful ruling religion in order to bolster their standings within the European arena. This increased interaction between cultures paved the way for the exchange of style and ideas which lead to this topic of this paper: stave churches as physical methods of the religious conversion of Scandinavia. Stave churches, wooden churches of medieval Nordic origin, are places built for the intention of Christian worship. They present imagery that is often a very clear marker of hybridization, the blending of thoughts and images, as a means of connecting ideas and making sense of the late ninth-century development of Christianization. This paper will argue that through looking at interactions between native and foreign populations around Scandinavia (the area including modern Norway, Denmark, and Sweden), examining Scandinavian-influenced styles found in Britain made by the Anglo-Saxons, and analyzing imagery found on architecture within three different stave churches (Urnes, Borgund, and Heddal), the examples of hybridization in imagery and architecture found in stave churches functioned as a form of translating newer Christian thought to native Norse people in order to make it more understandable. Additionally, the paper asserts that it was not just the native Norsemen that actively used this imagery, but also the Anglo-Saxons. In looking at the interactions between these two groups of people and seeing how the institutionalized process of conversion was reflected within the iconography of these stave churches, this paper helps to understand how these images and buildings were used to the benefit of the ruling powers to align themselves and their subsequent kingdoms with the ultimate powers at the time.