“Reading and Understanding”: The Miracles in Þorvalds þáttr ens víðfǫrla

We live in an age where the miraculous is more likely to invite skepticism than to confirm belief. Although the Roman Catholic Church affirms the continued occurrence of miracles and maintains their apologetic function as evidence for the “reasonableness” of faith, most philosophers question that miracles can be used to justify religious belief, while acknowledging the theoretical possibility that they may happen.¹ David Hume’s essay from 1798, On Miracles, in which he attacks the value of miracles as evidence for God’s existence, has had an enduring impact on our thinking: miracles, he claims, “are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations” and show “the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvellous.”² While miracles seem appropriate within the conventions of particular literary genres, such as hagiography, most of us would now agree that they are out of place in historical narrative and feel uncomfortable with medieval texts like Bede’s Ecclesiastical History that so obviously work on different premises from ours. Even within the study of hagiography, the idea that miracles belong to the popular imagination, rather than to the sophisticated thinker, is widespread: in his Legends of the Saints, Hippolyte Delehaye condemns “people’s blind attraction towards what is marvellous, the supernatural made concrete” and laments that “the soul’s mysterious commerce with God has to be translated into concrete effects if it is to make any impression on the people’s mind.”³ Medieval hagiographers like Gregory of Tours and James of Voragine, he complains, “simply catered for popular taste”: they privileged “all that is marvellous and appealing to the senses” at the cost of authenticity.⁴

These sorts of attitudes have dominated critical thinking about the Old Icelandic narratives of conversion: the complete lack of miracles in Ari Þorgilsson’s Íslendingabók is taken as tribute to Ari’s critical capacities as a historian, while later accounts of conversion that abound in the marvellous—principally Kristni saga and the kristni þættir in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta—are seen as untrustworthy. Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson, for example, attacks Kristni saga as “uncritical history writing in the service of church and religion,” and he condemns Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta as “every inch as much a religious tract as Kristni saga.”⁵ Dag Strömbäck is more emphatic in his disapproval of Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar en mesta: “Of this monument of bombast and rhetoric I shall say only that much of its material has been adopted by modern authors in what otherwise purport to be serious and scholarly accounts of the conversion.”⁶

There are two points to be made about this. The first is that the presence or absence of miracles in a medieval text cannot be a reliable marker of whether its aim is historical accuracy, since miracles, when authenticated by qualified witnesses, were accepted as historical events in the Middle Ages. The miraculous was, for the medieval Christian, an integral part of everyday life: although some theologians, like Pope Gregory the Great, struggled with how contemporary miracles related to Biblical miracles, no one doubted that miracles actually happened.⁷ It may seem obvious to us that medieval hagiographers like Gregory the Great or Bede are intentionally borrowing miracle stories from other works or enhancing their meagre collection of “facts” with literary parables, but some studies suggest that not all hagiographers from this early period routinely indulged in “pious frauds.”⁸ Although appeals to eyewitnesses are sometimes literary inventions, this is by no means always the case, and witnesses who are high-ranking figures of their own time should be taken seriously. It is worth noting, then, when named informants are used to support miracles in the Old Icelandic narratives, especially when such men can be identified from elsewhere. One miraculous incident in Þorvalds þáttr ens víðfǫrla, for example, is carefully traced back through three stages of transmission: “Þenna atburð segir Gunnlaugr munkr at hann heyrði segja sannorðan mann, Glúm Þorgilsson, en Glúmr hafði numit at þeim manni er Arn...