Painted vault of a snug Norwegian stave church
There is something very appealing about Norway’s stave churches – with their lofty steep-roofed, deep-eaved, pagoda-like silhouettes and internal wooden snugness, like the inside of a sailing ship. They are different from the cool stone structures of our own medieval parishes.
The name stave church merely renders the Norwegian stavkirke. One thousand years ago it was natural to build in wood there, just as in Old English timber simply meant a building, being related to the German Zimmer and the Latin domus.
A new study of screens and rood lofts in parish churches in Scandinavia before 1300 has been published by Ebbe Nyborg of the National Museum of Denmark, in The Art and Science of the Church Screen in Medieval Europe.
Dr Nyborg brings out the connections between Norwegian stave churches and their European models, particularly English ones. The small stave churches had low and narrow arches between the nave and chancel. The wall on each side of the chancel arch could be pierced with open arcading. This opening up of the chancel to the view of people in the nave has been linked to the growth of Eucharistic devotion in the 13th century, and to a desire to seeing transubstantiated bread and wine as the priest elevated the elements at the consecration during Mass.
In English churches, screens served not so much to hide ceremonies in the chancel as to mark off the sacred space while allowing the congregation to see the priest at work at the altar.
Dr Nyborg speaks of “squints” or open arcading cut into the wooden walls of a Norwegian church each side of the chancel arch. He likens it to the early screen at Stanton Harcourt, where the lower, solid part is pierced with quatrefoil openings at eye level for kneeling worshippers.
A puzzling example of such development is at the stave church of Torpo, a village of 400 people on the national road 7. In the early 13th century, in the middle of this church was a narrow chancel arch flanked by an altar each side. Later in the century an exuberant painted canopy was built, at which tourists marvel today.
On the underside of this wooden barrel vault is an image of Christ in majesty surrounded by symbols of the evangelists and saints (pictured below). Such a canopy, known as a ciborium, was conventionally built over an altar. Yet it stands here before the entrance into the chancel, in which the high altar would have been. (At Torpo the chancel was demolished in 1880.)
There must have ben a rood loft here, a first-floor chapel, allowing room beneath to walk into the chancel. The loft would have had an altar above which would have hung Christ on the cross or “rood”, flanked by Mary and St John.
At Torpo is an ancient piece of carved timber, long used as a bench-back. It is a row of seven or eight little wooden arches, carved with runes saying: “Torolf made this church.” It could have found a place, facing the congregation, as the railing at the front of the rood loft. Something similar, with important differences, can be seen at the stone church at Compton, Surrey, with its double-level chancel. Connections between 13th-century rural Norway and Christian Europe were closer than we might have
assumed.