Bishop Osmund: A Missionary to Sweden in the Late Viking Age

Bishop Osmund: A Missionary to Sweden in the Late Viking Age

By Janet Fairweather

Bishop Osmund, court-bishop to Edmund the Old, King of Sweden, in the mid-eleventh century, was probably born in England and certainly ended his life there as a monk of Ely, having previously spent time at the court of Edward the Confessor. He has been the subject of much academic controversy because the two Latin historical sources that refer to him differ widely in their estimates of the character. he was well-thought of by the monks of Ely, whereas Adam of Breman castigated him as an acephalous vagabond, given to promulgating unsound doctrine.

Dr Janet Fairweather, a Latinist from the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge University, who in 2005 published the first ever translation of Ely's monastic chronicle, the Liber Eliensis, was commissioned in 2008 by Skara Stiftshistoriska Sallskap to re-examine the evidence about Osmund's career specifically from an English point of view. Inevitably, however, his case needs also to be considered in a European perspective, given that he was educated in Bremen, worked in Scandinavia and made a journey to rom, returning by a circuitous route which took him to Poland for his consecration as bishop.

This attempt to set Osmund's career as a Christian missionary in context had involved a radical reassessment of the evidence, written and material, for the political and religious history of late Viking-Age Scandinavia. It has also demanded investigation of the chaotic stat of the papacy and of Poland in he period 1030-1050. the final chapter brings Osmund of England for a not entirely peaceful retirement in the period when the Abbey of Ely became the headquarters of Hereward's resistance to William the Conqueror.