SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Voluspd IIS
measured. It was more natural to work out when
Doomsday would be than to calculate an eclipse of the
sun. Was it not most probable that these thousand
years referred to the Christian calendar? A heavy
shadow lies over the Christian nations in the tenth
century. The great pilgrimages around the year IOOO
and on through the eleventh century, which were the
main causes of the crusades, demonstrate the fear of men
for their salvation. Donative letters to churches in the
tenth century often begin with the words Mundi termino
adpropinquante. Abbo of Fleury tells how he heard
a sermon in his youth in Paris to the effect that Antichrist
would come soon after the year IOOO, and that not much
later Doomsday would occur." Ecclesiastical historians
have of late tried to discount this fear, admitting that it
did manifest itself, but no more than at many other
times. But it is extremely difficult to judge this in
retrospect. Everyone knows how Doomsday prophecies
can become epidemic even in this present age of
"universal education". An astronomer in Minnesota
rashly writes an article in a paper - and people in
Grindavik take to their beds in fright. Yet the power
and spread of the hysteria varies greatly according to the
basis of the prophecy. Many people will still recall the
terror that resulted from the appearance of the comet in
May 1910. But afterwards this is soon forgotten. No
one wants to remember it, least of all those who were
most frightened. When the end of the world did not
come in the year 1000, the expectation was transferred to
a thousand years after Christ's death, i.e. to A.D. 1033.
At that time a great flood of pilgrims poured into the Holy
Land, including some from Norway, for instance.??
This fear doubtless played a great part in the conversion
of the Norwegians after the battle of Stiklestad, and in
King Olafr's canonisation.
"Cf. R. S. Storrs, Bernard of Clairuaux (1892), 59.
77 F. Paasche, Kristendom og kvad (1914), 14.