Northern Lights on Southern Shores: Re-Writing St Oswald’s Life in Eighteenth-Century Friuli

Oswald, king of all Northumbria from 634 to 642, is the first and most popular of Anglo-Saxon royal saints, whose life of both military feats and Christian devotion is enthusiastically recounted in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica. Bede’s account represents the only early hagiographical tradition on Oswald and portrays the king as an all-around figure of Christian sanctity, encompassing the confessor’s missionary zeal and the resoluteness of the miles Christi, martyred at the hands of pagan enemies. The comprehensive kind of sanctity embodied by Oswald helps to explain the rapid expansion of his cult from a regional to a national dimension – as attested by the Old English life by Ælfric of Eynsham – to, in turn, a continental one, as it spread to Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland, Bohemia, and Austria. It was indeed through German-speaking immigrants from Tyrol that Oswald’s cult reached Friuli in the thirteenth-century, and eventually Veneto, with Sauris, a remote village in the Carnian Alps, in particular, being a thriving centre of pilgrimages as it boasted the possession of one of the saint’s thumbs. This essay focuses on the vita authored by the Friulan hagiographer G.P. della Stua in 1769, where he proposes an idiosyncratic interpretation of the raven episode, as well as an explanation of the presence of Oswald’s relic in Sauris that ideally joins the saint’s own time and place with Friuli, in that it claims that the relic was brought by a native of Carnia who served in Oswald’s army. By comparing key episodes in the original Bedan narrative and its vernacular reworking by Ælfric, on the one hand, and in the Italian vita, on the other, as well as by analysing the later elaborations of the latter, I hope to highlight the key steps in the appropriation of the legend of the Northumbrian saint in such a distant context. Thereby, I provide a case study of the processes by which Oswald ‘was absorbed into the devotional symbolism of the universal church’ [Clemoes 1984: 6].