One of the saints celebrated this month is St Anskar, ‘the apostle of the north’ — ‘the north’ in this case being Scandinavia, particularly Sweden and Denmark. His feast-day falls on February 3, the date of his death in 865 as Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, which at the time held archiepiscopal authority over large parts of northern Germany and the whole of Scandinavia, then still very much in the process of being converted to Christianity.

The period of Christian conversion and consolidation in Scandinavia lasted a long time. In each country the conversion ‘moment’ was (and is) considered to be the year when the leading men in each society decided to abandon their pagan practices and follow Christian rites only, although that doesn’t amount to a general conversion as we would understand it, nor does it indicate widespread ecclesiastical organisation. In Denmark this ‘moment’ happened in the 960s under King Harald Gormsson; in Norway it can be assigned to the reign of Olaf Tryggvason, 995-c.1000; in Iceland it occurred in 999/1000; and it happened about the same time in the Faroes and Greenland. Paganism persisted the longest in Sweden. While most of the ruling dynasty was being baptized from about 1000, the great pagan temple in Uppsala was still being used in the 1070s, and at around that time the Christian king was ousted by a pagan kinsman, who then ruled for a few years. So you may well wonder how Anskar, dying in 865, fits into this rather drawn out and somewhat haphazard narrative. Fortunately, we know quite a bit about him because of his responsibilities as Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, and because Rimbert, who succeeded him there, wrote an account of his life.

Anskar was educated at the great Benedictine monastery of Corbie in France, the land of his birth, and then went as a teacher to the monastery of Corvey in north-west Germany. When Harald Klak, king of Denmark, converted to Christianity in 826 at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Louis the Pious, Anskar was recommended by the Archbishop of Reims and the Abbot of Corvey to undertake missionary activity in Denmark. But King Harald was expelled soon after, so Anskar then travelled to Sweden where, with the Swedish king’s agreement, he founded the country’s first church. In 831 he was consecrated as the first bishop of Hamburg and in 832 was appointed by Pope Gregory IV to be in charge of the missions to Scandinavia and the Slavic lands. Anskar himself focussed on Denmark, entrusting the Swedish mission to a colleague. Louis the Pious granted the monastery of Turnhout in Flanders to be a source of revenue and a training centre for the Scandinavian mission, but it suffered a setback in 845 when Hamburg was plundered by Viking raiders. Two years later Anskar was appointed to the see of Bremen, which was then almost immediately united with Hamburg. This allowed him to renew his missionary efforts: he founded churches in  Schleswig, Ribe and Sigtuna, and continued to provide more general archiepiscopal and missional oversight across Scandinavia.

It was not until the twelfth century that the three main Scandinavian countries were granted archbishoprics of their own: Denmark in 1103/4 (Lund); Norway in 1152/3 (Trondheim); Sweden in1164 (Uppsala). From then on, with Scandinavia no longer owing allegiance to Hamburg-Bremen, the bishops of Orkney, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland came under the Archbishop of Trondheim. Anskar’s undoubted importance was in laying the foundations for a Christian Scandinavia early on in this long process..