Pilgrimage to the “Vi” Center of Bulverket's Water Square: Mapping the Location and Orientation of Gotland Churches

Introduction

The work in this chapter began as part of a larger study of early medieval stone church orientations in three areas of Scandinavia: Trondheimsfjord Norway, Storsjön Sweden, and the northern third of the island of Gotland. Theoretically, the widely diverse orientations within each region did not follow any church dictate or imposing site condition but were derived from design logic using azimuths to other landscape points, either church or natural feature in the region. This meant that these folk cultures knew of and practiced land surveying at scales well beyond individual farms. These larger scale ideas somewhat naturally followed good evidence of a penchant for formal geometry at scales of folk dwellings and farm layout.

A cardinally offset pattern of right-angle orientations was found in 1100’s layouts of Norwegian farms studied in the author’s dissertation (1981). In a wider area of Scandinavia, Lindström’s documentation of grave orientations (1997, 2005), found a “vinkelrätt” (right angle) concept of larger landscape “system” predictably off cardinal over ten degrees. Symbolically in the Norwegian folk tun (cluster of farm buildings), the stue orientated east-west, positioned west of the loft, orientated opposite north-south. The western stue domain expressed “male” and associated with cooperative or collective relationships between individual farmers. The loft, symbolically opposed in position and orientation meant “female”, and linked with the competitive element in Norse society, i.e. preservation of fertility and family, and of at times a warrior group (the big hov longhouses on larger farms may have also been oriented an offset north-south, e.g. at Hofstadir on Iceland, (Olsen 1966, 183).

The symbolism of the loft/hov’s axis between humans (south) and spirits (north) not only exists in its south facing portal but receives greater embellishment as the south facing primary dwelling portal of the stue with its central fire as axis mundi and focal point of most important ritual. This symbolic pattern may have determined the placement of the principal portal on the south walls of many of the fylke stone churches around Trondheimsfjord. On Gotland, as well, many principal entrances were located on the south walls of churches, corresponding perhaps to symbolic understandings of spiritual flow up to some landscape point as North.

The two ritual domains on the farm allowed a latent family-based territory to integrate culturally, relatively peacefully with valley or fjord groups of farmers. The modified ritual idea from Bourdieu has been discussed earlier (Doxtater 1990); one kind of larger scale, integrative ritual expresses “occupation” and the other “union”. The two calendrical rituals of Jul and Midsommar have opposite meanings. At winter solstice or Jul, the gods come out of the mountains occupying the symbolic center of the farm, the stue, even as expressed in much later bourgeois Sweden in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander: the visiting gods subordinate the family and most important architectural setting. At Midsommar, farm families reverse this ritual movement, journeying to some natural place and dancing around a wooden stake as cosmic center icon: the individualities of family moderate in a unification with spirits, i.e. the community becomes the gods.

While the farm stue, tun and opposed summer/winter rituals in the 1100’s clearly worked from Viking concepts of landscape and dwelling, these folk were Christianizing to an extent where large farmers built small wooden stave churches nearby. But in Norway at least, it wasn’t until the Reformation that the principal rituals of marriage, birth and death were moved from stue to church (Doxtater 1990). Thus, the Norse landscape at the time of the pilgrimages was still largely pagan, even though folk were beginning to call themselves Christian, using Biblical text and art less ritually than discursively in limited space of church interiors.