Second Friday in Advent, December 14, A.D. 2023
Hallvard was an honest young man of Lier, a relative of St Olaf, late king of Norway. His father Vebjørn was a wealthy farmer, and he trusted his son to conduct his business and travel regularly to Gotland on his behalf to trade.
In Gotland, a distinguished man name Botvid once saw Hallvard and immediately sent his servants to fetch him. “I see a light in your face,” Botvid said. “Wonders stand near and will soon befall you.” Then Botvid hosted Hallvard and his companions for several days, and he bought from him all his stock.
The wonders that Botvid foresaw for the youth arrived that spring as he prepared to cross the hazy Drammensfjord. This time, he was traveling alone in a small boat. As he got ready to embark, a woman, her stomach round with pregnancy, hurried up to him, trembling and breathing heavily with exertion.
The woman, whose name Hallvard would never know, asked him to take her across the fjord. Hallvard assented, and she climbed in the stern. But as Hallvard cast off, he looked back at the shore and saw three armed men marching down from the line of trees. They launched a boat of their own and rapidly approached Hallvard’s little craft.
“Do you know these men?” Hallvard asked the woman.
“I know them,” she said. “They have come to kill me. They accuse me of theft, but I am innocent.”
At that moment, the men started shouting. They recognized Hallvard, for he was the image of his father. “Why are you, the son of an honorable man, taking up with thieves?” they shouted. “She broke down the door of our brother’s house and stole his property. Give her to us!”
Hallvard looked down at the woman in his boat. “Did anyone witness her crime? Then let her go before the law. For her sake, and the sake of the child in her womb, I will make restitution. But I will not let you in your anger do anything rash.”
One of the men, however, full of rage and devilry, put an arrow to his bow and shot it at the little boat. It struck Hallvard in the chest, killing him immediately. Then, seizing the boat, the men killed the woman as well, so that there would be no witness to their crime. They found a millstone on the shore, tied it to Hallvard’s neck, and cast his body into the fjord.
Days passed. Vebjørn and his wife grew deeply concerned that their son had not come back home, but no trace could be found of Hallvard on the earth. Then one evening, a blind old man who often ate at Vebjørn’s house and had loved Hallvard as a son, walked along the banks of the Drammensfjord with two of his grandsons by blood. They were traveling home, but the fjord was flooded with springmelt, and the road was washed out. Night fell, and the three lost their way in the silvery birch forests. The cold began to reach into the old man’s bones, and he began to fear for himself and his grandsons.
Suddenly, the boys looked up. “A light, grandfather!” they said. There, in the night sky, was a blazing torch, out over the water. Then they saw a strange and miraculous sign: a man’s body, floating alongside a millstone.
“It must be a holy man,” one of the grandsons said.
So the two grandsons, seeing a boat on the shore, set out and pulled the body into the boat. They brought it back to the edge of the land and heaved it on the beach.
“This is Hallvard Vebjørnsson,” they told their grandfather.
The old man raised his hands to heaven and began to weep. Suddenly, through the tears, his eyes were filled with the light of the miraculous fire, and his blindness was taken from him.
“Surely Hallvard was dear to God,” the old man said. They took the body to the house of Vebjørn, and his father and mother wept for him. But the old man told them of the signs by which they found the body.
Then Vebjørn said, “Shall I mourn my son as dead, when these miracles prove that he lives in the presence of the Lord?”
In the centuries that followed, Hallvard came to be honored throughout that part of Norway and nearby parts of Sweden. The city of Oslo took Hallvard as her patron saint. And so Hallvard, martyr for mercy, blazes still like a torch over the dark swell of history.
Read
It would behoove me to mention that many of my reading recommendations often derive from Jeffrey Bilbro’s weekly Water Dipper. I almost always find at least one article worth my time there, and usually several.
That includes this recommendation: a review of Peter Brown’s new book, Journeys of the Mind, on The Bulwark.
And from Plough, an experienced writer and teacher of prisoners counsels perseverance in good works in “Not Everything Can Be Fixed.”
Matthew Lee Anderson’s “Drunk Tears on a Barren Sea” is all about TikTok, the opacity of desire, and St. Augustine’s tears. A brilliant meditation.
Anglican art historian Michael Milliner recently wrote an engaging article on the Velankanni Marian shrine. It spans the problem of evil, Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and a personal encounter with Mary in India. If you only read one article I’ve recommended here, read this one.
Listen
Watch
Angel’s Egg is a classic of surreal animated beauty.