Chapter 22 Enemies of Christ in the Far North: Tales of Saracens, Jews and the Saami in Norwegian Medieval Painting

Abstract

Within the limited corpus of Norwegian medieval painting, a surprisingly large number of images portray Muslims and Jews in the context of Christian narratives of opposing faiths. In this chapter, I wish to shed light on these images and discuss them in their cultural and religious context. In recent years, a number of scholarly articles have addressed the question of different ethnic and religious groups and their representation in medieval Scandinavia. I will argue that the portrayal of Muslims and Jews in this corpus reflects the role of these minorities within the storyworld of the Jerusalem code, not in physical reality, and that as literary figures they emphasise the medieval Jerusalem as, among other things, a city of the mind. To demonstrate this, I contrast the depictions of Jews and Muslims with representations of the Saami people of Scandinavia, a minority that must have had a palpable presence in Nordic society, but that is largely invisible in medieval Norwegian storyworlds.