Land surveying in early medieval Norway: a St. Olav pilgrimage path as a means of creating an integrated Christian society in a Viking landscape?

Abstract

Abstract The pilgrimage routes to St. Olav’s crypt offered new cultural landscape experiences. Primary attention to Christian dogma and art as discursive text leaves a ritual transformation from a Viking landscape unexplored. Pilgrim mental maps and belief may have been structured by land surveyed patterns of churches on the route. This article will map points of one route, Østerdalsleden. Among the six churches on today’s recreational route, four are replaced with the earliest in the community. A complex pattern of alignments integrating all six church locations are compared to patterns created by substituting random points within community test areas. The existing pattern does not randomly reproduce in 10 000 sets of eleven total route points, leaving the high probability that these churches were organised as a cultural concept of pilgrimage landscape.