Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen & Apostle of the North
February 3 · d. 865
also known as Ansgar, Oscar
Anskar (c. 801 to 865), a Frankish monk of Corbie and Corvey, was sent north in 826 with the exiled Danish king Harald Klak and spent the rest of his life on the pagan frontier: two journeys to Birka in Sweden, thirty-four years as bishop of Hamburg and then Bremen, a cathedral burned by a Danish fleet in 845, and a mission repeatedly rebuilt. He is called the Apostle of the North.
When Anskar was about five years old his mother died, and the boy saw her, he said afterwards, in the company of the Virgin. Some years later his father gave him to the monastery at Corbie in Picardy, and there the child grew into a monk and a schoolmaster. He would have been a schoolmaster all his life. Instead, one Pentecost, in a vision he later dictated in his own words, he was brought before an unending light, and out of the light a voice said to him: "Go and return to Me crowned with martyrdom."
Hold that promise in your hand while you hear the rest, because nothing about the rest looks like it.
In 826 a Danish king in exile, Harald Klak, was baptized at Mainz with the emperor Louis the Pious standing sponsor, and the emperor wanted priests to go home with him. Anskar was asked whether he was willing to go to pagan nations. He answered, "I desire, with all my strength, that the opportunity for going may be granted to me, and that no one may be able to divert me from this design." He went with a companion, Autbert, and they gathered a school of boys, some of them bought out of slavery. Within a year Harald was driven out again, and the mission went down with him. Autbert sickened and was carried back to Corvey and died there at Eastertide.
Then Swedish envoys came asking for teachers, and Anskar set out again in 829, this time with the monk Witmar. Pirates took their ship, their gifts and their books, and they finished the journey on foot. At Birka on Lake Mälaren the king's chief counsellor, Herigar, was converted and built a church on his own land, the first in Sweden.
He was made bishop of the new see at Hamburg. In 845 a Danish fleet under Horik burned it: the church, the monastery, the Bible the emperor himself had given him, beautifully copied, and many other books besides. Everything he had built since the day he became a bishop was gone in an afternoon. Rimbert, who knew him, says that by none of it was he distressed, nor did he sin with his lips, and that he said over and over the words of Job: "The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; the Lord's will has been done. Blessed be the name of the Lord." That same year a mob at Birka stripped Bishop Gautbert and drove him out, and killed his nephew Nithard with the sword.
He went back. In 853, in his fifties, he saw in a vision the abbot Adalhard of Corbie, dead nearly thirty years, commissioning him again out of the words of Isaiah, and he sailed for Sweden a second time. There the whole future of the mission was put to the assembly at Birka, which had been urged instead to enrol its dead king Eric among the gods. Anskar did not demand that their way of deciding be set aside. He prayed, and they cast lots, and the lot fell favourably, and the assembly gave its own reason for allowing him to stay: "inasmuch as we cannot be sure that our gods will be favourably disposed, it is good for us to have the help of this God."
All the while, and nobody knew it, he was writing prayers. One short prayer for each of the hundred and fifty psalms, sung quietly to himself for years, told to no one. Near the end a friend got them out of him only after much entreaty, wrote them down, and showed them to nobody until he was dead. People came from far outside his diocese to be healed by his prayers, and he would rather it had been kept quiet. When miracles were spoken of in front of him he said to a friend that were he worthy of such a favour from God, he would ask for one miracle only: that by His grace He would make of him a good man.
He died at Bremen in February 865, after four months and more of dysentery, in his bed, in the sixty-fourth year of his age. No martyrdom. He said three verses over and over, "According to Thy mercy think thou upon me," and "God be merciful to me a sinner," and "Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit," and when he could no longer draw breath enough to say them he told one of the brothers to go on saying them for him. So the words did not stop. His eyes were on heaven, and the one thing he had asked for was the one thing nobody can see from outside, and the voice in the light had never said when.
You will probably not be told how your work turns out. Anskar was promised a martyr's crown and given dysentery; he was sent to convert the North and watched his cathedral burn, his fellow bishop driven out, his converts fall away, and he went back anyway, twice, and died before any of it took. What he asked for, when people wanted miracles from him, was that God would make him a good man. That is a petition you can make without knowing anything about outcomes, and it is the only one in his life that did not depend on kings, fleets, or a lot falling the right way. What are you waiting to see completed before you will call your own obedience worthwhile?
Almost everything known about Anskar comes from a single book: the Vita Anskarii, written between 865 and 876 (the narrower window 869 to 876 rests on Louis the German still being alive) by Rimbert, who was Anskar's disciple, travelled with him, was in the room when he died, and succeeded him in the see. That proximity is the great strength of the record and its great complication. Rimbert wrote hagiography with a declared purpose and an institutional one, partly to keep flagging Frankish support attached to a northern mission that looked from the outside like it was failing. Its chronology is subordinate to its theology, and dates inside it are approximate unless something corroborates them. What corroborates it, sparsely, is Frankish court annals: the Royal Frankish Annals and the Astronomer's Vita Hludowici independently place Harald Klak's 826 baptism at Mainz, while the Annales Xantenses alone sets the surrounding assembly at Ingelheim and supplies the figure of more than four hundred baptized. The 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia supplies later detail (Turholt, the Life of Willehad, the Horik material) and also supplies errors; its figure of six hundred vessels in the 845 fleet is its own, not Rimbert's, who gives no count at all.
The largest live dispute concerns the title our own summaries lead with. German scholarship now widely holds that the claim Anskar was an archbishop was imposed on the record after his death by forged privileges, and that Anskar was a missionary bishop. Eric Knibbs argued this at length in 2011; Kölzer and Drögereit concur; Janson and Pangerl dissent, Janson dating an archiepiscopal foundation to 15 May 834. The dispute reaches the text itself. The standard German repertorium, geschichtsquellen.de, says of the late-eleventh-century b) recension of the Vita that it falsified the text in favour of the archbishopric's claims, and a Vienna project reports that b) also softened a martyrdom motif present in the earlier a) recension. Recension a) is the text to prefer, and every use of "archbishop" here should be read as contested.
The manuscript record is otherwise unusually good. At least ten witnesses survive in two recensions, the earliest being Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, HB XIV 7, a ninth-century copy that Bernhard Bischoff judged plausibly made at Corvey shortly after 865, perhaps under Rimbert's own supervision: a gap of years, not centuries, between composition and surviving copy. Two further witnesses, at Kiel and at Heiligenkreuz, were identified only in the last decade, and a new critical edition with facing English was reported in progress in 2024.
The dates are softer than they look. The birth year 801 is arithmetic from Rimbert's statement that Anskar died in the sixty-fourth year of his age; Robinson's own footnote says the date of birth is unknown, and Klapheck has argued for 796 or a little earlier. The death date is worse: Rimbert gives no calendar date at all, and four exist in later notices, 2 February (Catholic Encyclopedia on Rimbert), 3 February (Robinson, the modern calendars, and the feast), 4 February (the , known here through Robinson's footnote), and 5 February (Catholic Encyclopedia on Anskar). Three February is the best attested and the one that fixes the observance. The union of Hamburg and Bremen is a sequence rather than a contest: a synod at Mainz in October 847 attached Hamburg to the vacant see of Bremen, Robinson places Anskar's accession at Bremen in 849, the Catholic Encyclopedia gives 857 for papal confirmation and the German and English references give 864 and Pope Nicholas I, over resistance from Cologne. That harmonization has not been checked against any papal act, and the letter of Nicholas I reproduced in the is exactly the kind of document the forgery argument targets.
The devotion to Anskar is pre-congregation in the fullest sense: local acclamation and diocesan memory, centuries before Rome had any machinery for adjudicating sanctity. Tradition credits Pope Nicholas I with declaring him holy around 867, and the German reference that reports this flags it as tradition, noting that the first formal papal canonization was Ulrich of Augsburg in 993. His relics are distributed among several custodians without the usual rival claims: an ulna beneath the high altar of the Kleiner Michel in Hamburg since 1865, the millennium of his death; a skull reliquary of about 1875 at the former abbey of Corvey; and a relic examined for authenticity at Hildesheim in 1982 and transferred to Hamburg's Catholic cathedral on permanent loan in 2010, where it is kept in the south side aisle. Bremen keeps a separate commemoration of the translation of his remains on 9 September, though nothing could be found about the event behind the day.
He is kept on 3 February by Rome (a memorial, and a high feast in the Archdiocese of Hamburg), by the Church of England as a Lesser Festival, and by the Episcopal Church and the ELCA; the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified him in 1952 and the Moscow Patriarchate added him in 2023. The best evidence that the observance is alive is an annual ecumenical vespers at St Petri in Hamburg every 3 February since 1964, organized since 2010 by the city's working group of Christian churches. Artists give him no fixed emblem; where a convention exists he wears an archbishop's vestments and holds a small church in his hand, the generic sign of a founder-bishop, and there appears to be no surviving medieval statuary of him at all. What stands instead is nineteenth-century: Engelbert Peiffer's 1883 statue on the Trostbrücke in Hamburg, a stone cross raised on Borgberget at Birka in 1834 for the millennium of his arrival, and, from 2006, Jörg Plickat's figure on the Brooksbrücke above the Speicherstadt.
Everything quoted above comes from one book, and the reader who wants Anskar in his own century should start there. Rimbert's Vita Anskarii is edited by Georg Waitz in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Scriptores rerum Germanicarum 55, Hannover, 1884), which supplies the chapter numbering used here; C. F. Dahlmann's earlier edition (MGH SS 2, 1829) is the text behind the only complete English rendering, Charles H. Robinson's Anskar, the Apostle of the North, 801-865 (London: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1921), whose footnotes are considerably more careful than its introduction. Werner Trillmich's German translation with facing Latin, in Quellen des 9. und 11. Jahrhunderts zur Geschichte der Hamburgischen Kirche und des Reiches (Darmstadt, 1961; 7th ed. 2000), is the standard modern edition; a new critical edition covering the full stemma, with facing English, was reported in progress in 2024. Quotations in the Story and History are Robinson's English, corrected against Waitz's Latin. The vision and the promise of martyrdom are at chapter III, which is the one passage Rimbert flags as reproducing Anskar's own dictated words; the consent to go at chapter VII; Job at the burning of Hamburg at chapter XVI, where the "bible" that burned is the emperor's gift Bible, not a library; the expulsion of Gautbert and the killing of Nithard at chapter XVII; the vision of Adalhard at chapter XXV; the Birka assembly and the casting of lots at chapters XXVI and XXVII; the Pigmenta and their concealment at chapter XXXV; the one miracle he would ask for at chapter XXXIX, where a philological note records that Kruse and Dreves disputed whether the words deny miracles or only deflect the credit; and the deathbed at chapter XLI. The Pigmenta themselves were first edited by J. M. Lappenberg (Hamburg, 1844) and printed by G. H. Klippel in Lebensbeschreibung des Erzbischofs Ansgar, kritisch bearbeitet (1845), Beilage 11, pp. 230 to 250, the prayer for Psalm 1 at p. 231. On the manuscripts and the recensions, see the Repertorium Geschichtsquellen des deutschen Mittelalters, no. 4204, and Paul Gazzoli's 2014 report of the Kiel witness. On the disputed archbishopric, Eric Knibbs, Ansgar, Rimbert, and the Forged Foundations of Hamburg-Bremen (Ashgate, 2011).
Anskar left no treatise, letter or sermon, but he did leave one work. The Pigmenta, a short prayer for each of the 150 psalms, survives: lost for centuries, edited at Hamburg by Lappenberg in 1844, and printed by Klippel the following year. The attribution rests finally on Rimbert's word that they are Anskar's, which is about as strong as ninth-century attribution gets and is still a chain with one link.
Of the objections a modern reader will raise, the sharpest is not about miracles but about results. Denmark and Sweden were not durably Christianized in his lifetime or in the generation after; the work stalls between Rimbert's death in 888 and Harald Bluetooth's conversion roughly a century later. But the honest form of that observation is the reverse of an exposure. Rimbert himself records the collapses without concealing them: Hamburg burned, Gautbert expelled, Nithard killed, converts relapsing. It is later memory, not the primary source, that reads thirty-nine years of setbacks as a foundation.
British (Received Pronunciation): Anskar /ˈænskɑːr/; Ansgar /ˈænsɡɑːr/
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Anskar to preach the Gospel to the people of Scandinavia: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.