Alena

Saint Alena, also known as Alène or Alina of Forest, is a Christian virgin martyr associated with Brabant in the seventh century. Traditional accounts place her birth at Dilbeek, west of Brussels in what is now Belgium, then part of the Frankish realm. The year of her birth is not recorded. Hagiographical legend describes her as the daughter of a pagan chieftain or local magnate named Levold (the name appears in varying forms in later texts). In a period when Christianity had taken root in towns and among elites of the Frankish kingdoms but had not yet fully displaced older cults in the countryside of the Low Countries, Alena is said to have come into contact with the Christian faith and to have been baptized in secret, concealing her conversion from her family.

According to the legend, she regularly left her father's house in order to hear Mass at a chapel in Forest (Vorst), not far from Dilbeek. Her repeated absences eventually betrayed her. Retainers or foresters in her father's service waylaid her on the path to church. In the violence that followed, her arm was torn from her body, and she died of the injury. Devotional tradition assigns her death to about the year 640. Stories of the subsequent miraculous finding of the severed arm, and of healings connected with it, belong to the later cult. A chapel rose on a site identified with her martyrdom, and her tomb became a focus of local pilgrimage.

No contemporary seventh-century source confirms these events. As with many early medieval saints of the southern Low Countries, Alena's written legend was shaped long after the time in which she is supposed to have lived, and the narrative of the torn arm and the pagan household has the character of pious folklore rather than recoverable biography. What can be said with more confidence is that a cult of Saint Alena took hold in Forest. In the early twelfth century a Benedictine nunnery, Forest Abbey, was founded there; it became the principal guardian of her relics and the centre of her liturgical commemoration. The abbey church, dedicated to Saint Denis, and a nearby chapel of Saint Alena preserved her memory through the Middle Ages. Relics associated with her, including the famous arm, were venerated at Forest. The former abbey precinct lies in the present-day Brussels municipality of Forest (Vorst).

Alena is honoured as a virgin martyr and is not recorded as having married or had children. She belonged to no religious order. Her feast is celebrated on 18 June. She is the patron saint of Forest (Vorst) and has traditionally been invoked against eye diseases and toothache. She was not the object of a formal canonization by a pope of the later medieval or Tridentine period; her cult is of the ancient, pre-congregation type, resting on local veneration and episcopal recognition rather than a Roman process. In art she is sometimes represented as a noble maiden, occasionally crowned in allusion to the princely rank given her by the legend, and she may be shown holding or accompanied by her severed arm. Devotion to her remains strongest in and around Brussels and Dilbeek, where churches, a chapel, and local custom keep her name.