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Biography

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Ansgar (also Anskar or Anscharius), later called the Apostle of the North, was born in 801 at Amiens in Picardy, in the Frankish realm, of a noble family. As a child he was given as an oblate to the Benedictine abbey of Corbie, where he was educated and made his monastic profession. Visions reported in later tradition, together with the religious climate of Corbie after the death of Charlemagne, turned him toward missionary work. When the daughter house of Corvey (New Corbie) was established in Saxony, he was sent there in the early 820s as a teacher and preacher among the recently subdued Saxons, gaining a reputation for learning and austerity.

In 826 the exiled Danish king Harald Klak was baptized at Mainz in the presence of the emperor Louis the Pious and asked for missionaries to accompany his return. Ansgar was chosen and went with Harald to Denmark, where he opened a small school and began evangelization, though political unrest soon limited what could be achieved. In 829 Swedish envoys at the imperial court requested Christian teachers. Ansgar traveled with the monk Witmar to the trading town of Birka on Lake Mälaren. Received by King Björn, he converted the influential royal counsellor Herigar and obtained leave to build a church, the first organized Christian foothold in Sweden.

Louis the Pious erected an archbishopric at Hamburg in 831 as a base for the northern missions, and Ansgar was consecrated its first archbishop. Pope Gregory IV granted him the pallium and named him papal legate for the Scandinavian and neighboring Slavic peoples. In 845 a Viking raid destroyed Hamburg, scattering the community and its library. After a period of hardship the see was united with Bremen, and Ansgar continued from there as archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen. He later secured from the Danish king Horik permission to preach and to build a church at Hedeby (Schleswig), and he returned to Sweden to restore the mission at Birka after a pagan reaction.

Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts, above all the Vita Anskarii written by his successor Rimbert, present him as an austere monk-bishop, given to prayer, fasting, and the ransoming of captives, who accepted repeated setbacks without abandoning the northern field. The churches he planted remained fragile and would have to be refounded in later centuries, yet they established the first lasting Latin-Christian presence in Denmark and Sweden.

Ansgar died at Bremen on 3 February 865 and was buried in the cathedral there. He was venerated as a saint from an early date, without a later formal papal canonization of the medieval type. His feast is kept on 3 February in the Catholic Church and in several Lutheran calendars. He is honored as patron of Denmark, Sweden, Scandinavia, and the city of Hamburg.

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