Guðmundur Arason

Guðmundur Arason, known in Icelandic tradition as Guðmundur góði (Guðmundur the Good), was born in 1161 at the farm of Grjótá in Hörgárdalur in northern Iceland. He was the son of the priest Ari Þorgeirsson and of Úlfheiður Gunnarsdóttir. His parents were not married, so he was of illegitimate birth, a canonical impediment that later had to be dealt with when he was raised to the episcopate. His father was killed while Guðmundur was still a child, and the boy was brought up among clerical kinsmen in the north of the country. He received a church education and was ordained to the priesthood in 1185. In the years that followed he lived as a priest of marked piety and already acquired a popular reputation for holiness, for generous almsgiving, and for blessings of water and other sacramentals that people believed had healing and protective power.

In 1201 the diocese of Hólar, the northern of Iceland’s two bishoprics, fell vacant. Guðmundur was chosen bishop, travelled to Norway, and was consecrated in 1203 by the Archbishop of Nidaros, metropolitan of the Norwegian church province to which Iceland then belonged. As bishop he took a high view of the liberty of the Church, defending the right of sanctuary, the immunity of church property, and ecclesiastical jurisdiction over church people. Those claims collided with the power of the great chieftains (goðar) of northern Iceland, above all the Ásbirningar. The struggle turned violent, most famously at the Battle of Víðines in 1208, where the chieftain Kolbeinn Tumason was killed. Guðmundur was repeatedly driven from Hólar, held in captivity or under constraint, and forced to take refuge elsewhere in Iceland or in Norway. He spent substantial periods abroad, including several years in Norway in the 1210s, and came back to a see that remained politically insecure. Later he also came into conflict with leading men of the Sturlungar.

Among ordinary Icelanders he was remembered as a protector of the poor. He used episcopal revenues to support large numbers of needy people, pilgrims, and dependents, a policy that drained the resources of the bishopric and further alienated the secular elite. Miracle stories gathered around him in his own lifetime. Blessed springs later called Gvendarbrunnar were associated with his name, and he was invoked for healing and for safety at sea. His devotion to the Virgin Mary was especially noted. Although he became the subject of a full-scale saint’s life, he was never canonized by the papacy. Local veneration was nonetheless strong. In 1315 Bishop Auðunn rauði of Hólar had his bones translated, an act that in medieval practice amounted to a form of local canonization.

Guðmundur died at Hólar on 16 March 1237 and was buried at his cathedral. His career is unusually well documented for a medieval Icelander because it stands at the meeting point of the contemporary Sturlunga compilation and several versions of Guðmundar saga, written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which combine political narrative with hagiography. He remains one of the central religious figures of the Icelandic Commonwealth period. His feast has traditionally been observed on 16 March. He was never placed on the universal calendar of the Roman Church, and his cult remained essentially Icelandic.