Gifts to St Olav in the Late Medieval Wills of the Lübeck Bergenfahrer

ABSTRACT In a Norwegian context, the wills of the Lübeck Bergenfahrer merchants are unique source material in their quantity and content: A collection of some 250 wills, with more than 700 donations to various religious institutions in Bergen, from a distinct ethnic and fairly homogeneous socio-economic group, distributed over some 200 years. How was St Olav, rex perpetuus norvegiae, represented in these donations? What image of St Olav seems to be the dominating one? Not surprisingly, the study of the German merchants’ gifts shows that they primarily were directed at St Olav as a patron saint of seafarers and merchants and not as the eternal king of Norway.