"Prepared with great craftiness": St. Magnus Cathedral, Rǫgnvaldr Kali Kolsson, and Orkney’s Autonomy in the Medieval North Sea World

This project reevaluates the political position of the Earldom of Orkney within the medieval North Sea world by tracing aesthetic and cultural links between St. Magnus Cathedral and churches in England, Scotland, and Norway. The cathedral does not represent national subjugation and cultural dependency as previously assumed; rather, the cathedral and its iconography in Orkneyinga saga embed the Norse earls within patronage and narrative trends of foreign and Biblical kings to make a final, if ultimately unsuccessful, claim for Orcadian autonomy.