Orkney’s Silver Bangles, Carols and Yuletide Trees
Most UK Jewellery Shops Aren’t a Match For Orkney’s Jewellers
Silver bangles crafted within Orkney remember our links with Norse history. Two special Christmas gifts have come to Orkney to commemorate a friendly relationship between local communities that’s bonded our islands with Norway ever since the Viking Age. On a yearly basis the folks of Hordaland give us Christmas trees to stand outside and inside St Magnus Cathedral. Silver bangles and charms depicting St Magnus’ window sell nicely in the UK and overseas.
While London, Edinburgh and New York each are given a Christmas tree from Norway; Orkney is gifted 2. The tree that had been lit outside the cathedral on Saturday was presented by the county of Hordaland, that has been twinned with Orkney Islands Council for 26 years, whilst the smaller sized tree positioned inside the cathedral comes from the people of Grimstad, that has a special link with Orkney’s history.
Viking earls St Magnus and his nephew Kale Kolssn, (born 1100) known later as Earl Rognvald the constructor of St Magnus Cathedral , spent their childhood years as boys on the farm Bringsvrd at Grimstad in southern Norway, now in the state of Aust-Agder. It is within this forest that the tree meant for Orkney is felled.
Kale was born at the huge farm where his father Kol Kalessn was the king’s representative. He was married to Magnus’ sister Gunhild and was to become Earl Rognvald in Orkney on the martyrdom of his uncle Magnus. He created the cathedral to honor his uncle.
In Grimstad the Fjre Kirke (church) on the farm is linked to St Magnus Cathedral although the present-day stone church created around 1150 by neighborhood farmers upgraded the solid wood church that Magnus and Kale were familiar with. In 1987 the 850th anniversary of the founding of St Magnus Cathedral was denoted when the society sent a plaque and a tree to Kirkwall. And that’s exactly how the tree gifting custom started. Both places of worship were once in the Norwegian diocese of Trondheim.
Silver Bangles Open a Window on History
Grimstad has a community of nearly 20,000, similar to the total number of inhabitants of Orkney, and is a maritime township set among many tiny isles. A famous son of Grimstad was the playwright Henrik Ibsen. Writer Roald Dahl went to visit his grandfather and grandmother there and writer Knut Hamsun was a native of the town.
In the cathedral a Christmas service, which usually has standing room only provides carols and music from college choir and pipers of Orkney and music artists from Norway. Above them is the Rose windowpane which is displayed on Silver bangles from our website.
If silver bangles aren’t going to be your personal style then certainly many of the other pieces of fine jewellery on our www.olagoriejewellery.com online site will please you. For other things with a Norse stimulus just click here.
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