‘A good and sincere man ... even though he looked like a Slav’: Asger of Lund, canon law, and politics in Denmark, ca 1085–1140 FREDERIK PEDERSEN University of Aberdeen ASGER THRUGOTSEN is the first Scandinavian prelate for whom it is possible to construct a biographical sketch based on a dossier of documents rather than relying on the evidence of literary biographies and hagiographies. Asger of Lund – the first archbishop in Scandinavia – stands out and allows us a small glimpse of his personality and policy. His long career was focused on the diocese of Lund, whose bishop he was 1089–1137, and covers a long period of relative stability in the Danish kingdom, which ended with the battle at Fotevik in 1134 where six of Denmark’s bishops died after Asger’s unexpected switch of allegiance from the royal party to that of the pretender Erik II Emune on the eve of battle. There are relatively few sources which illustrate the character of Scandinavia’s first archbishop and his world. There are a few diplomata, papal letters, a brief description of Archbishop Asger in Ebbo’s Vita Ottonis Bambergensis, entries copied into Necrologium Lundense during Asger’s term of office, narratives from Adam of Bremen and the Englishman Ælnoth’s Gesta Canuti regis et martyris. In addition, Chronicon Roskildense (composed around 1140) shines an occasional light on the practices and personnel of the Danish Church to inform us of the challenges which clerics and laypeople faced in applying canon law and implementing the programmes of both lay and ecclesiastical reformers. Finally, a comparison with secular lawcodes allows a glimpse of the function of prelates in Scandinavian society. A careful analysis of these sources allows us to construct a picture of the men who implemented canon law and spread the knowledge of it among the laity and, in particular, affords a relatively full picture of the personality of Asger of Lund. In this paper I shall put his term of office into a Danish and an international context. The argument put forward is that Asger, archbishop of Lund, was what is known in German as a Realpolitiker who sought the middle ground of politics throughout his term in office; that he was a reluctant reformer, but also a keen promoter of ecclesiastical interests; and that he strove to remain impartial in national secular politics as long as this was at all possible. Such a consensus-seeking policy has meant that his posthumous reputation has been contested. His activities as co-regent with King Erik I’s illegitimate son, Harald Kesja, 1101–3, were arguably so unremarkable that we know that he fulfilled that function only because it is mentioned in Necrologium Mediaeval Scandinavia 20 (2010) 141–62 ISSN 0076-5864