Sanctus Anscharius

Ansgar was born in 801 near Amiens and raised a monk at Corbie, and he spent his life walking north into places that did not want him. He went first to Denmark, then across to the trading town of Birka in Sweden — the first missionary to get that far — decades before any of it was safe.

On one crossing pirates took everything he owned, including his books, and he recorded that he counted the loss a gift. Made first Archbishop of Hamburg, he watched a Viking fleet burn the whole see to the ground in 845 and began again from nothing at Bremen. He spent what he had on ransoming slaves and nursed the sick with his own hands. He wanted very much to be martyred, and was not.

He died in his bed at Bremen in 865, having converted a fraction of what he set out to convert, and the North closed over behind him and went back to its old gods for another hundred years. Then it did not. He had said he was casting seed on frozen ground and trusting it to flower long after he was gone — which is a hard thing to say and mean, and he is the only one of the eight who turned out to be right about his own posthumous work.