Sanctus Thorfinnus

Almost nothing is known of Torfin before 1277, when he appears as Bishop of Hamar, a small diocese on the shore of Mjøsa. He was a monk at heart, which in thirteenth-century Norway was an awkward thing for a bishop to be. What is known of him is almost entirely about how he ended.

When the crown moved to strip the Church of its liberties he stood with Archbishop Jon and refused to sign, and he paid the whole price for it. Outlawed and driven from his diocese, he took ship and was caught by storm, wrecked, and carried across the North Sea to Flanders — landing at the Cistercian abbey of Ter Doest near Bruges. There the exiled bishop set down mitre and crozier and lived as the least of the monks: prayer, fasting, silence, no office and no complaint.

He died there in the deep of a January, far from Hamar, and was buried without ceremony. Fifty years later the monks moved his tomb and found a sweet fragrance rising from it, and beside him a poem in his honour lying as fresh as the day it was set there. It was the poem, not the relics, that began the cult — a bishop who lost every office he held, remembered because one man had quietly written down that he mattered.