It’s 23 December, and you know what that means, don’t you? Yes, of course! It’s the feast day of Þorlákur Þórhallsson, aka Thorlak, patron saint of Iceland, and performer of sausage-based miracles.
I am indebted to historian Eleanor Parker for this very fine tale.
Apparently, Thorlak studied in Lincoln, and — according to the Old Norse Þorláks saga — in the 13th century, someone called Auðunn had a statue erected to him in a church in King’s Lynn. One day a visiting English cleric asked who it was, and, when he heard it was St Thorlak, burst out laughing, went into the kitchen, got a bit of sausage, came back in and waved it at the statue with the words
Want a bit, suet-man? You’re a suet-bishop!
This might appear, on the face of it, to make no sense at all, but at the time ‘suet-man’ (mörlandi) was apparently a derogatory term for Icelanders. And — this story being all miraculous and that — the statue heard him say it.
When this odd and — let’s be honest — slightly racist cleric turned to go, he was (according to legend, at any rate) frozen to the spot, his fingers stuck fast to the meaty treat.
News of a divinely ordered, sausage-related petrification spread, and people came from miles around to gawp, at which point the gentleman of the cloth began to repent of his unwisdom, and asked them to pray for him.
Eventually, he was released from his (entirely deserved) indignity, and went on his way. And perhaps his lesson is one for us all. Let us all mark St Thorlak’s day (later, possibly, depending what time of day you read this) by raising a glass and not a sausage in his honour.
If we’re being strictly accurate, the salutation for an Icelandic saint should be ‘skál’, and we should be raising an Einstök. Skol was invented in Scotland, and Hägar’s American, but this started with a badly photoshopped Grange Hill sausage. So.
However, if you haven’t yet had your fill of meat-in-a-casing nonsense, there is more in this from last month:
