Fosite

Nobody spoke at the spring. People came up from the shore with their vessels, knelt, filled them and went away again, and the only sounds were the wind over the grass and the water itself. Around them cattle grazed that belonged to no farmer. Nobody milked them, drove them or killed them. The whole island was like this, a place where a person kept their hands to themselves and their mouth shut, because every blade of it was the property of a god called Fosite.

That picture comes from a churchman who wanted the god gone. Alcuin of York, writing near the end of the eighth century, set down the life of the missionary Willibrord, and in it he tells how a storm once drove the saint’s ship onto an island that lay on the border between the Frisians and the Danes. The people there called it Fositesland after their god, and his temples stood on it. Alcuin records the two rules above, the untouched animals and the silent spring, and then describes how his hero broke both.

Willibrord was stuck there for several days waiting on the weather. He used the time. He took three people to the spring and baptised them in it, out loud, in the name of the Trinity. Then he had some of the sacred cattle slaughtered to feed his crew. The islanders stood at a distance and watched, sure that the strangers would lose their minds or drop dead where they stood. Neither thing happened. The smell of roasting beef drifted over holy ground, the foreigners ate, and the watchers went to tell their king.

The king was Radbod, ruler of the Frisians and no friend to missionaries. He was furious. For three days running he had lots cast three times a day, to find out which of the offenders the god wanted. The lots never fell on Willibrord. They fell on one of his companions, and that man was killed. Radbod then had the saint brought before him and accused him of defiling a sanctuary and insulting a god. Willibrord answered that the god was a devil. The king, by Alcuin’s own account, did not give an inch, but he did send the missionary back to the Franks with honour. It is an oddly even contest for a saint’s life. One man dead, three baptised, and the island still Fosite’s when the ship sailed.

It did not stay his. A second saint’s life, written in the ninth century by Altfrid about his kinsman Liudger, returns to the same island near the close of the eighth century. Liudger crossed the water, pulled down the temples of Fosite, and baptised the islanders in the very spring where Willibrord had baptised his three. Among those he raised from the water was Landric, the son of one of the island’s chief men. After that the god has no worshippers on record.

Three centuries later Adam of Bremen described the place in his account of the northern seas. It lay out in the ocean off the mouth of the Elbe, he says, about eight miles long and four wide, with a single hill, not one tree, cliffs all round and only one spot where a boat could land. It had fresh water. Hermits lived on it by then, and pirates, of all people, left them a tenth of their plunder. Sailors held the island in awe and called it Holy Land, and Adam adds that this is the island the Life of Willibrord names for Fosite. On his word it has usually been taken for Heligoland. Other places along the Frisian coast have been proposed, and none of the three texts settles it.

That is the entire record. It is a short one.

Everything else about Fosite is missing. No source says what he was the god of. There is no story of his birth, no parents, no wife, no weapon, no enemy, and no description of what stood inside his temples. The writers who name him were not curious about him, and the people who could have explained him were being baptised. What survives is the shape of his holiness: land that could not be used, animals that could not be eaten, water that could not be taken with a word spoken over it.

The gap has been filled, many times, by borrowing. The nearest name is Forseti, a Norse god who settles quarrels in a shining hall, and Fosite is very often called a god of law on that strength alone. The match has been argued since the nineteenth century without a verdict. Jacob Grimm thought the two were one. Jan de Vries suggested the Frisian name was the older, and that the Norse bent a foreign word until it sounded like their own word for a chairman. Hans Kuhn went further afield and proposed that Fosite is the Greek name Poseidon, carried north long ago by traders who came for amber. Others have found that hard to swallow. One Frisian scholar of the 1890s read the name as something like “the dreaded one”, which at least suits the behaviour of the islanders. Nothing in Alcuin or Altfrid mentions a court.

One later tale is often laid at his door. In a Frisian legend written down in the late Middle Ages, the emperor Charlemagne orders twelve law-speakers to recite the laws of their people. They cannot, and he sets them adrift in a boat with no rudder. They pray. A thirteenth man appears in the stern with a golden axe on his shoulder, steers them to land with it, and throws the axe onto the shore, where a spring breaks out of the turf. He teaches them the law and is gone. A stranger, a spring and a body of law make a tempting fit with a silent well and a cousin of Forseti. The tale itself never names Fosite. Reading him into it is a modern idea, and it has not convinced everyone.

His power, as far as anyone can now tell, was the power of the forbidden. He could hold an entire island out of human use and keep a seafaring people quiet at a well, and a king thought him worth a human life. His weakness is recorded with some relish by the men who exploited it. He did not strike. Twice, strangers did exactly what was not to be done on his ground, and twice nothing fell on them from the sky. A god whose whole strength is that nobody dares test him has very little left once somebody does.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Fosite?

Fosite was a god of the pagan Frisians, worshipped on a holy island in the North Sea called Fositesland. He is known from two medieval saints’ lives and a passage by Adam of Bremen. Those texts record his island and its rules but say nothing about his appearance, family or myths.

Where was Fositesland?

Fositesland was an island on the border between the Frisians and the Danes. Adam of Bremen identified it with an island off the mouth of the Elbe that sailors called Holy Land, which is usually taken to be Heligoland. Other sites on the Frisian coast have been suggested, and the identification is not certain.

What were the rules of Fosite’s holy island?

Nobody was allowed to touch the cattle that grazed on Fosite’s island or anything else found there. Water could be drawn from the island’s spring only in complete silence. The islanders believed that anyone who broke these rules would go mad or die suddenly.

What did Willibrord do on Fosite’s island?

Willibrord baptised three people in the sacred spring and had some of the sacred cattle killed for food. King Radbod of the Frisians then cast lots three times a day for three days, and one of Willibrord’s companions was put to death. Later the missionary Liudger destroyed the temples of Fosite and baptised the islanders in the same spring.

Are Fosite and Forseti the same god?

Fosite and the Norse god Forseti may be the same, but it has never been proved. The names are similar, and Fosite is often called a god of law because Forseti is one. The medieval texts about Fosite never mention law or judging, and one theory holds that Fosite is the older name.

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Nehalennia, Donar (Thunar), Woden, Tyr, Balder, Njord, Aegir, Ran, Odin, Poseidon