TAMDRUP KIRKE - Nationalmuseet

Danmarks Kirker, Århus
5169
Fig. 132. Kirken og Tamdrup Bisgård set i landskabet fra vest. Jesper Weng fot. 2001. – The church and Tamdrup Bisgård
seen in the landscape from the west.
The church, situated seven kilometres north west
of Horsens, was built around 1125. With its size
and its wealth of treasures from the High Middle
Ages, it is one of the most interesting churches
in Denmark – but also one of the most enigmatic.
There is regrettably little reliable historical information
from the earliest period. The earliest
mention of the church is in connection with
a gift from an Århus canon in 1345, although
the place­name is mentioned as early as 1279,
when the Bishop of Århus witnessed a letter in
‘Thomæthorp’. It is not evident whether he did
so in the large manor house of the parish, which
has at least since the Late Middle Ages lain south
of the church as an episcopal manor called Tamdrup
Bisgård (fig. 132) (Bisgård = Bishop’s Manor).
The manor may earlier have been located
north west of the church site, where archaeological
excavations in 1983­90 have demonstrated a
‘large residence’ from the latter half of the eleventh
century and the beginning of the twelfth
centu ry. In the Late Middle Ages the advowson
may have been episcopal. But the prosperous
benefice, which appears to have been the seat for
a very large cure, seems to a great extent to have
been in the hands of place­hunters with papal
TAMDRUP CHURCH
TAMDRUP CHURCH
com missions. With the Reformation the patronage
would have passed to the King, and around
1675­1803 it belonged to the counts of Frijsenborg.
The few, scattered written sources in fact offer
no explanation of the existence of such a large
and richly furnished basilica church (by Danish
standards) in Tamdrup. The bishops are unlikely
to have been the original founders. It is more
likely to have been a Royal foundation, and may
be considerably older than the present church
and have served as a kind of minster or missionizing
church. In that case there would be a
clear parallel with the more southerly ancient
Royal seat in Jelling, where King Harald Bluetooth
marked the christianization of the country
with his large runic stone and the building of a
substantial minster church of wood.
These conjectures draw particular support from
the representations on the *(†)golden altar of the
church from c. 1200 (cf. pp. 5113ff.). Seven of
the pa nels are depictions of how the cleric Poppo
(or ‘Poppa’) converted King Harald Bluetooth c.
958/65 by undergoing the ordeal by fire, as recounted
a few years later in the chronicle of the
Saxon monk Widukind (figs. 88­94). The story
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