Baring-Gould’s sources: Norwegian Kalendar and Breviaries. Greven in his additions to Menardus, and after him Molanus, Canisius and Ferrarius, the Irish Martyr, ologyof Fits-simon, and the Scottish Menology of Dempster. Authorities: — The monk Oddr (12th cent.), Saga of K. Oiaf, the younger Olafs Saga Tryggvasonar, c. xo6 — 8 and X49, and a Latin fragment of the Church Office and Lections for the festival in Langebeck: Sriptores rerum Danicarum, vi. p. 3-4, and 14—23. There is not the smallest foundation for this story, it is only a Scandinavian version of the legend of S. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins.] In the days of earl Hako, say the Saga writers, there lived in Ireland a king who had a beautiful daughter named Sunnifa, who was endowed with wealth, beauty, and great Christian piety.
A northern viking, hearing of her charms, became CJuly*. enamoured, and harried the coasts of Ireland, setting all in flames, because the king hesitated to accept his suit for his daughter Sunnifa. The damsel, to save her native island from devastation by the impatient suitor, expressed her determination to leave Ireland. Her brother Alban (!) and a multitude of virgins joined her, and all sailed away East, trusting in God. They came ashore on the island of Selja, off the coast of Norway, and finding it uninhabited, they settled in the caves, and lived upon fishes. But the islet served as a pasture for cattle in the summer, and when the farmers on the mainland saw the people on the island, they supposed they were pirates, and appealed to earl Hako to protect their cattle. The earl at once gathered together some armed men and rowed to the island, but the Christian maidens fled into the caves and prayed God to preserve them. Then the rock closed upon them, and they came forth no more alive. In the reign of Olaf Tryggvason, a farmer found a human head on the island of Selja, which was surrounded by a phosphoric light, and which emitted an odour which he was pleased to consider agreeable. He at once took it to the king, who submitted it to the bishop Sigurd. Both recognized the evidences of sanctity, and the king and his bishop went to the island, where they discovered the cave filled with the bones of the saintly refugees. How they found out that they were Irish, that their leader was named Sunnifa, and her brother Alban, we are not told. Two churches were at once erected in Selja, and dedicated to S. Sunnifa and S. Alban, and miracles innumerable confirmed the conviction that the bones belonged to glorious saints.
The scholiast on Adam of Bremen’s Acts of the Bishops S. Grimbald. of Hamburg, 1 gives a finishing touch to the story: u Paul (the deacon), in his History of the Lombards [a Germanic people who ruled much of Italy from 568 to 774], affirms, that in the extreme parts of the North, among the Scritefings, in a certain cave beside the ocean, lie seven men as though sleeping, concerning whom opinions differ; it is believed by some that they will preach to these people before the end of the world. But others say that they are some of the eleven thousand virgins whose company separated, and some were wrecked on that rock; and there miracles are wrought. The church there was erected by Olaf. Olaf, a king of righteousness, first drew the Northmen to Christianity.” The quotation is from the 4th chapter of the 1st Book of Paul Warnefried’s History of the Lombards. In 1170, the relics [the bodily remains of a saint, or objects they used, kept with honor] of Sunnifa were brought from Selja to Bergen, by the bishop, Paul, chaplain to king Eysteinn. SS. Sunnifa and Alban are regarded as the proto-martyrs of Norway.
The bones discovered were probably those of some shipwrecked foreign rovers, massacred in Earl Hako’s reign. And the legend that grew up around them is a distant echo of the legend of S. Ursula.
