Boniface Fells Donar's Oak (723): Converting the Germans

Around 723 the English missionary Boniface cut down a great oak at Geismar in Hesse, a tree that local people held sacred to the thunder god Donar. The event, recorded by his biographer Willibald, became the best-known episode of Boniface’s mission and a symbol of the Christianisation of the German lands. Boniface went on to organise bishoprics and monasteries across central Germany and is remembered as the “Apostle of the Germans”.

Who was Boniface?

Boniface was born Wynfrith in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex around 675. He became a monk at Exeter and then at Nursling, near Southampton, where he was a respected teacher and wrote a Latin grammar. English monks of his time felt a strong call to preach to the continental Saxons and other Germanic peoples, whom they saw as their own kin.

His first mission to Frisia in 716 failed amid war between the Frisians and the Franks. In 719 he travelled to Rome, where Pope Gregory II gave him a commission to preach to the Germans and the name Boniface. He worked in Frisia with the older English missionary Willibrord and then in Hesse. In 722 Gregory II consecrated him a bishop in Rome, and he swore an oath of loyalty to the papacy.

Background: Hesse in the 720s

Hesse lay on the eastern edge of the Frankish realm. Some of its people had been baptised, but Christian and pagan practices often mixed, and there was little church organisation. Boniface’s letters complain of people who sacrificed to trees and springs, consulted diviners and took part in pagan rites while calling themselves Christians.

Boniface relied on protection from the Frankish ruler Charles Martel, mayor of the palace, who in 723 gave him a letter ordering officials to support him. Without this backing, Boniface later wrote, he could neither govern his people nor prevent pagan practices.

The felling of the oak

According to Willibald’s Life of Boniface, written in the 760s, some Hessians who had accepted baptism still worshipped at a huge oak at Geismar, near modern Fritzlar. Willibald calls it the oak of Jupiter, the Latin name he used for the god known in Germanic as Donar, the thunder god related to the Norse Thor.

On the advice of Christians in the region, Boniface decided to cut the tree down in front of a crowd of pagans, who cursed him as an enemy of their gods. Willibald says that after Boniface had made only a small cut, a sudden wind brought the oak crashing down, and it broke into four parts of equal length. The onlookers, seeing that their god had not struck the bishop down, stopped cursing and accepted Christianity.

Boniface then used the timber to build an oratory, or small chapel, dedicated to St Peter. This was a characteristic choice, since Boniface promoted loyalty to Rome and to the apostle Peter, whose successor was the pope.

Sources and interpretation

The only account comes from Willibald, an Anglo-Saxon priest who wrote about a decade after Boniface’s death, using the memories of Boniface’s companions. His details, especially the miraculous wind, follow the conventions of saints’ lives, which often included the destruction of pagan shrines.

Historians nevertheless accept the core of the story as likely. Destroying sacred sites was a common missionary strategy, intended to show that the old gods could not protect their holy places. The event also took place under Frankish protection, which made it a political as well as a religious act.

Organising the German church

The oak episode was only the beginning. Boniface founded a monastery at Fritzlar, and English monks and nuns, including his kinswoman Leoba, came to help. In 732 Pope Gregory III made him an archbishop. In 739 he reorganised the church in Bavaria into the bishoprics of Salzburg, Freising, Regensburg and Passau, and in the 740s he created sees at Würzburg, Büraburg and Erfurt.

With the support of Charles Martel’s sons Carloman and Pepin, Boniface held reforming councils from 742 onwards. His disciple Sturm founded the abbey of Fulda in 744. Boniface became bishop of Mainz, and he was associated with Frankish church reform at the time when Pepin the Short was crowned king in 751, though whether he personally anointed Pepin is debated.

In old age Boniface returned to Frisia. On 5 June 754 he and his companions were killed by armed men near Dokkum. His body was carried to Fulda, which became the centre of his cult.

Timeline

• c. 675: Wynfrith is born in Wessex.
• 716: First, unsuccessful mission to Frisia.
• 719: Pope Gregory II commissions him and gives him the name Boniface.
• 722: Consecrated bishop in Rome.
• c. 723: Fells Donar’s Oak at Geismar and builds a chapel of St Peter.
• 732: Made an archbishop by Pope Gregory III.
• 744: The abbey of Fulda is founded by his disciple Sturm.
• 754, 5 June: Killed near Dokkum in Frisia.

Why it matters

The felling of Donar’s Oak captures how Christianity spread in early medieval Germany: through confrontation with old sacred places, backed by the power of the Frankish rulers. Boniface’s network of bishoprics and monasteries laid foundations for the church of the Carolingian age, which reached its height under Charlemagne during the Carolingian Renaissance and the forced conversions of the Saxon Wars.