From these accounts we gather that Oda’s mother, Ada, had already had a vision of the future greatness of her family. Hrotsvith tells how St John the Baptist appeared to her clad in a garment made of camel’s hair of bright yellow, his lovely face of shining whiteness, with a small beard and black hair. In giving these details of the saint’s appearance the nun was doubtless describing a picture she had before her at Gandersheim.
It was in 852 that a plan was formed for transferring a small congregation of women, who had been living at Brunshausen, to some property on the river Ganda. A suitable site had to be sought and a fitting centre of worship provided. Liudolf and Oda undertook a journey to Rome and submitted their scheme to Pope Sergius II (844-847), begging him for a gift of relics. They received from him the bodies of the saints Anastasius and Innocentius, which they carried back with them to Saxony.
On the night before All Saints’ Day a swineherd in Liudolf’s employ had a vision of lights falling from heaven and hanging in the air, which was interpreted as a heavenly indication of the site of the settlement. A clearance was accordingly made in the densely wooded district and a chapel was built.
It was at this time that Hathumod, the eldest daughter of Liudolf, was living in Herford. From childhood her bent had been serious, and her friend Agius tells us that ‘of her own free will she desired to be admitted to serious studies to which others are driven even by force[466].’ She left her father’s residence for Herford, where she was so happy that in after years she often longed to be back there. In 852 at the age of twelve she was taken away to Gandersheim to preside over the new settlement. This settlement was to be an improvement on existing institutions of the kind, for Agius tells us that its members were not allowed to have separate cells or to keep servants. They slept in tenements (villula) in the neighbourhood till their ‘spiritual mother’ was able to provide them with a suitable dwelling. Curious side-lights are thrown on other religious institutions by the following remarks of Agius on the nuns of Hathumod’s convent: ‘They shared everything,’ he says[467]; ‘their clothes were alike, neither too rich nor too poor, nor entirely of wool. The sisters were not allowed to dine out with relatives and friends, or to converse with them without leave. They were not allowed like other nuns (sanctimoniales) to leave the monastery to stay with relatives or visit dependent estates (possessiones subjectae). And they were forbidden to eat except at the common table at the appointed times except in cases of sickness. At the same hour and in the same place they partook of the same kind of food. They slept together and came together to celebrate the canonical hours (ad canonicos cursus orandi). And they set to work together whenever work had to be done.’
Agius draws a beautiful picture of the gentleness and dignified bearing of Hathumod, who was at once strong and sensitive. She was always greatly cheered by signs of goodness in others, and she was as much grieved by an offence of a member of the community as if she had committed it herself. Agius tells us that she was slow in making friends but that she clung faithfully through life to those she had made.
Her literary acquirements were considerable. ‘No one could have shown greater quickness of perception, or a stronger power of understanding in listening to or in expounding the scriptures,’ he says[468], and the scriptures always remained her favourite reading.
It is difficult to form an idea of the standard of life in these religious settlements. The age was rough and barbarous in many ways, but the surroundings of the Saxon dukes did not lack a certain splendour, and traces of it would no doubt be found in the homes they made for their daughters. In these early accounts nothing transpires about their possessions in books and furniture, but it is incidentally mentioned that the abbess Hathumod owned a crystal vessel in the form of a dove, which contained relics and hung suspended by her bedside[469].
The plan was formed to build a stone church for Gandersheim, an unusual and difficult undertaking. No suitable stone, however, could be found till one day, as Hathumod was praying in the chapel, she was divinely moved to walk forth and follow a dove which was awaiting her outside. The bird led the way to a spot where the underwood was removed and masses of stone which could be successfully dealt with were laid bare. ‘It is the spot barren through its huge masses of stone, as we know it now-a-days,’ Hrotsvith the nun wrote a hundred years later[470].
The densely-wooded character of the neighbourhood is frequently referred to by early and later writers. Lingering superstitions peopled the forest with heathen fantasies, with ‘fauns and spirits,’ as Hrotsvith designates them. The settlement lay in the midst of the forest and was at all times difficult of access, but especially so in winter when the ground was covered with snow. In the introduction to her history of Otto the Great Hrotsvith likens her perplexity and fear in entering on so vast a subject to the state of mind of one who has to cross the forest in mid winter, a simile doubtless suggested by the surroundings of the convent[471]. Her feelings, she says, were those of ‘someone who is ignorant of the vast expanse of the forest which lies before him, all the paths of which are hidden by a thick covering of snow; he is guided by no one and keeps true to his direction only by noticing the marks pointed out to him; sometimes he goes astray, unexpectedly he again strikes the right path, and having penetrated half way through the dense interlacing trees and brushwood he longs for rest and stops and would proceed no farther, were he not overtaken by some one, or unexpectedly guided by the footprints of those who have gone before.’
Neither Liudolf the founder of Gandersheim nor his daughter Hathumod lived to see the stone church completed. He died in 866, and the abbess in 874 at the age of thirty-two. She was surrounded by her nuns, among whom were several of her sisters, and her mother Oda, who had also come to live at Gandersheim. The monk Agius, who was a frequent visitor at the home, was often with her during her last illness, and after her death he composed an elegy in dialogue to comfort the nuns under the loss they had sustained. This poem is full of sweetness and delicacy of feeling, and is said to have been written on the model of the eclogues of Virgil. Alternate verses are put into the mouths of the nuns and of Agius; they describe their sorrow, and he dwells on the thoughts which might be a consolation to them. It opens in this strain: