Expecting to come home again

[Robert Ward]

Tom, This stuff about the local pilgrimages from the Austrian village is fascinating and if you publish it someday (or if you have already), I'd like to know more about it. However, there's a difference between the sort of pilgrimage you're proposing (max 90 km) and the pilgrimage to Santiago in the Middle Ages.
I think Galen is right in saying that no old-time pilgrim who was travelling to Santiago from a distance (especially one who was crossing the Pyrenees) assumed he would return home safely. There is a terrific book entitled "Aventura y Muerte en el Camino de Santiago" (1999, author Braulio Valdivielso Ausin) which spells out in gruesome detail the very real dangers awaiting the pilgrim on the way to Santiago. In the early days, these perils were predominantly natural ones: ravenous wolves, rivers to ford, snowstorms, lack of wholesome food and water. As the Camino grew more "civilized," the dangers to the traveller took on a human face: cut-throats (who often doubled as customs officers and inn-keepers), bands of underemployed mercenary soldiers, and of course the vile epidemics that pilgrims unknowingly carried with them from town to town.
One of the many cheerful conclusions reached by Ausin is that the pilgrim's hospitals (of which there were, as we know, so very many) were not primarily places where pilgrims went to be cured. They were places where they went to die.
>
> From: Tom Priestly <tom.priestlyaUALBERTA.CA>
> Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 15:18:57 -0700
> To: GOCAMINOaPETE.URI.EDU
> Subject: Expecting to come home again
>
> In response to Galen's point, below:
> True, but . . . "travelling locally" was for many Europeans, for most
> of the centuries of Christianity (i.e., better-recorded history),
> often very difficult.
>
> The ancestors of the inhabitants of the Austrian village where I have
> been doing fieldwork for three decades are a good example: they
> certainly did not commute from their village to earn their daily
> bread (even as late as the late 1930s there was only one 'commuter',
> the village postman), but they *did* go on yearly pilgrimages to
> shrines and/or 'sister churches' situated in what are now close
> neighboring villages. They still uphold the tradition, but pile into
> cars to make these trips. But from the early-ish middle ages till
> within living memory they walked, every year, to at least three
> places, respectively 6, 13 and 15 km (about 4, 8 and 10 miles) in
> each direction, on communal pilgrimages. (The last two would have
> taken nearly all day, of course).
>
> Also, they tried to visit, more than once in their lives and
> especially at times of  crisis, two further-flung shrines: one of
> these is 40 km (about 26 miles), the other 90 km (about 60 miles)
> away. Camino-walkers will know how long this will have taken them.
> (Bear in mind that an Alpine ridge had to be crossed for the former
> trip, an Alp had to walked up for the other).
>