The original Tautra Abbey occupied a strategic and beautiful site in the Trondheimsfjord, part of what is now Frosta Municipality in Trondelag county. The monks who founded it came from Lyse Abbey, itself one of Norway's major Cistercian houses, and the new community quickly absorbed the earlier foundation at nearby Munkeby Abbey. Tautra grew wealthy. Its abbots wielded real political influence, playing significant roles in Norwegian governance over the centuries that followed. The monastery flourished until the sixteenth century, when the same Reformation that toppled Catholic authority across Scandinavia reached its island. Tautra Abbey ceased functioning as an independent monastery in 1532, and its property was seized by the Crown in 1537 when it was formally closed. The monks dispersed. The buildings began their slow collapse into ruin.

The ruins of Tautra Abbey proved remarkably durable. The nave walls, the western portal, the north wall of the church -- these survived the centuries of abandonment better than many Norwegian medieval structures that received at least nominal care. Today the ruins are managed by Fortidsminneforeningen, the Society for the Preservation of Norwegian Ancient Monuments, and they remain a popular destination for visitors drawn to the combination of medieval stonework and fjord scenery. The preservation is partly a matter of geography. An island is harder to quarry than a roadside ruin, and the remoteness that once made Tautra attractive to monks seeking contemplative isolation also protected its remains from the kind of systematic dismantling that reduced other medieval sites to scattered fieldstone.

In 1999, something genuinely unexpected happened. A group of Trappistine nuns from Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey in Dubuque, Iowa, founded a new monastic community on Tautra, near the medieval ruins. It was the first permanent Cistercian settlement in Norway since the Reformation -- a gap of more than four and a half centuries. Queen Sonja of Norway laid the foundation stone for the new monastery on 23 May 2003, and the community was granted autonomy in 2006. The new church, designed by the acclaimed Norwegian firm Jensen and Skodvin Architects, sits near the medieval ruins in a deliberate dialogue between old and new. The connection to Iowa may seem improbable, but the Cistercian order has always been international, and the route from France to Norway to America and back again traces the arc of a tradition that has survived by being willing to travel.

The story has one more turn. Near the site of Munkeby Abbey -- the community that was absorbed into Tautra in the thirteenth century -- a new foundation of Cistercian monks is being established. It will be the first new foundation by the Abbey of Citeaux, the motherhouse of the entire Cistercian Order, since the thirteenth century. The monk in residence at Munkeby serves as chaplain to the nuns at Tautra. Eight hundred years after Cistercian monks first walked the shores of the Trondheimsfjord, their successors are walking those shores again. The ruins stand beside the new walls, and the chanting that fell silent in 1537 has resumed.