A Norwegian Holiday (Part 5)
The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (Norsk Folkemuseum)
We woke up the next morning, refreshed after sleeping soundly the previous night. After getting ready, we went down and had a hearty breakfast and set out by 9 a.m..
We stepped out to find an entirely different Oslo. Unlike on the previous day which was bright and sunny, the sky was completely overcast, gloomy and grey. It was raining steadily. Braving the drizzle and the cold, we walked to the nearby bus stop and caught a bus which took us to the National Theatre. From here, we walked for about ten minutes in the drizzle to reach the piers.
Radhusplassen was wet, windy and deserted. We waited in the rain at the piers for a while, the pitter patter of rain drops punctuated by the cries of hovering sea gulls and an occasional gust of wind. We stood there for a while before our boat arrived. It was to take us to the Dronningen Jetty in Bygdoy, a peninsula in the western part of Oslo. Our plan was to visit the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (Norsk Folkemuseum) there and, later, go to the famous Fram Museum nearby which tells the story of the famous expeditions of Norway’s legendary Polar explorers, Amundsen and Nansen, and their renowned polar ship, the Fram.
As we sailed out from the piers under the grey sky, the rain intensified but the sea was calm. After about 10 minutes, we reached Dronningen jetty. Getting off, we walked uphill from there through a hilly, rain-swept residential locality featuring lovely villas with gardens. After walking for about 15 minutes, we reached the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (Norsk Folkemuseum). The rain had abated by then.
Wooden Farmhouses
The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History is well over a century old and is set in a sprawling, wooded, hilly location. It is an Open Air Museum, in fact, the oldest such museum in the world, its nucleus dating back to 1881. (An open air museum is one which, typically, has collected and recreated buildings and the original landscapes they were set in, without adversely affecting their authenticity). This museum has about 160 such beautiful old buildings, primarily wooden, relocated from various places across Norway and painstakingly rebuilt here without losing their originality. Even farms and rural buildings from the Norwegian countryside have, incredibly, been relocated and aesthetically recreated in this unique museum.
Passing through an arched entrance laden with creepers, we reached the foyer, got our tickets and went past turnstiles to reach a large, paved courtyard having an ornate fountain and surrounded by old, tile-roofed buildings. Soon, we were met and warmly greeted by our guide, a pretty young Norwegian lady in traditional Norwegian costume, the Bunad.
The Bunad often features hand woven fabric and delicate embroidery and comes in a variety of colours. The patterns and colours vary hugely across Norway’s different regions, each region having a characteristic type. It is worn with accessories like scarves, shawls and silver jewellery.
Our guide briefed us about our tour of the museum and, soon thereafter, we started off. We passed a lovely meadow and came to a farmstead with a street lined by a row of traditional wooden buildings, including farmhouses and barns, on either side. As I stood there, immersed dreamily in this evocative pastoral view that transported me back to the medieval ages, I was startled out of my reverie by the loud neigh of a horse. Turning around, I saw a horse-drawn farm cart trundle past us with two ladies in period costumes.
These wooden buildings had sod roofs with grass growing on it, a means of keeping the buildings insulated from the bitter cold in this extreme northern part of the world. The slanting wooden roofs are covered with layers of birch bark and, over it, sod. Interesting to note, the logs used in making these wooden dwellings are not nailed together but interlocked in a secure manner using slots. The preferred wood used for construction is pine.
The first building to our right on this street was a farmhouse, originally from Kjelleberg in the Setesdal traditional district of south western Norway, an isolated mountainous region, dating back to the mid 17th century. Adjacent to it stood a wooden storehouse, relocated from another village named Ose in the same region. This had two-storeys, its ground floor, bereft of windows, used to store food and the upper floor to store clothing and other valuables. Both floors were used for living.
We walked past another pasture, where horses were grazing, to a street behind this located on a slope at a slightly higher elevation. An exact replica of the Kjelleberg house that we saw earlier had been constructed here, utilising identical material and even sod sourced from the same Setesdal region. This replica was made so that visitors could enter, touch, feel and sit inside the house unlike in the old, original Kjelleberg farmhouse.
We entered this small wooden house and sat around its open hearth while our guide explained to us how rural Norwegians lived in it centuries ago. The wooden appliances and other utensils they used, their surprisingly small cots (in medieval times, people were of smaller stature) and other pieces of furniture, the animal hides and fur items, their foodstuffs and the cooking methods they used and various other aspects of everyday life in medieval Norway were fascinating to see, hear about and understand.
We left the farmhouse, stooping considerably while doing so, the windows and doors of these medieval buildings being made as small as possible in an attempt to keep the cold out and the interior warm. The shorter stature of the people during that age may also have had an influence in designing doors like this.
We went up an ascent along a wooded path and reached a clearing where stood a distinctly more impressive house. This was the farmhouse of a wealthy farmer from the early 17th century, relocated from a village named Heddal in Telemark county in southern Norway. Unlike the farmhouses which we had seen earlier, this one was much larger and quite well-appointed. It had a fireplace with a chimney, a large dining table with cupboards, a separate bedroom and even an attic loft.
A little distance away stood another charming little wooden building, the Storehouse from the village of Nesland in Telemark. It was elevated off the ground on stout pillars and had broad wooden planks placed atop these, ostensibly, an attempt to ward off rodents.
The Stave Church of Gol
However, the most beautiful and impressive of all the wooden buildings that we saw stood majestically on a grass-covered mound nearby. It was the magnificent Stave Church of Gol, undoubtedly the centrepiece of this fascinating museum. Dating back to the 12th century AD, it stood originally in the village of Gol in the traditional district of Hallingdal, in southern Norway. Plans were drawn up by the local populace to demolish the original stave church in Hallingdal in the late 19th Century when it began to show signs of decay and disrepair. But, it was saved, relocated and reconstructed in this Norsk folkemuseum in 1885 under the patronage of the then King of Norway, Oscar II.
Stave churches are wooden churches typical of traditional Scandinavian architecture. ‘Stave’ refers to the massive, vertical wooden posts which form the framework of these medieval churches. Characteristically, the outer walls of these churches are made of vertically oriented wooden planks. The slanting wooden roof consists of multiple tiers, gradually reducing in size towards the top. Only around thirty such churches survive now in the world, almost all of them in Norway.
The Stave Church of Gol was tinted black on the outside, thanks to the pine tar applied on it in order to protect the wood from the elements. Its wooden roof soared up in six tiers, progressively tapering upwards, resembling the pagodas of Buddhist temples in the Far East, and seemed to substitute for a spire. The gable finials of the mid tiers of the roof had beautiful, curved dragon motifs projecting outwards, reminding one of the fabled Viking ships. The lower ones featured crosses.
We went inside the charming old Stave church through its small western doorway. Stepping over a raised threshold, we entered its quiet, dimly lit interior, the old, wooden floor creaking under our feet. The small nave of the church led to the chancel and the altar. The walls of the chancel and the altar were decorated with curious, dull-coloured wall paintings. ‘The Last Supper’ was depicted on the rear wall of the apse.
The tiered wooden ceiling was quite high. Small shafts of light pierced the dark interior of the church through small, circular fenestra high up on the walls. At the top of the staves, strange-looking carved faces could be made out. Several saltires (or the St. Andrew’s Cross) were placed all around at the top between the staves, all of them carved. Simple wooden arches spanned the gap between the staves. A narrow, partially enclosed perambulatory passage ran around the outer wall of the church. The faint smell of pine tar, the dimly lit interiors, the strange wooden carvings and faded, old, wall paintings all combined to lend a fascinatingly mysterious aura to the medieval church.
The parsonage and its garden
Leaving the beautiful church, we visited two more old wooden houses. Soon, it was time for us to leave. It was well past noon and we had spent more than two and a half interesting hours in this unique folklore museum. As we had planned to visit the Fram Museum as well that afternoon, we had to leave half-heartedly.
While walking back, we came across a beautiful, red coloured, timbered building and opposite it, across a shaded path and beyond a stone hedge, a beautiful little garden with an arbour. This garden stood next to another quaint, old, tile-roofed, wooden building from the 18th century, a parsonage (a parsonage is a house provided by the church for members of the clergy to stay) relocated from the little town of Leikanger on the shores of the famous Sognefjord in western Norway, one of the most picturesque of all Norwegian fjords. We could not resist lingering there for a while.
We had a light lunch in the museum cafeteria and walked back to the Dronningen jetty. The sky was still overcast but the drizzle had stopped. While waiting for the boat, we were treated to the pretty spectacle of a flotilla of Barnacle Geese making their way across the water. A short while later, our boat arrived and docked to take us to the famous Fram Museum nearby.
I was beginning to feel a frisson of excitement!
(To be continued in Part 6)
