Viking Ship Museum

Burial Mound

There has been a ship on the rim of the horizon all morning. The crowds have gathered; some moan, others stand silent. As the sun starts to drop towards the waterline, a group of men row out towards the bobbing wreck. There is disquiet among the spectators, the ship is in rags, wraith-like against the dying light. It will soon cross over.

Creative response to the Viking Ship Museum

Bygdøy Peninsular, Tuesday 28th October 2014

Last week I visited Oslo. It’s my third visit to Norway’s capital since a close friend took up residence there. One of the ways I justified taking time out of my university reading week was by visiting the Viking Ship Museum. Since reading the Prose Edda I have been absorbed by the sagas and the people who wrote them, so we trekked out to the pretty Bygdøy peninsular thumbing the Oslo Fjord. The ships are housed in a cruciform building. As you walk inside, you're taken aback by the immediacy and the enormity of the Oseberg burial ship. It looms over you as you buy your ticket.

The cross shape acts as four antechambers containing the three Viking burial ships (Oseberg, Gokstad and Tune) and much of the content discovered inside them.

Oseberg Ship 

The Oseberg ship is housed in the nave of the building and has an ornate bow and stern and images of sea-serpents carved into the main body. The Gokstad ship and the remains of the two larger vessels live in the north transept, the Tune ship and three smaller craft in the chancel, and the sledges, various textiles and other artefacts in the south transept. There are long galleries for people to see inside all three ships. The space has an acoustic, that invokes the song-like metre of the Norwegian language. 

The museum has preserved sledges, ornate bridals, boots, buckets for blueberries, troughs for rye flour and cooking equipment that were buried with the occupants of the ships. The peacock feathers and the boots were the most surprising and intriguing of the archaeological finds. 

The museum made no secret of the fact that many of the archaeological finds discovered in the Oseberg dig are endangered due to the original conservation method of using hot alum. They are finely varnished on the outside and rotting on the inside. There's an article on the Viking Ship Museum website if you're interested called Can the Oseberg Viking finds be Saved? It would be sad to see these last material links to Viking culture disintegrate. 

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first five photographs by Ka Man Mak

Norroway Over The Foam

Recently, I stumbled across this queer little travel account of Norway from the Peeps at Many Lands series. I found it in the second hand bookshop hidden away in the Lanhydrock stable block. I was attracted by the Norway connection and pulled it out not expecting much. However, I was charmed by the cover, so I flicked through and discovered that there were lots of illustrated plates among some entertainingly colonial prose by A.F. Mockler-Ferryman. The landscapes are more skilfully drawn but there’s something strangely crude and engrossing in the pictures of people.

 They're by Nico Jungman who was a popular Anglo-Dutch painter at the turn of the 19^th/20^th Century. He was also involved in another book called Norway, a longer work written by his wife Beatrice and illustrated by himself. There’s a wonderful image of Jungman painting in the first chapter. This paragraph encapsulates a brilliant reflection of adoration and irony for her artist husband. 

"In Trondhjem it rained all day and all night, and the inhabitants cheerfully told us that it was always so. Nico, however, painted in the rain, enveloped in mackintoshes and encompassed by umbrellas, and was much disgusted to find that he attracted no attention at all. Accustomed as I am to be an object of inquisitive interest to the inhabitants of small Dutch towns, I was rather relieved to be taken so absolutely for granted in Norway, in spots unfrequented even by ardent fishermen."*

I’d love to find a copy. Both books are available at Project Gutenberg with all the illustrations.

These are a handful of my favourite Jungman illustrations. They’re strange works, relying heavily on the contemporary trend of Volks art.  I think the writing and the art offer an interesting insight into the outsider dilemma that people documenting foreign lands face. How do you avoid cliché and generalisation when looking, so briefly, into the snow globe?  

*Norway, Beatrice Jungman, 1905, Project Gutenberg