Bygdøy

The Bygdøy Peninsula is just west of Oslo and is the site of several popular attractions, mostly based on famous boats -- Viking Ships, Fram, Kon Tiki, and a more generic maritime museum -- but also the large outdoor Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (Folkemuseum).

We took the water taxi over from the downtown waterfront and walked with the small tourist crowd through the neighborhood to the museums - two of them, at least.

The Viking Ship Museum is built around three boats, all well preserved, but in various states of restoration, along with a collection of other Viking era artifacts - wagons, figures, tools, and so forth.

These are very old ships - roughly 1000 years - and are a pretty important part of Norwegian and European history. And given that Vikings visited and traded with the Middle East, that they changed the human landscape of northern Europe and influenced the course of Medieval Christianity, and that ships like these reached Newfoundland, I guess they're an important part of world history, too. Of course, they also gave rise to thousands of high school mascots and a fair number of professional sports teams as well.

Given my Scottish-British roots, some of that history must I have influenced me, but ultimately my strongest connection with these ships dates back 50 years, when I visited them as a kid. Not that I remember that any better than when they raided my clan's coastal village in 920 AD.

The Folkemuseum is sort of a Norwegian Sturbridge Village, although it included a much broader scope of historical architecture and culture ... including a gas station and a timeline of 20th century apartment buildings. My favorite feature was a restored (brought in pieces from some other part of the country) stave church. We had seen a few along our route, with Lom (earlier post) perhaps the most impressive, but had missed out on some of the better known examples and had not had a chance to see inside any.