Norwegian Folk, Kon-Tiki, and Fram Museums

After my morning activities of exploring Vigeland sculptures and Frogner Park, I took a short city bus ride to the peninsula containing the sights I saw this afternoon, the Norwegian Folk, Kon-Tiki, and Fram museums.

Norwegian Folk Museum

The Norwegian Folk Museum is primarily a bunch of old (I think mostly in the 200- 300-year-old range) buildings brought from various regions of Norway and plunked down, well-spaced on some rugged otherwise green space.

I’ve been to something similar in Stockholm. They call theirs Skansen. That visit was years before I started this journal. So don’t bother looking for it here. That said, if you want to read every page of this journal fruitlessly hunting for it, be my guest.

Although, come to think of it, I loved Stockholm. I’d like to go back one day. So if you’re reading this page well after I wrote it, who knows, maybe there be a post about Skansen by then. Have at it.

But this isn’t about Skansen in Stockholm. It’s about the Norwegian Folk Museum in Oslo. Curse you for distracting me.

The shipped-in structures are mostly small, rustic residential log buildings. Some have sod roofs. There are also some other small farm-related buildings.

The structures are geographically organized based on the region in Norway they came from. All the buildings from each region are grouped together. In each section, a sign on a pole stuck in the ground provides information on that region. Tags on the buildings tell the purpose the structure served and gives its rough age.

I hope the above didn’t make it sound as though the structures are cheek-to-jowl. They’re not. Some are relatively close neighbours. But most have a decent amount of space between them.

And the structures aren’t in neat rows. They appear to be relatively randomly plunked down within their respective geographic sections.

The Norwegian Folk Museum schedules performances throughout the day. For example, I saw a ten-minute Norwegian music and dance show with players wearing traditional clothing. There were three performers, one man and two women. There were only two musical instruments, an eight-string fiddle, which is traditional in Norway, and a Jew’s harp. One woman played the fiddle. The man played the Jew’s harp. However, there was only one instrument used during each number. The other two performers danced while the third played his or her instrument.

Before the show, the man blew on a horn that looked like a straightened-out shofar. However, the man said in no uncertain terms that this was not a musical instrument. Farmers used it to signal information to people or animals in the valley. One of the women, I forget if it was the fiddler, also sang a short Norwegian folk song, during which there was no dancing.

Moving on from the show, I stumbled on a blacksmith working in one of the buildings. There were already a few visitors there. When I entered the small building, he was busy pumping an ingenious bellows to intensify his fire, in which he had a flat metal rod heating up.

The blacksmith said nothing while I was there, and didn’t appear to be inclined to say anything. I would have enjoyed it if he had said a few words. For example, I would have greatly appreciated it if he had said, “I’m about to take these tongs, pick up the red hot metal from the fire, and carry it to that vice on the other side of the room. So, if you’re standing in the path from where I am now to the vice it would be a good idea if you move.”

He didn’t say that. I did manage to get out of the way in time. But I felt the heat of the metal as it moved past me closely.

With the metal in the vice, he banged a dent into it before he had to take it back to the fire to heat it again. I didn’t stay long enough to find out what he was making.

In addition to the rustic, shipped-in buildings, there are some larger buildings bordering a square near the entrance to the “museum.” (I put “museum” in quotes, not to suggest that it’s not a museum, but because it’s mostly an open-air museum, which isn’t standard for museums.)

The larger buildings contain exhibits that weren’t open-air. One holds traditional clothing, furniture, tableware, and other items from the different regions and periods (1600-1914) represented at the museum.

The other building contains mostly old photographs. One room had a temporary exhibit that displayed photographs of, not Norway, but America by an American photographer. Don’t ask me why.

Kon-Tiki Museum

Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian anthropologist lived on a Polynesian island with his wife for a year in 1937-38. There, he noticed statues that looked very similar to statues found in South America. His wife noticed that waves always struck the eastern shore of the island, not the west. The prevailing theory at the time was that the Polynesian people originally arrived from Asia. But based on these observations, Heyerdahl posited that they might have come over in boats from South America.

Experts didn’t believe that because they thought boats of the type available at that time couldn’t have completed the journey because they wouldn’t have stood up long enough to make it across the wide, rough Pacific seas. Heyerdahl wanted to prove that it was possible.

So he built a raft built from balsa wood logs lashed together with rope. The raft also had a mast that supported a large sail.

People advised Heyerdahl and his crew not to undertake the voyage. When he and his crew insisted, people strongly recommended they get their affairs in order and say a proper farewell to their loved ones. The experts said the primitive-style ropes lashing the logs together would hold for fourteen days at the very most, not nearly long enough to make it across the Pacific.

But Heyerdahl set out from Peru in the raft he named the Kon-Tiki and he made it to the other side of the Pacific in 101 days, surviving on fish, coconuts, and sweet potatoes. It turns out that the ropes wore grooves into the wood and this, in turn, protected the ropes. So, while Heyerdahl didn’t prove that the original Polynesians did indeed originally migrate from South America, he showed that they could have.

Subsequently, when DNA testing became available, DNA tests showed that native Polynesians had some genes that are common in Asians. But they also found some DNA typical of South America. So it’s possible that ancient Polynesians came from both sides of the Pacific and merged there.

The original Kon-Tiki raft is on display in the Kon-Tiki Museum, along with a lot of text about Heyerdahl, the raft, and his voyage.

Not satisfied with proving that the ancients could have crossed the Pacific, he wanted to prove that it was possible to sail across the Atlantic in boats available to ancient Egyptians. So he built a boat constructed of reeds. He called his first boat of that construction the Ra. He then built another called the Ra II and successfully sailed it across the Atlantic.

The Ra II is also on display at the Kon-Tiki Museum.

I assumed that both boats had to be reproductions. Nope. I asked. They are the original boats. Very cool.

Fram Museum

The Fram Museum is across the street from the Kon-Tiki Museum. It’s another boat museum.

The Fram is a 125-foot steam- and sail-powered boat that Norwegian explorers Roald Amundsen and Fridtjof Nansen used to explore the Arctic and Antarctic. The Fram now sits on dry land in one of the two buildings of the Fram Museum.

Walkways at various levels surround the ship and information panels tell the story of the ship and its voyages.

From the top level, visitors, such as me, can board the deck of the Fram and, from there, climb down below decks and take a look around.

You might have noticed that I said, “One of the two buildings of the Fram Museum.” Getting to the other building requires walking through a short tunnel. Climbing up the steps to the other building brings you to another ship within a building. This one is the Gjoa. It’s a somewhat smaller, but still good-sized ship that was used to search for the Northwest Passage. Those too were harrowing expeditions.

Again there is plenty of descriptive text in the building and visitors can climb onto and into the ship. This building also contains an exhibition of photographs.

Not far from the Kon-Tiki and Fram Museums, there’s also normally a Viking ships museum. But they’re building a new museum and they closed the old one for a couple of years until the new one is complete. My visit is in the midst of those couple of years. Because, of course, it is.

The Fram and Kon-Tiki museums are at the end of the peninsula that the Norwegian Folk Museum is also on. Right behind the Fram Museum, there’s a ferry dock. I caught a ferry from there into the city centre rather than taking the bus back to end my activities for the day.