Bryggen’s and Hanseatic Museums, St. Mary’s Church

Surprisingly, I slept in this morning in Bergen, Norway. At least, it was what counts as sleeping in for me. Others may disagree.

What with my usual morning torpor being present despite the longer sleep, by the time I got up, showered, dressed, and went to the nearby cafe for a light breakfast, it was after 10:30 before I got on with my morning’s tourist activities.

Consequently, I didn’t pack much into the morning, much less than the upcoming list makes it seem. I visited three sights tightly clustered around my hotel: The Bryggen’s Museum, the Hanseatic Museum and St. Mary’s Church. They were all relatively small.

But first, a weather report. Yesterday’s clement weather didn’t survive beyond yesterday. When I set out, it was raining fairly heavily. By the end of the morning, it tapered off to just a drizzle, but it never completely stopped.

The forecast calls for more light rain throughout the day. Hopefully, the forecast called softly and the weather, not hearing the forecast, will deliver at least a smidgen of clearing.

I know that’s wishful thinking. But I’ve found weather forecasts here in Norway so far in my trip to be highly unreliable. Even what a weather app says is happening right now is sometimes false. And more than a couple of hours in the future? Forget about it. So there is some reason for hope.

Bryggen’s Museum

Bryggen’s Museum is relatively small. It’s a modern building that’s, I believe, in historic Bryggen on the site of buildings that burned down.

The Law of the Land at Bryggen’s Museum

When I was there, the upper floor of the two levels of exhibit space at Bryggen’s Museum held a temporary exhibition celebrating the 750th anniversary of “The Law of the Land.”

In 1274, King Magnus VI Hakonsson presented his Law of the Land, which governed all of Norway and replaced independent provincial legal codes. The Law of the Land was approved by the four regional assemblies.

I was impressed with the need for regional assemblies to approve the document. It doesn’t fit with the image I have of Medieval kings. I would have thought King Magnus would have said, “Here’s the way it’s going to be. Accept it, or off with your head! Your choice.”

Then again, for all I know, the king said to the assemblies, “Approve this or off with all of your heads!” But I don’t think so because of something else I learned at the museum. I’ll get to that, but I think I need to explain a little bit about the exhibition first.

It was text-heavy. Panels gave considerable information about The Law of the Land, the history around it, its components, and its effect. Artifacts included original old legal texts, many fragmentary, from both before and after The Law of the Land, art and architectural elements from the time, daggers, and other items relevant to the period.

Okay. That’s enough background. Back to why I doubt that King Magnus threatened decapitation, or anything similar, to get the assemblies to approve The Law of the Land.

One of the information panels provided some information about the penal system at the time of the Law of the Land. It mentioned little about capital punishment and, in fact, even jailing was little used. Fines to compensate for any loss due to the crimes and to fill the king’s coffers, were the order of the day. It was also felt that the shame of being caught committing a crime was a deterrent.

Even a murder conviction usually didn’t result in capital punishment. If the perpetrator immediately took responsibility for the murder, a large fine sufficed for the penalty unless the murder was particularly vile. If the perpetrator didn’t take responsibility or if the murder was particularly vile, it was considered premeditated and an inexpiable crime. (Okay. I admit I didn’t know the word “inexpiable” before today. It means so bad as to be unable to make amends.)

Unrepented murder was not the only crime considered to be inexpiable. They also included arson, murder-for-hire, suicide, deliberate mutilation, treason and sedition against the king, counterfeiting, sorcery, and divination.

Um. Suicide? I imagine they waived the penalty if the perpetrator was successful in their crime.

The punishment for an inexpiable crime was confiscation of property and being expelled from society. The signage at the museum said that some texts imply that capital punishment was possible in some cases.

That’s hardly the sort of punishment that fits the brutal medieval stereotype. I guess Norway was a liberal country in the 13th century.

I placed images of a couple of the art pieces from the exhibition here because I wanted to comment on them. Look first at the wooden statue of King Olav. The statue came from the Røldal stave church. Notice Olav’s rosy cheeks, highly arched eyelids and eyebrows, and the hint of a confident smile on his face. I don’t know about you, but he looks like one happy guy to me.

Now look at the triptych painted on the doors of a cabinet. It’s from Trondenes church. the woman on the right is St. Sunniva. The man on the left is St. Olav. King Olaf and St. Olaf are the same person. The king was sainted at some point after his death. I used “King Olav” when referencing the statue and “St. Olav” when referencing the triptych because that’s what the respective labels said.

Look at St. Olav on the triptych. He doesn’t look sad, but the mirth apparent on his face in the sculpture is gone. Other people might see something else, but I see a questioning look in his eyes on the triptych. Did he become a saint and think, what the heck am I doing here? Of course, because you have to be dead to become a saint, that’s a reasonable question.

Then again, maybe his inquisitive look had more to do with the human head lying beside his foot. Maybe the question in his mind was not, “What am I doing here,” but rather, “What is that doing there?”

Archeology at Bryggen’s Museum

The lower of the two exhibition levels at Bryggen’s Museum contains archaeological exhibits including artifacts dug up under Bryggen. I mentioned in my post from yesterday afternoon about the walking tour I went on that fires are a major problem in Bergen, but less so in Bryggen because of the fire prevention measures they took.

However, fires weren’t unheard of in Briggen, and there have even been a few in the modern era. Nobody wants a fire, but one benefit it offered was it provided an opportunity to do archaeological digs without destroying an existing building because the fire took care of that. (Another advantage of one particular fire is I probably would have had to find another hotel had it not happened because the hotel I’m in is built on the site of some Bryggen buildings that burned.)

The Bryggen’s Museum displays some of those dug-up relics, along with descriptive text. Artifacts on display include a laid-out wood foundation and a bit of the wall of a Bryggen building, a skeleton, a separate skull and other bones, pottery, some art, and rune sticks, among others.

I’d heard of rune stones before, but never rune sticks. They are what the name implies. They’re wooden sticks with runes carved into them. The messages on the sticks were eclectic. They included prayers, claims of ownership of objects, protestations of deep love, and just about any message that someone wanted to convey to someone else.

I have one complaint about some of the displays on the archaeological level of Bryggen’s Museum. Several display cases have a rectangular footprint, with the ends being much narrower than the sides. Some of them were quite tall, well above my height, and well above the tallest of people. All four sides of these cases are clear glass.

The information panels that say what each of the pieces in the display case is are are affixed to the outside of the ends of the display case—with the text facing into the case. So, to read the labels I had to look through two pieces of glass. What’s more, I was looking at an angle through one of the sides to see the printing on the display board. And it often wasn’t at eye level. Needless to say, I didn’t read many of the labels in those cases.

Hanseatic Museum

I mentioned the historic Bryggen neighbourhood of Bergen in the post from my first day here and in the post on the walking tour of Bergen that I went on. Bryggen was effectively a trading post established by a society of Germanic merchants, the Hanseatic League, in the 14th century. Bryggen’s Hanseatic Museum comprises some of the buildings formerly of the Hanseatic League that are furnished as they would have been at the time.

The buildings of the museum are not the warehouses that made up most of Bryggen, but rather the clubhouse, if you will, of the Hanseatic League’s outpost in Bryggen. Most of the few rooms on display were assembly rooms of some sort and a cookhouse.

The museum offers free guided tours included with the price of admission. I missed the start of an English language one. The next one was not for a couple of hours so I joined the tour already in progress. Consequently, I missed some of the information.

Things I did learn included that most of the Hanseatic League members who came from Germany to Bergen were apprentices. And those apprentices did almost all of the real work. There were also some administrative people, but most of the other members of the league stayed in Germany.

Beer was the drink of the day for the Hanseatic League in Bryggen, and maybe back at home in Germany as well, I don’t know. Nobody drank water. And children started drinking beer as soon as they were weened off their mothers’ milk.

(The strict fire prevention rules in the warehouses that I mentioned in my write-up of the walking tour couldn’t be as strictly enforced in these buildings because of the activities in them.)

The Hanseatic League had a lot of rules that had to be obeyed. For example, their secrets had to be kept so competitors wouldn’t learn about their practices. For another, when they assembled to do some serious drinking, one person couldn’t drink. He had to stay by a large barrel of water, ready to employ it if a fire broke out.

The cookhouse is a separate building. It has wood walls, but there was a stone floor for cooking on (a series of pots hang over the floor and fires would have been built on the floor), as well as a stone oven.

The apprentices did the cooking. Before they entered the cookhouse they had to remove their shoes and put on clogs. When they left the cookhouse to take the food to the assembly hall they had to take off the clogs and put their shoes back on. The Hanseatic League was worried that some embers might attach to the shoes, which would then be tracked back into the all-wood assembly hall and start a conflagration.

The tour ended outside the museum proper and into a small portion of the general public area of Bryggen. There, the guide talked a bit about the whitewashed stone buildings that I mentioned yesterday. I learned their purpose today. Back in the Hanseatic League days, they used to store important flammable items, such as documents, and their most valuable goods.

Back then, wood was much cheaper than stone building materials, so that’s what they used to construct all of the buildings except these safe storage rooms.

The guide today pointed to a modern sign on one of the doors of one of the stone buildings. The sign said “Bossrom.” It’s not where the boss has his or her office. The guide said that “boss” is the Norwegian word for “garbage.” And “bossrom” means “garbage room.” The guide went on to explain that keeping garbage in a damp, wood building, which doesn’t seal in smells well, can be unpleasant. So, while the Hanseatic League used those buildings to store only their most valuable or flammable items, today some portions of some of them are used for garbage.

The walking tour guide yesterday also said what “bossrom” means, but she didn’t mention the original purpose of the stone buildings or why garbage is kept there now.

Oh, and if you read it, you might remember that I said that the walking tour guide said that Bergen gets, on average, 240 days of rain a year. The Hanseatic Museum guide gave a different number. He said that Bergen gets an average of 280 days of rain a year. I think the correct answer is that Bergen gets a frigging lot of rain.

St. Mary’s Church

St. Mary’s Church is an attractive little basilica beside (or possibly in, I don’t know where the boundary is) Bryggen. It was probably built sometime in the 12th century, but the pamphlet provided at the church suggests that the exact year of construction is in some doubt.

The pillars and some of the walls of St. Mary’s Church are bare stone. Some of the rest of the walls are an off-white colour. There are sculptures affixed to the wall around and behind the altar, along with a colourful altarpiece. There is a faded fresco on one of the side walls and a couple of sculptures on the walls away from the altar.

For me, the most interesting part of St. Mary’s Church is its pulpit. Although, it’s much younger than the church. The pulpit was donated to the church in 1676 by a group of prominent German merchants.

The pulpit cantilevers in the air. The only part on the floor is the bottom of the stairs that angle out and up to it. The full support for the pulpit is whatever is attaching it to the wall it’s beside.

The pulpit is decorated with sculptures of women. One of them is fully topless. Another is breastfeeding a baby, with another young naked child beside her. The other women are fully, modestly clothed.

Below the sculptures of women are sculptures of cherubs depicted as if they are valiantly holding up the pulpit. Above the pulpit, there’s a canopy that looks like a very much larger-than-life version of a Carmen Miranda hat.

St. Mary’s Church is neither large, imposing, extravagant, nor grand. But I very much liked it. Come to think of it, I’m neither large, imposing, extravagant, nor grand. Maybe that’s why I could relate to St. Mary’s Church. Except, of course, for that whole religion thing. I don’t imagine I’ll ever relate to that.