Karl Johans Gate. History Museum.

Remember that pedestrianized shopping street I stumbled on when out for a walk on my first day here in Oslo? It’s called Karl Johans Gate. Both the guidebooks I’m using on this trip recommend it as a sight to see. This morning, I walked the length of it rather than just the half I strolled along that first day.

A couple of blocks from one end of Karl Johans Gate is the Historical Museum. A visit to it capped off my morning, the last morning during which I’ll have time to engage in any activities of note in Oslo before I move on to my next stop in Norway. (Waking up, going to the bathroom, and then going for breakfast might be of note to me, but I’m not going to note them here.)

Karl Johans Gate

Karl Johans Gate is maybe about a dozen blocks long. It’s a straight run from across the street from Oslo’s Central Station to the Royal Palace.

A couple of blocks in from the end I started at, the Central Station end, off to one side of the street sits the Oslo Cathedral (Oslo Domkirke). I took a detour to pop in there.

Oslo Cathedral

The Oslo Cathedral (Oslo Domkirke) is a minimally adorned church. The walls are almost entirely a monochrome off-white colour.

It’s a relatively small, cross-shaped cathedral. Cross-shaped is fairly standard for cathedrals, but here, to my eye, the two bars of the cross appeared to be of roughly equal length. I didn’t bring a measuring tape, so I could be wrong about that. But, if memory serves, in the cathedrals I’ve seen, the combined length of the two opposing transepts is usually noticeably shorter than the length of the central nave through to the front of the church.

I said “minimally adorned,” but the cathedral is not devoid of decoration. There are some splendid stained glass windows by Emanuel Vigeland, younger brother of Oslo’s beloved sculptor, Gustav Vigeland. I guess art was the family business.

The wood ceiling is painted in subdued tones with religious themes. And some crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling.

Above the pulpit hangs a very large, very heavy-looking crown. I saw no cables supporting it from the ceiling. It appears to be attached solely to the adjacent wall.

I tend to trust engineers and their judgement of what it takes to support a heavy weight. But you’d have to have a lot more faith than I have to preach there for any length of time without significantly raising my already high ambient level of nervousness.

On the other hand, I doubt that will ever be a problem for me because I don’t think many cathedrals allow atheists to preach to their flocks.

Studenterlunden

Off to one side of Karl Johans Gate, down at the Royal Palace end, is Studenterlunden (Students’ Grove) Park. The park is about three blocks long and one block wide.

Studenterlunden contains lots of mature, stately trees lining the sidewalks. I imagine their shade is greatly appreciated on warm, sunny days. That aspect offered no benefit today, an overcast and slightly cool day.

Studenterlunden also contains two fountains. One is in the middle of a large, rectangular, stepped pool. The other is a domed fountain in a circular pool not all that much wider than the diameter at the base of the dome. Both are attractive.

There are also a number of statues in the park, including some by Gustav Vigeland.

It’s a very enjoyable central Oslo park.

Oh, by the way …

Off to one side of the park, close to one end, sit three independent, single-person toilet structures. I didn’t approach them closely enough to see if they were free or if you needed to drop in some coins to use them.

Each structure is painted a different colour. On the side I viewed them, from left to right, they were blue, white, and red, the colours of the French flag.

Each structure has a sign on the side saying they are toilets. And each has an oval-shaped sign on top of it. The left-most sign reads, “liberté.” The middle sign reads, “égalité.” And the right-most sign reads, you can probably guess, “fraternité.” “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” is, of course, the French national motto.

I have no idea as to the state of Norwegian-French relations, but I don’t know why that is in a park in central Oslo. Don’t get me wrong. I think cities should consider public toilets to be essential infrastructure. If you desperately need a toilet, you’ll be extremely appreciative of anyone who has anything to do with positioning one where and when you need it. That notwithstanding, I don’t know about you, but if a city or country feels inclined to honour Canada, my home and native land, I’d rather they do it with something other than toilets. A statue, a fountain, an edifice, or something of that nature would be terrific.

Across the street from the park, not far from the Royal Palace sits the central Oslo campus of the University of Oslo. The buildings are quite impressive. (I read that the university also has a newer campus on the outskirts of the city. I don’t know what the buildings on that campus look like.)

The Royal Palace end of Karl Johans Gate is not entirely pedestrianized. The Grand Hotel sits on the side of the street across from the park. Taxis serve the hotel. Some other vehicles also drive on the street. Yet there is an icon sign at least one of the intersections that I saw indicating no vehicles are allowed on Karl Johans Street. I don’t know who qualifies for exemptions to that rule, but traffic was very sparse, so it wasn’t much of an issue.

The central station end of the street is not entirely pedestrianized 24 hours a day either. It appears that delivery vehicles are allowed on it during some hours to supply the stores. I don’t know when those hours are other than it’s when I was there this morning.

Historical Museum

The Historical Museum (Historisk Museum) is a mid-sized museum that’s part of the University of Oslo. The permanent collection spans three small floors, including the first, which also contains the lobby and a small gift shop. A fourth floor also provides space for temporary exhibits.

Exhibits on the first level include art from Norwegian stave churches, some bones from a few Norwegian animals that helped to shape civilization here, and artifacts from Norwegian cultural history, including drinking horns and Christian statues.

The second level contains various Inuit artifacts from the early 1900s brought back by Norwegian Artic explorer Roald Amundsen from Uqsuqtuuq, a hamlet in Nunavut, Canada. Amundsen named Uqsuqtuuq “Gjoa Haven.” Uqsuqtuuq is the Inukitut name. The second floor also contains items from the Polynesian Islands.

The top level houses the museum’s Viking collection and, more broadly, its Norwegian collection, along with its Middle Eastern collection.

By coincidence, I came to the museum in time to spend some time with its collections and arrive at the room containing the Viking collection just before a free English-language tour of the room was about to start. The room is not huge. It contains about a couple dozen small display cases. The guide went through and described the artifacts in them and their significance.

Some of the first cases contain treasures that the Vikings brought back from their expeditions. The origins of these pieces allowed experts to confirm where Vikings had gone. Based on the artifacts on display at the Historical Museum, they ranged through Europe and into North America.

The guide explained that the Vikings liked gold, and there were gold pieces on display, but she said they needed silver. According to her, Scandinavia did not have a coin-based economy until the 11th century. Instead, their currency was silver, but not silver coins. They traded based on the weight of silver as the medium of exchange.

Because they didn’t use coins, when Vikings brought back silver coins from their conquests, once they had enough, they melted them down and forged them into things like bracelets. Those bracelets could then be used to trade for goods and services.

Coins were used from the 11th century and the museum has a collection of them. But Scandinavians back then didn’t have small denomination coins. If what they wanted to buy cost less than the coin they had, they’d cut a chunk off the coin. Consequently, the museum’s collection also includes partial coins.

The back half of the room holds cases containing items of war. According to the guide, every Viking was required by law to have at least one axe, spear, or sword. The museum has a few of each on display.

(Just to pat myself on the back, I didn’t type the above paragraph until a few hours after I left the museum, but I remembered the three items—axe, spear, and sword—without jotting them down. Knowing how bad my memory is, I used an easily remembered mnemonic to do that. You know the old saying, “To assume makes an ass of you and me?” The mnemonic I used is buried in there. You figure it out.)

The museum also has on display what it claims is the best-preserved Viking helmet ever found. At this point in the tour, someone asked the age-old question, “Did Viking helmets really have horns.”

I’ve read about this a few times in a few different contexts. Some were in guidebooks for places I’ve visited with a Viking history. Another was in a non-fiction, but very humorously written history of the early British monarchy, the name and author of which escapes me at the moment. Most of the references I read, including the latter, said Viking helmets definitely didn’t have horns. One or two said, maybe, but the answer is unknown.

The guide said that there may have been cultures that used helmets with horns, but almost certainly not the Vikings. But she said, then again, there is some chance they did but they’ve just never been found because the horns, which would have been animal horns taken and affixed to the helmets, would have decayed much more quickly than the metal helmets.

So, the Vikings very likely didn’t have helmets with the cartoonish horns that modern caricatures assign to them. This reminded me of my trip to Dublin a while back. Dublin has a Viking history. In one of my posts on that Dublin trip, I noted that I’d seen amphibious tour vehicles tooling around town. Every single one of the customers in the vehicles wore the modern stereotype of horned Viking helmets. I certainly hope the tour company provides the helmets for use during the tour because I don’t even want to consider the possibility that there are tourists who haul those large, gaudy things around with them.

I said in that note that I might have taken the tour, but there was no way I was going to wear one of the buffoonish helmets, so I didn’t. Now I’m reasonably certain that, not only were the helmets buffoonish, but they were also historically inaccurate. Harrumph.

After taking the tour of the Viking room at the Historical Museum, it was time for lunch, meaning it’s time to end this post on my morning’s activities.