Museum sights in Norway
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Norwegian Folk Museum
Norway’s largest open-air museum and one of Oslo’s premier attractions is the Norwegian Folk Museum. The museum includes more than 140 buildings, mostly from the 17th and 18th centuries, gathered from around the country, rebuilt and organised according to region of origin. Paths wind past old barns, ele-vated stabbur (raised storehouses) and rough-timbered farmhouses with sod roofs sprouting wildflowers. The Gamlebyen (Old Town) section is a reproduction of an early-20th-century Norwegian town and includes a village shop and old petrol station; in summer (daily except Saturday) you can see weaving and pottery-making demonstrations. Another highlight is the restored st…
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Vikingskipshuset
Even in repose, there is something intimidating about the sleek, dark hulls of the Viking ships Oseberg and Gokstad, which is why visitors to this unforgettable Vikingskipshuset often find themselves whispering. Only a few boards and fragments remain of a third ship, the Tune, built around the same time as the Gokstad and excavated in 1867 from the Oslofjord region. All were built of oak in the 9th century; the ships were pulled ashore and used as tombs for nobility, who were buried with all they expected to need in the hereafter: jewels, furniture, food, servants, intricately carved carriages and sleighs, tapestries and fierce-looking figures.
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Kon-Tiki Museum
A favourite among children, the worthwhile Kon-Tiki Museum is dedicated to the balsa raft Kon-Tiki, which Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl sailed from Peru to Polynesia in 1947. The museum also displays the totora reed boat Ra II, built by Aymara people on the Bolivian island of Suriqui in Lake Titicaca. Heyerdahl used it to cross the Atlantic in 1970. For a full rundown on the life of this extraordinary explorer who achieved a lot in his lifetime, see the boxed text, p132.
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Polar Museum
The quaint, Arctic-themed Polar Museum has displays on local hunting and fishing traditions. There's extensive coverage of the 38 winter hunting expeditions in Svalbard undertaken by local explorer Hilmar Nøis, who also collected most of the exhibits.
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Norwegian Glacier Museum
For the story on flowing ice and how it has sculpted the Norwegian landscape, visit this superbly executed museum, 3km inland from the ferry jetty.
The hands-on exhibits will delight children. You can learn how fjords are formed, see an excellent 20-minute multiscreen audiovisual presentation on Jostedalsbreen (so impressive that audiences often break into spontaneous applause at the end), wind your way through a tunnel that penetrates the mock-ice and even see the tusk of a Siberian woolly mammoth, which met an icy demise 30,000 years ago. There’s also an exhibit on the 5000-year-old ‘Ice Man’ corpse, which was found on the Austrian-Italian border in 1991. The newest …
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Norwegian Petroleum Museum
We could (and have) spend hours in this state-of-the-art museum, one of Norway’s best. Filled with high-tech interactive displays, gigantic models and authentic reconstructions, its many highlights include a terrific 3-D film covering Norway’s geological history, a documentary by former Lonely Planet TV presenter Ian Wright, simulators, a petrodome recreating millions of years of natural history and an amazing model of ‘Ekofisk city’. Tracing the history of oil formation and exploration in the North Sea from discovery in 1969 until the present, the museum nicely balances the technical side of oil exploration and extraction with archive footage and newspapers of significan…
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Canning Museum
Don’t miss Canning Museum; housed in an old cannery, it’s one of Stavanger’s most appealing museums. Before oil there were sardines and Stavanger was once home to more than half of Norway’s canning factories; by 1922 the city’s canneries provided 50% of the town’s employment. Here you’ll get the lowdown on canning brisling and fish balls and the exhibits take you through the whole 12-stage process from salting, through to threading, smoking, decapitating and packing. There are no labels but there’s a handy brochure available at the entrance and guides are always on hand to answer your questions or crank up some of the old machines. Upstairs, there’s a fascinating display …
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Folk Museum
West of the centre, the Folk Museum is one of the best of its kind in Norway. The indoor exhibition, Livsbilder (Images of Life) in the main building, displays artefacts in use over the last 150 years – from clothing to school supplies to bicycles – and has a short multimedia presentation. The rest of the museum, with over 60 period buildings, is open air, adjoining the ruins of King Sverre’s castle and giving fine hilltop views of the city. Houses, the post office, the dentist’s and other shops splay around the central market square in the urban section. There are farm buildings from rural Trøndelag, the tiny 12th-century Haltdalen stave church and a couple of small m…
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Frognerparken
Frognerparken, which has as its centrepiece Vigeland Park, is an extraordinary open-air showcase of work by Norway's best-loved sculptor, Gustav Vigeland. Vigeland Park is brimming with nearly 212 granite and bronze Vigeland works. His highly charged work ranges from entwined lovers and tranquil elderly couples to contempt-ridden beggars. His most renowned work, Sinataggen (the 'Little Hot-Head'), portrays a London child in particularly ill humour.
It's a great place to visit in the evening after other sights have closed.
Near the southern entrance to the park lies Oslo City Museum (Oslo Bymuseum) housed in the 18th-century Frogner Manor (built on the site of a Viking-era …
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Norske Sjøfartsmuseum
The author Roald Dahl once said that in Norway, everyone seems to have a boat, and there is no better place to explore that theory than at the Norske Sjøfartsmuseum. The museum depicts Norway’s relationship with the sea, including the fishing and whaling industry, the seismic fleet (which searches for oil and gas), shipbuilding and wreck salvaging. Outside the museum there’s a seamen’s mem-orial commemorating the 4700 Norwegian sailors killed in WWII, and alongside is Roald Amundsen’s ship Gjøa, the first ship to completely transit the Northwest Passage (from 1903 to 1906). Other features of the museum include Norway’s largest collection of maritime art, a dried…
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VEFSN Museum
A combined ticket (Nkr30) gives entry to both branches of Mosjøen’s museum. In Sjøgata, the Jakobsensbrygga warehouse is an excellent small museum that portrays, via some particularly evocative photo blow-ups, the history of Mosjøen from the early 19th century onwards. There’s an English guide-pamphlet for each section. Northeast of the centre, the rural building collection features 12 farmhouses, shops and the like from the 18th and 19th centuries, which you can view from the exterior. It too has a pamphlet in English. Adjacent is the Dolstad Kirke (1735), built on the site of a medieval church dedicated to St Michael. If it’s closed, ask for the key at the …
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Alta Museum
Alta Museum is in Hjemmeluft, at the western end of town. The cliffs around it, a Unesco World Heritage site, are incised with around 5000 late–Stone Age carvings, dating from 6000 to 2000 years ago. As the sea level decreased after the last ice age, carvings were made at progressively lower heights. Themes include hunting scenes, fertility symbols, bears, moose, reindeer and crowded boats. The works have been highlighted with red-ochre paint (thought to have been the original colour) and are connected by 3km of boardwalks that start at the main building. The short loop (1.2km; allow around 45 minutes, including viewing time) is the most visited. You can also graft on a s…
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Emanuel Vigeland Museum
For a freakish sensory overload, enter the Emanuel Vigeland Museum containing his life's work and mausoleum - a specially designed vaulted chamber where you duck under a low door (and thus pay tribute to his ashes, interned above) to enter an eerie nave with almost zero lighting.
As your eyes adjust to the dark, you'll begin to discern enormous frescoes reaching up to a distant ceiling. These depict human life from conception to death (sometimes erotically). Entirely surfaced with smooth stone, the bizarre chamber has such incredible acoustics that visitors are required to wear cloth booties to deaden the echoing thuds created by the slightest footstep. Overheard cell pho…
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Historical Museum
The highly recommended Historical Museum is actually three museums under one roof. Most interesting is the ground floor National Antiquities Collection (Oldsaksamlingen), with displays of Viking-era coins, jewellery and ornaments. Look out for the 9th-century Hon treasure, the largest such find in Scandinavia (2.5kg). A section on medieval religious art includes the doors and richly painted ceiling of the Ål stave church (built around 1300). The 2nd level has an Arctic exhibit and the Myntkabinettet, a collection of the earliest Norwegian coins from as early as AD 995. The 2nd level and top floor hold the Ethnographic Museum, with changing exhibitions on Asia, Africa and…
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Munch Museum
Edvard Munch (1863–1944) fans won’t want to miss the Munch Museum, which is dedicated to his life’s work and has most of the pieces not contained in the National Gallery. Security is high in the museum since the 2004 theft of The Scream and The Madonna, though both paintings were recovered in 2006. The museum provides a comprehensive look at the artist’s work, from dark (The Sick Child) to light (Spring Ploughing). With over 11,000 paintings, 4500 watercolours and 18,000 prints and sketching books bequeathed to the city by Munch himself, this is a landmark collection. To get there, take the T-bane to Tøyen, followed by a five-minute signposted walk.
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Vigeland Museum
For an in-depth look at Gustav Vigeland’s work, visit the Vigeland Museum, opposite the southern entrance to Frognerparken. It was built by the city in the 1920s as a home and workshop for the sculptor, in exchange for the donation of a significant proportion of his life’s work, and it contains his early collection of statuary and monuments to public figures, as well as plaster moulds, woodblock prints and sketches. When he died in 1943, his ashes were deposited in the tower and the museum was opened to the public four years later. Visiting the artist’s private apartments on the 3rd floor is possible, but must be arranged in advance (tours per group cost Nkr700 on top o…
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Norsk Folkemuseum
This fascinating open-air museum contains around 150 buildings from different regions, mostly dating as far back as the 13th century. Though the buildings themselves are authentic, they're juxtaposed in a Disney-eqsue recreation of a fictive landscape. Even so, if you drink a few Aass beers and squint, you'll swear you've stepped back a few hundred years.
You'll wander past old banks, pharmacies, post offices, barns and farmhouses and see folk dancing and weaving and people dressed in festive costumes. The Old Town section reproduces an early 20th-century town and contains a petrol station, a general store, and a huge display of old toys, costumes, tools and appliances fr…
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Roald Amundsen Centre
The renowned and noted polar explorer Roald Amundsen, who in 1911 was the first man to reach the South Pole, was born in 1872 at Hvidsten, midway between Fredrikstad and Sarpsborg. Although the family moved to Oslo when Roald was still a small child, the family home in Hvidsten, which was the base for a small shipbuilding and shipping business, is now the Roald Amundsen Centre, which is dedicated to the man’s life and expeditions. Standing surrounded by these quiet fields of southern Norway, it seems perhaps not so surprising that Amundsen set off to seek adventure so far from home. The centre is signposted about 11km east of Fredrikstad, along the Rv111 towards Sarpsborg…
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Henrik Ibsenmuseet
Author, playwright and so-called ‘Father of Modern Drama’, Henrik Ibsen was born in Skien on 20 March 1828. In 1835 the family fell on hard times and moved out to the farm Venstøp, 5km north of Skien, where they stayed for seven years. The 1815 farmhouse has now been converted into the excellent Henrik Ibsenmuseet. There are some terrific audio-visual displays in the former barn, while guides (some of whom are Ibsen actors) show you around the family home. Ask also about Ibsen theatre performances here or at the tourist office, or check out the programme at the Theater Ibsen, which is in the town centre, a block back from the harbour.
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Ibsenhuset Museum
Norway’s favourite playwright, Henrik Ibsen, arrived here in January 1844. The house where he worked as a pharmacist’s apprentice, and where he lived and first cultivated his interest in writing, has been converted into the Ibsenhuset Museum. It contains a re-created pharmacy and many of the writer’s belongings and is one of southern Norway’s more interesting museums, with everything you needed to know from Ibsen’s life and work. There’s also a library with the writer’s complete works. His 1861 poem Terje Vigen and his 1877 drama Pillars of Society take place in the Skerries offshore from Grimstad.
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Kristiansand Cannon Museum
The Kristiansand Cannon Museum, 8km south of town, preserves the Germans’ heavy Vara Battery, which, along with an emplacement at Hanstholm in Denmark, ensured German control of the strategic Skagerrak Straits during WWII. At each end, four 337-tonne, 38cm cannons, reportedly the second-heaviest guns in the world and with a range of 55km controlled traffic along either end of the strait, while the unprotected middle zone was heavily mined. In the autumn of 1941, over 1400 workers and 600 soldiers occupied this site. Visitors to the museum can see the big guns as well as bunkers, barracks and munitions storage (including some daunting 800kg shells).
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Maihaugen Folk Museum
Norway’s finest folk museum is the expansive, open-air Maihaugen Folk Museum. Rebuilt like a small village, the collection of around 180 buildings includes the transplanted Garmo stave church, traditional Gudbrandsdalen homes and shops, and 27 buildings from the farm Bjørnstad. The three main sections encompass rural and town architecture, with a further section on 20th-century architecture. The life’s work of local dentist Anders Sandvig, it also houses temporary exhibitions in the modern exhibition hall and a permanent exhibition ‘We made the road’, a fascinating journey through Norwegian history.
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Hanseatic Museum
This terrific museum provides a window onto the world of Hanseatic traders. Housed in a rough-timber building from 1704, it starkly reveals the contrast between the austere living and working conditions of Hanseatic merchant sailors and apprentices, and the lifestyles of the management. Highlights include the manager’s office, quarters, private liquor cabinet and summer bedroom; the apprentices’ quarters where beds were shared by two men; the fish storage room, which pressed and processed over a million pounds (450,000kg) of fish a month; and the fiskeskrue, or fish press, which pressed the fish into barrels.
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Norwegian Industrial Workers' Museum
This museum, 7km west of Rjukan, is in the Vemork power station, which was the world’s largest when completed in 1911. These days it honours the Socialist Workers’ Party, which reached its height of Norwegian activities in the 1950s. You won’t want to miss the 30-minute film If Hitler Had the Bomb, describing the epic events of war-time Telemark, nor the miniature power station in the main hall. There’s also an interesting exhibition about the worldwide race in the 1930s and ’40s to make an atom bomb. It consists of short films, touch screen exhibits, photos and dioramas.
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Isegran
Fredrikstad Museum has another section on Isegran, an islet across the Glomma. Norse sagas mention the 13th-century fortress of Isegran, which later became a further line of defence against Sweden in the mid-17th century. The ruins of a stone (originally wood) tower remain visible at the eastern end of the island. It’s also the site of a small museum on local boatbuilding (from the time when boats were lovingly handcrafted from wood). Boats run between Isegran and Gamlebyen or the modern centre (Nkr6). By road or on foot, access is from Rv108, about 600m south of Fredrikstad city centre.
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