Explore the world oceans - Bygdoy, Oslo's museum island (Museums & Art Galleries in Oslo in general)

Member Name: stmatth

Product:	Museums & Art Galleries in Oslo in general
Date:	18/08/00 (155 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Much to see if you are interested in naval history

Disadvantages: If you are not interested....

Are you an explorer, a discoverer who would have crossed the oceans in search for new lands, if only you had been born at least a hundred years earlier, long before package holidays to the Antarctic were available? If you are fascinated by exploring the oceans, then Bygdoy, the Museum Island in Oslo, is the place for you. In several museums, highlights of Norwegian naval history can be experienced.

Norwegians have always been seafarers - not surprising for a country where you can't get far on land before you are stopped by a mountain, a glacier, or a fjord. Boats are among the most frequent Stone Age rock carvings in Norway. But the first Norwegian impact on European history came with the Vikings - and three fine Viking boats are on display in the Viking Boat Museum. To be sure, those were not any ordinary viking boats, but royal yachts, excavated in royal burial mounds, but in size and building technique similar to the ones that were used to cross the Atlantic and settle Iceland, Greenland and "vinland" (Newfoundland). However, the museum is a bit of the old-fashioned type: When I visited it a few years ago (it may have changed since), the objects were displayed with little background information, and the descriptions were rather short and not supplemented with much visual material, so if your background in Viking history is not so good, you may want to acquire a guide book. Still, the Viking boats themselves are impressive and certainly worth a visit, and the museum shop had a range of very good books on Viking history in several languages.

A real explorer in the modern sense of the word was Roald Amundsen, antarctic explorer, who reached the South Pole before Scott in 1912. His ship, the "Fram", is accessible in another museum on the island. It is an impressive craft, with a specially designed hull strong enough to withstand the pressure when it freezes into the ice, and you can spend a long time admiring the perfect func
tionality of everything on board. It was clearly build for a long voyage to the end of the world, where your survival depends on the competence, experience and foresight of the boatbuilders. The Museum is built around the ship, and you can enter the ship and explore it on your own. On the Galleries around the ship an extensive photographic exhibition about Antarctic research supplements the experience. I must admit that I do not remember whether the descriptions were in Norwegian or in English (at that time, my Norwegian was good enough that it didn't matter for me), but you can buy a nice, detailed an not too expensive booklet about the Fram in several languages which should help you get around, and also makes nice reading afterwards.

An explorer of a different kind was Thor Heyerdahl. He was not out for unknown continents, but for unknown seafaring techniques: He spent his life trying to build ancient sea crafts and repeating the journeys of ancient people, and so he became one of the founding fathers of what is now known as "experimental archaeology". In 1947, he set out to test the theory that Polynesia was originally settled from South America. So he had a balsa raft built - the "Kon-Tiki" - and managed to travel 1000 miles across the Pacific Ocean on it. When you see this small and seemingly fragile raft (now on display in its own museum), you can only admire the people who colonized the Southern Pacific long before Europeans even knew that the Pacific exists. Of course - to counter a common misunderstanding - Heyerdahl could not show that the Pacific WAS colonized this way, he only showed that this was POSSIBLE. Not only the raft itselfg is shown in the museum, but other exhibits related to Heyerdahl's journeys, plus approriate photographs and documents. In total I felt that it gave a lively and entertaining impression of Heyerdahls work.

These three special museums are supplemented by a general naval history mus
eum, which shows all sorts of different boats and ships from ancient to modern. And - if you still have time and are fed up with oceans - you can visit the nearby folk museum, where farm buildings and other traditional buildings from rural Norway have been collected. So, if you are into ocean discovery, then plan enough time for an extensive visit to Bygdoy, the Museum island of Oslo.

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