Popular Culture in Norway and Sweden1

Abstract

If you are interested in the history of European popular culture, you would be well advised finances permitting to make an expedition to Norway and Sweden. The obvious thing to do is to visit the famous open-air museums at Skansen (in Stockholm), Bygd$y (in Oslo), and De Sanvigske Samlinger (near Lillehammer), not to mention scores of smaller collections. At each of these three places you will find yourself combining a museum visit with a country walk, for hundreds of farms, churches, mills, town houses and shops have been moved there and re-erected in the open, by lakes and among trees. The farmhouses are mainly unpainted log cabins with roofs of turf, often small and usually dark. What light there is comes from small windows or from the hole in the roof which let the smoke out. At Bygd4y, some of the houses are provided with chickens and cows so that they look, sound and even smell authentic. A few are equipped with furniture of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not only benches, tables and beds but elaborately carved and gaily painted chests, cupboards, grandfather clocks, huge beer-bowls ('lbollar), and wooden 'irons' for pressing clothes (mangletraer), a reminder that Scandinavia was, like its neighbour Russia, a culture of woodlanders. The larger houses in particular are richly decorated, especially the best rooms, which were for use during festivities or for visitors, welcome or unwelcome, from wedding guests to officials on their rounds who might, in that sparsely populated region, be many miles from the nearest inn. In Norway, the speciality is 'rose-painting' (rosemalning). The walls of the house, or the ceiling beams, or the chests and cupboards are painted in bright colours with floral designs, or with pictures of the Danish King and Queen, or of medieval warriors like Ogier the Dane (reminders that Norway was under Danish rule till I8I4). There are also woven bedspreads featuring the texts of hymns or biblical scenes like the wise and foolish virgins. In Sweden, the speciality is bonadmdleri, painted wall-hangings of paper or cloth, the poor man's tapestries, usually representing episodes from the Bible such as the Marriage Feast of Cana, the Queen of Sheba's visit to Solomon, or the Three Wise Men riding to Bethlehem: festive scenes to match the festive occasions when the hangings would be brought out and displayed, with the Feast of Cana represented like a Swedish peasant wedding, so that host and guests, as they ate and drank, could gaze at their idealised reflections on the wall.2 At Skansen and Bygd$y, whole streets of nineteenth-century town houses have been re-erected, with curtains at the now larger windows, painted weatherboarding where the farmhouses had plain logs, prints instead of hangings and crockery replacing the wooden bowls and plates. In the main building at Norsk Folkemuseum, Oslo, there are reconstructions of one-family rooms from working-class districts of Christiania (as it was called then) in the I85Os, complete down to the socks hanging on a line between the rafters. In Nordiska Museet, Stockholm, when I was there, one exhibition was concerned with Nils