Edvard Munch: Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm 1895

Edvard Munch is famous around the world as a painter and printmaker, and is considered one of the most significant artists of the modernist period. Over a career spanning more than 60 years, he experimented with a variety of styles and techniques, including printmaking, drawing, painting and sculpture. Self­Portrait with Skeleton Arm, a well-known work dating from 1895, was one of Munch’s earliest lithographs. The image is built around stark contrasts: the face is white, almost deathly pale, and the background pitch black. The white skeleton arm at the bottom serves as a reminder of human mortality.

The image was printed in Berlin, where Munch had lived since the early 1890s alongside other artists such as Sigbjørn Obstfelder, Gustav Vigeland and August Strindberg. Berlin was the venue for Munch’s most controversial exhibition, which opened on 5 November 1892 and closed after only five days because the critics and the majority of members of the artist association’s board considered the works crude and sketchy. Far from damaging his reputation with the public, however, the affair heralded Munch’s international breakthrough. The following year, 1893, Munch painted his most famous image, The Scream, which along with several later iconic works secured Munch’s unique position in the history of art.

The Icelandic bard and chief Snorre Sturlason is thought to have written his great work about the Norwegian kings, Heimskringla, in the early 1230s. The text covers the period from Norway’s mythical origins to the battle of Re in Vestfold in the year 1177. Snorre’s histories first reached a mass audience when J.M. Stenersens Forlag published this edition, Kongesagaer (‘Sagas of the Kings’), in 1899. Not only were the sagas widely read; they also gave new impetus to the development of Norwegian literature and the historical fiction genre.

The publishing house took the initiative in publishing the book, and first engaged the illustrators: Halfdan Egedius, Christian Krohg, Gerhard Munthe, Erik Werenskiold, Eilif Peterssen and Wilhelm Wetlesen. Gustav Storm was then commissioned to translate the text from Old Norse. Werenskiold was in overall charge of the illustrations, and Munthe the adornments. Together, they gave Norway’s medieval history a new and distinct aesthetic, with clear ties to the present day. Werenskiold used Fridtjof Nansen as a model for the heroic king Olav Tryggvasson, while Munthe’s characteristic art nouveau designs became hugely popular in the fields of applied art and interior design – despite the book’s very first sentence stating: “Any use of the adornments from this work is prohibited.”

Published by J.M. Stenersens Forlag, Kristiania.

Hulda Garborg: Housekeeping. Recipes and advice for small households, chiefly those in the country, cookbook

1899

The kitchen became a place for books in 1845, when Hanna Winsnes published her cookery book Lærebog i de forskjellige Grene af Husholdningen (‘Textbook on the Various Aspects of Housekeeping’). In a famous essay, the writer Arne Garborg railed against Winsnes’ lack of awareness of her own privilege: It’s all take … take … take … with no thought given to the question of where we are supposed to take it from. Because all is good with the world.

Hulda Garborg was more readily disposed than her husband to appreciate Winsnes’ practical approach to housekeeping. In her own cookery book, Heimestell (‘Housekeeping’, 1899), she borrowed heavily from Winsnes. Garborg’s book was the first cookbook to be written in landsmål, the forerunner of nynorsk, and included a whole chapter on “foolish menfolk”. International influences, however, were of more interest to Garborg – especially German vegetarianism. Her advice to gather and cook mushrooms – tasty, healthy and free – was considered novel and daring.

Hulda Garborg was involved in grassroots cultural activities and efforts to create common national manifestations of Norwegian culture. She founded what was to become Det Norske Teatret, a theatre company performing in nynorsk, as well as establishing and promoting knowledge of folk costumes and folk dancing. The postcard, on display in the showcase drawer, depicts her as a national icon, standing among birch trees and wearing a bunad

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1905

In Norway’s referendum on dissolving the union with Sweden, held on 13 August 1905, a rock-solid majority of voters – 99.95 % – voted in favour of dissolution, with only 184 voting against. This showed Sweden that the Norwegian people backed the vote by their elected representatives in the Storting on 7 June 1905 to dissolve the union, which was viewed on the Swedish side as a revolt. Norwegian women, who were not yet allowed to vote, launched a nationwide petition. For the first time since 1380, Norway became a fully independent nation state.

Just three months later, Norwegians were asked to vote on whether the country should be a monarchy or a republic. The outcome was less of a foregone conclusion than that of the August vote, and the Storting was reluctant to hold another referendum with the potential to unleash political chaos. But the republicans demanded to have their say, and Prince Carl of Denmark, who had been offered the throne of Norway, desired a vote of confidence. The new referendum on 12–13 November 1905 was made as simple as possible: vote Yes or No to Prince Carl.

The difference in the design of the two ballots is striking: “ja” (‘yes’) is printed in a large, rounded, open typeface, while “nei” (‘no’) is in smaller, more angular type. The outcome of the referendum was 79 % in favour of offering Prince Carl the throne, with 21 % voting against.

18 King Haakon, Queen Maud and Crown Prince Olav arriving in Norway, cine footage

1905

On 25 November 1905, just two weeks after the vote to retain the monarchy, Prince Carl – now King Haakon VII – landed in Norway, accompanied by Queen Maud and Crown Prince Olav. This was a major event not only for the newly independent country, but also for the incipient Norwegian film and cinema industry.

Several Scandinavian cinematographers accompanied the royal family, who began their voyage from Copenhagen aboard the Danish royal yacht Dannebrog and transferred to the Norwegian vessel Heimdal for the final approach to Kristiania (Oslo). This resulted in several short newsreels that were screened a few days later at cinemas in the capital and elsewhere. The short clip shown here is one of several surviving pieces of footage. The large crowds and blowing snow clearly made it difficult for the cameraman to do his job, so at times it is hard to make out the new king – despite his upright bearing.

Motion pictures in those days were short, usually no more than a few minutes, and newsreels were an important part of the cinema repertoire. The king’s arrival was the first state occasion in Norway to be documented on film, and the images filmed that day are some of the earliest Norwegian cine footage.

A law governing Norwegian cinemas was enacted in 1913 and took effect the following year. The law stated that films were to be censored by a central body prior to screening, and provided for municipal ownership and licensing of cinemas. Before 1913, the police had the power to censor theatre, cinema and music hall. An officer would attend on the first day of a show and decide what, if anything, needed to be censored.

The four surviving fragments of the silent film

Dæmonen (‘The Demon’) are the clips that were cut by the censor. The film was produced by Jens Christian Gundersen, who owned several cinemas in Oslo. It was filmed in Denmark, where better studio facilities and more lavish costumes were available, but in the eyes of some people this tainted the film with the kind of immorality for which Danish cinema was notorious. The censored scenes show merry partygoers, erotically charged moments and a stylised French dance – likewise verging on the erotic. The role of the male dancer is played by Per Krohg, better known as a painter.

Dæmonen, one of the earliest Norwegian motion pictures, was released in 1911, two years before the legislation on cinemas was passed.

‘The South Pole Letter’, letter from Roald Amundsen to King Haakon VII

1911

On 14 December 1911, Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole, accompanied by four chosen members of his expedition: Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel and Oscar Wisting. They erected a small tent as a visible marker of the pole’s location, and Bjaaland took a picture of the other members of the party standing outside the tent. After four days, they hastened back to their ship, the Fram, so they could be sure of being the first to deliver the news. The expedition was planned in minute detail and was also a carefully stage-managed global media event.

The rival British expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott reached the pole more than a month later, when Amundsen and his men were only a week’s march away from the Fram. Scott’s expedition found the tent and a letter Amundsen had written to the king of Norway – in case they did not make it back. Amundsen also left a note asking Scott to post the letter, which was placed in a cloth pouch sewn from the same fabric as the tent.

All the members of Scott’s expedition perished on their return journey. The letter, still in its cloth pouch, was found with Scott’s body and thus served as proof that Scott too had made it to the pole.

20 Photographs of the British Antarctic Expedition 1912

These two photographs show Robert Falcon Scott’s men at the South Pole on 18 January 1912. The first picture is of four of the men standing next to the tent that showed the Norwegians had already reached the pole. In the second picture, all the expedition members are seen posing with British and English flags. Their exhaustion and disappointment are evident. Looking at these pictures now, it is impossible to forget that none of these men made it back.

The exposed films were found beside Scott’s body and developed back at base. The photographs are of exceptionally high quality: we can make out the seam in the tent fabric and the shutter release cord in the hand of Edgar Evans. The notes on the back of the photographs were written by Herbert Ponting, an outstanding photographer, who had waited for Scott and the others back at base. Ponting later described Scott’s pictures as “probably the most tragically interesting photographs in the world”.

Top: Discovery of Amundsen’s tent at the South Pole by Captain Scott’s party. January 18th. 1912. This print was made from a negative in the roll ffilm which lay for 8 months beside Scott’s body before it was found by the Search Party, & later developed.

Bottom: Captain Scott, Dr Wilson, Captain Oates, Lieut Bowers and Petty Officer Evans at the South Pole. January 18th 1912. – This print was made from a negative in the roll ffilm which lay for 8 months beside Scott’s body before it was found by the Search Party, and later developed.

During the politically turbulent interwar years, a uniquely Norwegian encyclopedia took shape. Compilation of Arbeidernes leksikon (‘The Workers’ Encyclopedia’) began in 1931, and the work was published in instalments between 1932 and 1936. The publisher was Arbeidermagasinet, a socialist literary magazine, and the editors were Jacob Friis and Trond Hegna. The articles were written by members of Mot Dag (‘Towards Day’), a group that was affiliated in the 1920s first to the Norwegian Labour Party, and later to the Communist Party, before becoming an independent revolutionary organisation in 1929.

Arbeidernes leksikon was intended to be an alternative encyclopedia – a counterweight to conventional bourgeois encyclopedias. The underlying editorial principle was that not even scientific knowledge is politically neutral. Modelled on the great Soviet encyclopedia, the project was instigated by the labour movement and the circle surrounding Arbeidermagasinet. The objective was to enlighten the working class on the basis of the movement’s “own views on social development and social conditions”.

The logo on the spine conveys a particular view of knowledge: reading is the path to insight and enlightenment.

Published by Arbeidermagasinets forlag, Oslo.

22 Radio news, 9 April 1940, and news broadcast from London, 7 May 1945, NRK

1940 and 1945

When the Second World War broke out in Norway in April 1940, broadcasting assumed a crucial role. The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, NRK, had been established in 1933, five years after the country’s first radio broadcasts began. Within a few years, the new medium had been widely adopted by the public and become a tool for connecting people and communities.

During the war, NRK continued to broadcast from London, where the Norwegian government and royal family were in exile. In the autumn of 1941, the German occupation forces began confiscating any radios belonging to Norwegians.

On 9 April 1940, NRK in the person of Toralv Øksnevad – soon to become known as ‘the voice from London’ – announced that German forces had landed in various towns and cities around the Norwegian coast. The German ambassador was reported to have urged Norway not to resist the invasion – a suggestion unanimously rejected by the government.

Five years later, on 7 May 1945, NRK in the person of Hartvig Kiran announced the German surrender. The broadcast ended with 16 special announcements, including “two-legged fox”, “kalvedans for breakfast” and “love without stockings”. These were coded messages to resistance fighters and British agents operating in Norway. The broadcast also included the Morse code for ‘victory’.

1 Dagsnytt (‘Daily News’), 9 April 1940 | 41:30

2 News from London, 7 May 1945 | 3:11

Georg W.

Fossum:

Deportation of Norwegian Jews, 35 mm negative 1942

On 26 November 1942, 529 Norwegian Jews were deported from Oslo harbour. A German cargo vessel, the Donau, left Oslo that afternoon and docked in Stettin a few days later. The deportees’ final destination was Auschwitz, where most of them perished immediately in the gas chambers. Only nine of the 529 people survived. The deportation was organised by the Norwegian police in collaboration with the occupying forces.

Georg W. Fossum, who was in his late twenties in 1942, took photographs of wartime Oslo for the civilian resistance movement. He was at the harbour that day in November, having been tipped off by a contact in the police that something was going on. The photograph shows a group of people with their backs to the camera watching the Donau as it rounds Vippetangen point, with the island of Hovedøya in the background.

The image was not made public until it appeared in Aftenposten on 26 January 1994, following an appeal by the journalist Liv Hegna for photographs of the deportation. During the war, the resistance sent exposed films by courier to Stockholm for developing, but in this case the courier was unmasked, so the film remained in Norway and was probably not developed until sometime after the war.

Today, the image serves as a stark reminder of Norway’s complicity in the Holocaust.

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After three years of exploration on the Norwegian continental shelf, Phillips Petroleum Company discovered the world’s biggest oilfield in the autumn of 1969. The field was named Ekofisk. Geologists were initially uncertain as to whether Ekofisk was operationally viable, but trial production showed that oil extraction could prove highly profitable. On 9 June 1971, prime minister Trygve Bratteli, accompanied by parliamentary and government representatives and other guests from Norway and abroad, visited the mobile drilling platform Gulftide to officially open the field.

“Today may be a notable day in our country’s economic history,” declares Bratteli in this excerpt from NRK’s news coverage of the opening ceremony. “I hope the high expectations we have for oil production will be fulfilled.” After a short speech, he pulls back a small, simple curtain to unveil a plaque on the wall of the oil rig – a modest ceremony that heralded an era of dramatic economic and social change for Norway.

The oil industry transformed not only the country’s economy, but Norway’s role and significance on the world stage.

Arvid Sveen: ‘Long-term conservation of the Alta-Kautokeino river!’, poster 1979

In 1968 the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE) unveiled plans to develop a hydroelectric scheme on the Alta-Kautokeino river system in northern Norway. The plans soon met with strong, well-organised opposition because of the major impact they would have on the environment, the local population and local economic interests, not least reindeer herding. A grassroots opposition campaign launched in 1978 collected 15,000 signatures on a petition, but the Storting approved the project, which included a 110-metre-high dam in the Sautso gorge, famed for its biodiversity.

The dispute escalated dramatically. In 1979, Sami protestors staged a hunger strike outside the Storting, and activists brought construction work to a halt. Having started out as an issue of local and national interest, the dispute now came to the attention of the growing international movement to protect the rights of indigenous peoples. Arvid Sveen’s poster depicts the Alta-Kautokeino river as the boundary between environmental destruction and conservation, between modern and traditional economic activity, and between the governing elite and the ordinary population.

Norwegianisation had long been the objective of central government policy towards the Sami people, but the Alta-Kautokeino controversy proved a historic turning point. As a direct result, a new law on Sami rights was passed, an article was added to the constitution, and the Sámediggi (Sami Parliament) was set up in 1989 – by which time the hydroelectric scheme had been in operation for two years.

© Arvid Sveen / BONO 2020.

Darkthrone: A Blaze in the Northern Sky, LP 1992

A Blaze in the Northern Sky, released in the winter of 1992, was Darkthrone’s second album. Along with other Norwegian bands such as Mayhem, Darkthrone defined what subsequently became known as early Norwegian black metal.

The album walks the line between the deadly serious and the theatrically staged. The cover features a grainy photo of one of the band members made up as a corpse in a graveyard. The soundscape is rough, riff-based and lo-fi, the vocals guttural and ugly. The lyrics are about death, warriors, tombs, paganism. The song ‘The Pagan Winter’ opens with an invocation of the Devil:

Horned master of endless time

Summon thy unholy disciples.

For the longest time, Norwegian black metal was a closed musical subculture. During the 1990s, awareness of versions of the genre grew as a result of media coverage of murders and church fires, and later also through black metal bands seeking more commercially and culturally acceptable forms of expression. But Darkthrone stands apart from this narrative.

A Blaze in the Northern Sky appeared just before the scandals and tragedies hit the headlines. The band has been critical of commercialisation and isolated from the general cultural public, and has not played any concerts since the 1990s.

Published by Peaceville Records.

Founded in 1991, Oslonett was a spin-off from the computer science department at the University of Oslo, where the internet was used as a research platform. The company provided internet services to individuals and small businesses, and offered training for businesses in how to use new information technology. In 1993 it set up Norway’s first commercial website, www.oslonett.no.

During the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Oslonett published a continuous results feed. There was huge interest: in a period of just over 24 hours in mid February, Oslonett had 130,000 hits – a number that made international news at the time. In the autumn of that year, the website likewise covered Norway’s referendum on EU membership. These live feeds have subsequently been cited as one of the reasons why so many Norwegian households were early adopters of the internet.

In 1995, Oslonett launched the Kvasir search engine, modelled on its American counterpart, Yahoo!. Like other portals at that time, Kvasir allowed users both to enter search text and to click on a contents menu to find information. That same year, Oslonett was acquired by the Schibsted media group, as the first step in its expansion into multimedia.

2016

Autumn 2015 saw the premiere of a new web drama series written and directed by Julie Andem and produced by NRK P3. Titled SKAM (‘SHAME’), the series quickly gained a cult following among young adults in particular, subsequently attracting viewers of all ages and becoming an international media sensation.

SKAM introduces us to a group of friends at Hartvig Nissen upper secondary school in the Frogner district of Oslo. The series ran for four seasons and was acclaimed for taking youth culture seriously, and for tackling complex subjects such as homosexuality, rape, mental health and religion. The show was streamed via the SKAM website, where clips, messages and social media posts were posted continuously. The clips were combined each week into a single episode, which also aired on TV. The fictional characters had real profiles on Facebook, Instagram and other social media – which brought the series into public consciousness in an unprecedented way. During the love affair between Noora and William in season 2, hundreds of thousands of viewers engaged with the hashtag #WILLIAMMÅSVARE (‘William must answer’).

Season 3 is all about Isak, who, after a brief period of doubt and denial, recognises that he is in love with Even. Andem’s annotations to the script show that much of the action was improvised.

In 2018 The National Library received the manuscripts for the drama series SKAM, episodes 5 and 8, season 3. Due to light sensitivity the exhibited pages will alternate.

Adolescence is a time of intense negotiations as to who we are, where we belong, who we wish to be, not to mention who we can be. And who we fall in love with can be critical.

Isak, played by Tarjei Sandvik Moe, is the main character in season 3 of SKAM, which portrays the love affair between two young men. The relationship between Isak and Even, played by Henrik Holm, is complicated, although not necessarily because they are gay. The complicating factors are that Even is already in a relationship and has manic episodes, and that Isak has a difficult relationship with his parents; his mother keeps sending him evangelical Christian messages. This third season seriously addresses the fact that rejecting the heteronormative way of life often brings extra challenges when it comes to defining our identity – even in 2016.