13 minute read
The Legacy of Norway's First Bunad, The Nasjonaldrakt
by Carrie Hertz, PhD, Curator of Textiles and Dress at the Museum of International Folk Art
For rites of passage, public celebrations, and national holidays, a growing number of Norwegians wear bunader in a dazzling array of styles. This contemporary clothing is made in the likeness of preindustrial regional festive dress and worn as a marker of local and national identity. Proponents of the early twentieth-century bunad movement prioritized clothing’s symbolic potential to evoke the notions of place and a shared past.¹ Before the bunad, however, there was the Nasjonaldrakt (literally “National Costume”), a standardized form of clothing inspired by the dress of Hardanger, a district nestled around the Hardangerfjord in Hordaland county (now part of Vestland county). Of all the districts of Norway with characteristic folk costume, Hardanger became especially meaningful to how the nation was perceived at the end of the nineteenth century.
Between 1814 and 1905, Norway freed itself from Denmark, ratified a democratic constitution, and quickly lost its nascent independence to Sweden. Held in unequal union, Norwegians rallied around symbols of national resilience and distinction. To revolutionaries, the dramatic vistas of the western fjords and the beautiful dress of its proud farmers represented everything unspoiled and indomitable about Norway. Patriots championed the folkways of Hardanger as pure survivals heroically resisting modernization and foreign dominance. Farmers and their characteristic dress became both symbols of the mythic past and the recipe for progress as quintessential Norwegian rebels.
At the turn of the twentieth century, women still wore locally-distinct styles of dress in Hardanger. In paintings, sketches, and photographs, European artists depicted the region’s resplendent folk dress against a backdrop of sparkling waterfalls, towering mountains, forests, and glaciers. Enticed by these thrilling images, tourists (both foreign and domestic) flocked to Hardanger.²
Tourism altered daily life throughout Hardanger, but nowhere more so than Odda, a tiny village perfectly situated at the end of the Sørfjord branch of the Hardangerfjord. By the 1890s, multiple cruise lines terminated at Odda, supporting new entrepreneurs who ferried visitors to nearby waterfalls, guided hikes and salmon fishing expeditions, sold handicrafts, and opened hotels, cafés, and souvenir shops.
Beyond the magnificent scenery, tourists hoped to see exotically-dressed women like the bride depicted in Hans Gude and Adolph Tidemand’s 1848 Brudeferd i Hardanger (Bridal Procession in Hardanger), perhaps the most famous painting to emerge from the era. The idealized and widely-shared images of Hardanger brides in their bejeweled crowns and red beaded bodices epitomized a glorious past and its innocence from worldly modern corruption. From his souvenir shop in Odda, Ole Theresius O. Ohm sold hand-painted portraits of young women dressed as Hardanger brides.
Men’s appearance did not inflame the same romantic imagination. Hardanger men had mostly traded their distinctive dress for more cosmopolitan suits by the 1840s. Women’s dress, in contrast, included a variety of garments made in a wide assortment of fabrics, colors, and prints with embellishments of lace, ribbons, or the region’s characteristic cut-thread embroidery now widely known as Hardangersøm (Hardanger embroidery). Bodices had wide openings filled with removable inserts called bringklutar in local dialect. An easily changeable element, fashions for new bringklut designs came and went, rendered in various techniques, including weaving, pattern darning, beadwork, or embroidery. The focus on women, their bodies, and craft skills, presented novel opportunities for financial independence. Anna Persdotter Jordal opened a dress shop in Odda where she sold simplified versions of Hardanger dress to tourists.³ Tourist versions borrowed the look of one formal style common to the Sørfjord area. Increasingly considered Norway’s national costume, this outfit invariably included a red bodice and dark skirt, paired with a white apron decorated with Hardangersøm. The bringklut was always beaded, usually in an eight-pointed star or rose pattern. This combination of striking heraldic colors may have been favored for resembling the Norwegian flag.⁴ It also closely matched the combination worn by Hardanger brides.
By the end of the nineteenth century, these standardized outfits were adopted and adapted by political agitators demanding national sovereignty. Those who wore Hardanger clothes as national costumes often rejected the cumbersome skaut (headdress) identifying married women, choosing instead the small, beaded caps worn by unwed girls. The Nasjonaldrakt became a common sight at political demonstrations, public gatherings, youth meetings, and folkdance performances.
Today, Hardanger dress remains diverse and meaningful within local experience, now more often called the Hardangerbunad. As elsewhere in Norway, a Hardanger girl typically receives her first bunad for church confirmation in her teens.
Marit Bleie Mannsåker of Ullensvang has fond memories of receiving bunad. Her mother spent years assembling the necessary pieces. “I knew what drawer my stuff was kept in,” she says. “I always wanted to look at it and touch it.” The anticipation of wearing beautiful garments for the first time was a joyful rite of passage. Mannsåker is now making bunader for her two granddaughters. “Girls today,” she says, “they are so proud to wear it.” Mannsåker believes the self-esteem girls derive from their first bunad comes, in part, from feeling loved and cared for by others. What she values most about local dress traditions is that they “strengthen family connections.” For this reason, she disapproves of political uses of Hardangerbunad.
When Mannsåker was growing up, Hardanger dress was still widely known as Nasjonaldrakt. In Mannsåker’s recollection, her teachers discouraged children from calling it that, saying “No, it’s our bunad. It belongs to this area.” By the 1960s, the broader term disappeared from local speech, but the gaps between provincial experience and national imaginaries persist.
Agnete Sivertsen, curator at the Hardanger Folkemuseum in Utne, feels that the Hardangerbunad still has nationalist connotations today. However, Sivertsen gives examples of locals using bunad to protest the Norwegian state interfering in provincial affairs. One protest, begun in 2010, failed to prevent construction of high-tension power lines. To activists, this expensive—and possibly unnecessary— modernization would not only harm local tourism and the environment, but the proposed benefits would primarily profit urban populations and transnational corporations. During protests, environmentalist Synnøve Kvamme was arrested for occupying a building site. Photographs of police lowering her from a shipping container dressed in Hardangerbunad, her arms outstretched like a crucified messiah, went viral.⁵ The powerful imagery activates the long history of using Hardanger’s landscape and dress to evoke feelings of patriotism, yet reframes it as a repatriation of local resources by provincial rebels.
Sivertsen explains that Hardanger dress has been politicized for centuries, “used by people far left and far right and in between. Everybody uses it.” Increasingly, some locals equate nationalistic uses of Hardanger dress to the state government’s exploitation of provincial resources at the expense of rural communities.
Even before Hardanger’s tourist industry was decimated by World War I, premier destination Odda was transformed by foreign investment into private industry. At the turn of the twentieth century, British industrialists and energy speculators bought up water rights for hydroelectric power. Chemical plants, refineries, factories, and smelting operations sprang up, enabled by a new Tyssedal Hydroelectric Power Station. As smoke and odorous chemical emissions choked the air, run-off endangered salmon, and dams dried up waterfalls, tourists stopped visiting and many multigenerational families packed up for the US.
Advantages came with industry. For much of the twentieth century, Odda had well-paying jobs, excellent schools, hospitals, libraries, and municipal swimming pools. Most companies, however, have since moved or declared bankruptcy, citing the pressures of globalization, leaving thousands unemployed. Especially embittering to some, the landscape, once the main resource for livelihoods, is no longer viable for fishing, farming, or tourism.⁶ While other areas of Hardanger enjoy renewed success with the growing popularity of Hardangervidda National Park and Trolltunga rock formation, Odda lags behind. Travel franchise Lonely Planet deemed Odda “Norway’s ugliest town.”⁷
Some residents now advocate for a tourism renaissance by incorporating “industrial heritage” into an attractive cultural history. In 2000, the former Tyssedal power station became an historic landmark managed by Kraftmuseet (The Norwegian Museum of Hydropower and Industry). The museum’s orientation video quotes twentieth century engineer Harald Hansen: “We have the waterfalls. We have the white coal . . . Our falls are beautiful to behold. This is true. In one sense, they’re lost, but in another, the falls are resurrected with a thousand times more beauty, as they give our country richness and greatness.” In other words, the natural resources of Hardanger, like the symbolism of its folk culture, supported Norway’s development into a thriving modern nation. This can be a compelling narrative for many in Odda today, especially those who grew up during the 1960s boom years.
Randi Bårtvedt, the first Director of Kraftmuseet and now Director of the Hardanger og Voss Museum system, describes her childhood in Odda as idyllic: “We had the best of everything growing up. I’m proud of the industry here. It created a good life for a hundred years.” When Bårtvedt attended university in Bergen, however, she discovered that people from Odda “were looked down upon.” “Sometimes,” she explained, “it feels we’re not a part of Norway. Everything is in foreign hands.”
Through the lens of romantic nationalism, Odda was the epicenter of everything “purely Norwegian.” That contrast—being viewed today as a symbol of globalization’s failures—is disturbing. Odda’s transformation has left many unable to satisfyingly define themselves and the character of their community.⁸ Which history should Odda’s inhabitants preserve and revere for future generations—the wild lands, provincial culture, or technological innovations of Norway’s industrialization? Bårtvedt, despite fierce opposition, believes we should remember all these interwoven pasts.
At the grand opening of Kraftmuseet, Bårtvedt wore her Hardangerbunad, proud that it represents the endurance of local tradition despite ongoing cultural, economic, and environmental change. Local dress persists as a vehicle for female industry, providing an outlet for self-expression, social influence, and financial gain. Though beautifully dressed women symbolized the region during romantic nationalism, Odda’s industrial modernity celebrated masculine dominance. But at the opening, Bårtvedt, a woman in traditional dress, now stood empowered to interpret that industrial past. Some locals were displeased to see Hardangerbunad in this context. The values embodied in folk costume and the relics of industrialization felt incompatible to them, perhaps disrespectful. Like Odda itself, Bårtvedt argues, “I embody many contradictions.”
Bårtvedt grew up in a family employed by local industry, and she grew up wearing Hardangerbunad. Her mother, in fact, was recognized for developing a novel way to weave bringklutar. To Randi, the dress and factories are not opposing facets of Odda’s history: they are integrated features of her lived experience.
In popular consciousness, regional dress remains entwined with cultural tourism and a romanticized view of provincial land, but Hardanger dress existed before the region was “discovered” by romantic nationalists and lives on in the context of post-industrialization. As Bårtvedt illustrates, the layering of associations can be contradictory, juxtaposing rhetorical opposites, like folk and modern. Choosing which aspects to prioritize and celebrate in one’s life becomes an expression of values. Marit Bleie Mannsåker, for example, characterizes the Hardangerbunad as a manifestation of social and familial nurturing. From this perspective, thriving traditions for local dress suggest healthy relationships between kin and neighbors. It suggests healthy communities. For those in Hardanger who feel abandoned by industry, for those who believe state-owned power companies act in bad faith, for those who sense smug entitlement from urban elites, these situations imply a breakdown in community and exacerbate the sense that outsiders do not care about the wellbeing of local people or their environment. Like tourists and prospectors, they take what they can and move on.
When Agnete Sivertsen connected the national character of Hardangerbunad with examples of provincial protests, she made an important point. By protesting in Hardangerbunader, locals not only wish to agitate for more local control, they also hope to conjure up the romantic-national history of Nasjonaldrakt to inspire Norwegians across the country to consider themselves mutually responsible: when one region is polluted and overruled, it damages the imagined whole.
The fight for Norwegian independence and the development of the welfare state after World War II were both justified by championing universal principles of unity in diversity, equality, and social security. For many citizens, in Hardanger and beyond, wearing bunad articulates hope that Norway will live up to these principles.
More recently, women in bunader of all kinds have taken to the streets to protest the closure of rural maternity centers, compelling pregnant women and mothers with newborns to travel far distances. Calling themselves Bunadsgeriljaen (bunad guerillas), one protestor explained that because bunader is widely associated with family tradition, healthy lineages, and “warm thoughts about our own country,” they can “become a symbol of the battle for what kind of health and welfare services we want to keep for the future.”⁹
Just as the Nasjonaldrakt helped Norwegians envision the nation of their dreams more than a century ago, as bunader, regional dress remains a persuasive medium for understanding the past and advocating for thriving futures.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am deeply grateful to Brita Jordal, Marit Bleie Mannsåker, Randi Bårtvedt, Agnete Sivertsen, and others in Hardanger for graciously sharing their time and expertise. I also offer thanks to Camilla Rossing for making introductions and assisting with translation. Håkon Brattespe, archivist at the Hardanger Folkemuseum, kindly introduced me to Kolltveit’s invaluable local history. Research was made possible with funding from the International Folk Art Foundation and Museum of New Mexico Foundation.
¹ Ylvisåker, Anne Britt. “Folk Costume as a National Symbol.” In Crowns and Roses: The Living Tradition of Norwegian National Costume, edited by Magny Karlberg and Anne Britt Ylvisåker. Utenriksdepartementet (Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), 1999.
² Barton, H. Arnold. “The Discovery of Norway Abroad, 1760–1905.” Scandinavian Studies 79, no. 1 (2007): 25–40.
³ Kolltveit, Olav. Odda, Ullensvang og Kinsarvik: i gamal og ny tid. Vol II. Translated by Hans H. Coucheron-Aamot. Odda, Ullensvang og Kinsarvik Bygdeboknemnd, 2005 [1962]; See Kolltveit, Odda, Ullensvang og Kinsarvik, 213; Bårtvedt, Randi, and Axel Mykleby. “The Tourists, the Landscape and the Fantasy Hotels,” Grind. Universitetet i Bergen, May 19, 2009. https://www.grind.no/en/ animal-life/tourists-landscape-and-fantasy-hotels.; and Ylvisåker, 301-302.
⁴ Colburn, Carol Huset. “Norwegian Folk Dress in America.” In Norwegian Folk Art: Migration of a Tradition, edited by Marion Nelson, 157–170. New York: Abbeville Press, 1995.
⁵ A 2016 documentary by Hardanger filmmaker Vigdis Nielsen, Kampen om fjordane (Fight for the Fjords), details the controversy.
⁶ Eitrheim, Karsten, Endre Skaar, and Nils George Brekke. “Odda: The Industrial Town.” Grind. Universitetet i Bergen, June 9, 2015. https://www.grind.no/en/hardanger/ odda/oddaindustrial-town.
⁷ Torpey, Paul. “Industrial Revolution,” The Guardian, October 3, 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2007/ oct/03/norway.heritage.
⁸ Cruickshank, Jørn, Winfried Ellingsen, and Knut Hidle. “A Crisis of Definition: Culture versus Industry in Odda, Norway,” Geografiska Annaler: Series B. Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography, 2013.
⁹ Berglund, Nina. “Bunads Turn into New Battle Gear,” News in English: Views and News from Norway, May 2, 2019. https://www.newsinenglish.no/2019/05/02/bunadsturn-into-new-battle-gear/. “National Costume: A Symbol of Norwegian Identity.” In Heritage and Museums: Shaping National Identity, edited by J.M. Fladmark, 299–309. Dorset, UK: Donhead, 2000.
Carrie Hertz is Curator of Textiles and Dress at the Museum of International Folk Art. She earned her MA in Museum Studies and her PhD in Folklore from Indiana University. Her work explores the social, cultural, aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of dress. Her most recent project is Dressing with Purpose: Belonging and Resistance in Scandinavia, an exhibition and forthcoming publication from Indiana University Press.
