Today we set off for the Trondheim Folk Museum which is a few miles outside of the city centre. It was actually founded in 1909 by a group of enthusiastic citizens from Trondheim who wanted to preserve old and distinct buildings from the city, the first buildings were moved to the land around King Sverre’s castle, Sverre Sigurdsson was a Norwegian King between 1177 – 1202, raised on the Faroe Islands, had the goal of becoming the king of Norway, this was in the days when any descendant could claim the throne, he claimed to be the son of King Sigurd Munn. Sverre gathered an army of the poor who he called the Birkebeiners. They were called the Birkebeiner because they were so poor they had to tie a birch bark around the legs instead of stockings but he developed them into an elite unit who fought for his descendants. Sverre founded a royal dynasty who ruled the country until the union with Sweden in 1319. The folk museum is built around the ruins of his Castle which was Norway’s first medieval castle. We started by looking at the indoor exhibition which reflects childhood, youth, adulthood and age in the region during the past century. Some of the photos were lovely and they had a lot of artefacts from the 1800s although slightly worryingly some of the reflections of childhood looked very similar to things I experienced as a child and the kitchen looked very familiar! We started walking round the Old Town which had a few houses that were open. As this is a living history museum some of the houses had actors and as with everywhere else they spoke fantastic English. There were a couple of houses that were a bit different, the first was a hat shop that had a lot of the tools of the trade to stretch the hats the other was a pharmacy which was built in 1708 and was the first in the area and up until the mid 1800s was the only one in the town. It was very well equipped and they even had a herb garden out the back to show you what plants they would use to made the potions. Apparently if the business wasn’t passed down through the family and the owner died before his wife another pharmacist would marry the widow and take over the business. We then went for a walk round the rest of the buildings, there were three areas showing different farming communities from different areas. Depending on where the houses came from the design was quite different the houses showed life in the 18th and 19th centuries, interestingly the farms from the Alpine region seemed to be slightly richer than the ones from the lowlands, but this could just be the setting. We walked all the way round the different houses and up to the castle ruins then it was time to get on the bus back to town. We stopped for some lunch then started walking round the remaining alleyways of Trondheim. These are the streets that formed the medieval streets of the city. There are about 40 originally kept alleys, we hadn’t realised when we started walking round them that what has been preserved are the allies themselves to show the function they had of providing communication and links in the town, some of the alleys are surrounded by historic 19th century wooden and brick buildings which are rather wobbly but really nice. We walked around quite a few of these then a massive black cloud passed over and we came back to the hotel as it felt like it was going to start raining any moment so we went back to the room again for a rest, as we sat in the room we saw the rain pass around us rather than over us. We have an early start tomorrow as we are taking the train back to Oslo so we brought some lunch to keep us going on the train, hopefully this journey will be a little more scenic than the one from Oslo to Bergen.
