Nordland Museum ( no, Nordlandsmuseet) is a museum located in the center of

Bodø Bodø (; smj, Bådåddjo, sv, Bodö) is a municipality in Nordland county, Norway. It is part of the traditional region of Salten. The administrative centre of the municipality is the town of Bodø (which is also the capital of Nordland count ...

Nordland Nordland (; smj, Nordlánnda, sma, Nordlaante, sme, Nordlánda, en, Northland) is a county in Norway in the Northern Norway region, the least populous of all 11 counties, bordering Troms og Finnmark in the north, Trøndelag in the south, N ...

, Norway. The museum is a central part of a larger consortium of 18 museum units in nine municipalities with the county of Nordland.

Background

The museum was established in 1888 as the Bodø Fisheries Museum (''Bodø Fiskerimuseum''). The majority of the museum's collections were destroyed during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

when the museum was hit by two bombs on May 27, 1940. The museum building was also stripped of its function as a museum during the war, when it housed the Nasjonal Samling, a Norwegian fascist party active from 1933 to 1945. The museum has since regained its function as a museum and houses today several exhibitions that cover Northern Norwegian culture and history.

Collections

The main building was designed by engineer Ole Aarnseth and built in 1903. The museum building has been preserved by the

Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage The Directorate for Cultural Heritage ( no, Riksantikvaren or ''Direktoratet for kulturminneforvaltning'') is a government agency responsible for the management of cultural heritage in Norway. Subordinate to the Norwegian Ministry of the Environm ...

. The museum houses an interactive dry fish aquarium exhibition from the mid 1950s, which has also been persevered by the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage. On the first floor the museum has two exhibits: one about the Lofoten fisheries and the international

stockfish Stockfish is unsalted fish, especially cod, dried by cold air and wind on wooden racks (which are called "hjell" in Norway) on the foreshore. The drying of food is the world's oldest known preservation method, and dried fish has a storage lif ...

trade with the

Hanseatic League The Hanseatic League (; gml, Hanse, , ; german: label=Modern German, Deutsche Hanse) was a medieval commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns in Central and Northern Europe. Growing from a few North German to ...

, and a second covering the local

Sami people Acronyms * SAMI, ''Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange'', a closed-captioning format developed by Microsoft * Saudi Arabian Military Industries, a government-owned defence company * South African Malaria Initiative, a virtual expertise net ...

. Most of the Sami material on display is from

Tysfjord Tysfjord ( smj, Divtasvuodna) is a former municipality in Nordland county, Norway. The municipality existed from 1869 until its dissolution in 2020. The municipality was part of the traditional district of Ofoten. The administrative centre of th ...

, north of Bodø. The exhibition on the second floor shows a silver treasure from the

Viking Era The Viking Age () was the period during the Middle Ages when Norsemen known as Vikings undertook large-scale raiding, colonizing, conquest, and trading throughout Europe and reached North America. It followed the Migration Period and the Germ ...

. This treasure was found in

in 1919 and is one of the biggest that has been found in Northern Norway. The treasure consists of silver jewellery and silver pieces, among them

Anglo-Saxon The Anglo-Saxons were a Cultural identity, cultural group who inhabited England in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to settlers who came to Britain from mainland Europe in the 5th century. However, the ethnogenesis of the Anglo- ...

and

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...

coins. The largest silver piece, a silver decorative needle for fastening capes, was part of a larger international exhibition. ''Vikings: Life and Legend'' was a collaboration between the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

, the National Museum of Denmark and the Berlin State Museums which focused on the core period of the Vikings from the late 8th century to the early 11th century. The third floor shows an exhibit about the history of Bodø from the founding in 1816 to the present. Central to the exhibit is the destruction of the old town during the

German occupation of Norway The occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany during the Second World War began on 9 April 1940 after Operation Weserübung. Conventional armed resistance to the German invasion ended on 10 June 1940, and Nazi Germany controlled Norway until the ...

, a dramatic highpoint in the town history. The exhibition also contains a 25-minute documentary with English subtitles about the town's older history (1816-1940).

References

External links

Nordlandsmuseet website
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