I should have told you before that in coming from Trondhjem to Christiania we passed through a very interesting historic region, the district of which Lake Mjösen is the center. A few miles south of Lake Mjösen is Eidsvold, where the famous national thing was held on various occasions.
Christiania is distinctly a city of the modern type. Scarcely anything venerable remains. I stopped while I was there in a pleasant though modest hotel on Carl Johan’s Gate. Certainly part of the attraction lay in the name, for it is called Fru Bye’s Hotel. Right across the street Fru Bye’s daughters, Fröknerne Bye, keep a Privat Hotel. What a pleasure it must be to the good Fru to have the Fröknerne in business right across the street. The freedom of Fru Bye’s Hotel is delightful. Meals are apparently served at all hours. Supposedly breakfast, or frukost, comes about mid-forenoon; dinner, or middag, from two till four o’clock; and supper, or aftensmad, from eight until ten. On several occasions I got home to the hotel about eleven o’clock and had a full supper. Everything was spread out for me on the table, including mysost and fladbröd, and no one was hovering around anxiously to count the number of pieces I ate, or the number of glasses of milk I drank.
All around the wall are hung huge old copper platters, highly ornamented. The whole hotel is cozy and typically Norwegian.
The Railroad between Bergen and Christiania.
Carl Johan’s Gate, on which it is situated, is the most important street in the city, as it runs straight up to the royal palace. Not far from the palace are situated the National University, the National Theater, the Parliament or Storthing building, and various other public buildings very similar to those of any other European capital. The city has suffered so frequently from fire that it has given up the picturesque for the substantial. Among other buildings of particular interest to Americans is the headquarters of the Nobel Peace Commission.
There is only one place (outside of Fru Bye’s Hotel) in all Christiania where I felt I was truly in Norway rather than in any other European city. That was when I was in the presence of the famous Gogstad viking ship, which is placed in a shed back of the University. This ship was found near the entrance to the Christiania fjord, buried in blue clay, where it had lain for a thousand years or so, and it convinced me that the marvelous tales which the sagas relate are tales of actual heroes; for certainly the sagas did not invent this Gogstad ship. In the center is the Death Chamber, where the captain was buried in his beloved ship. Here one may see just how the viking made his marauding expeditions, how the oars were arranged sixteen on a side, how the square sail was attached by means of pulleys to a mast fastened in the center, and how the rudder was attached on the right side (whence “starboard” or steerboard). The whole ship is only about eighty feet long and sixteen feet wide, and how the ancients managed to navigate the North Sea and the Bay of Biscay and sail far around into the Mediterranean in such primitive craft I cannot understand.
In this old Gogstad ship were found the bones of a dozen horses, several dogs, and a peacock. The owners of these bones were to be the chieftain’s bodyguard during his voyage to the next world. Du Chaillu says of this ship:
“Very few things in the north have impressed me more than the sight of this weird mausoleum, the last resting place of a warrior, and as I gazed on its dark timber I could almost imagine that I could still see the gory traces of the struggle and the closing scene of burial when he was put in the mortuary chamber that had been made for him on board the craft he commanded.”
This same author has written a book of two volumes of some twelve hundred pages about the vikings, and since I saw the Gogstad ship I have been intensely interested in reading of their customs. Their Bible was a long poem called Hávámal, supposed to have been written by Odin himself, containing much worldly wisdom. Odin, it seems, was the precursor of Horace Fletcher as an advocate of “dietetic righteousness.” He says: