When the school children got back to their school the next day, they wanted to dance some of the old Swedish dances. The gymnasium teacher helped them learn the steps, and the sewing teacher helped them make their costumes. Then one day they danced for their mothers and fathers and their grandmothers and grandfathers.
When the teacher of those children told them about the man who had made the gift of the museum to Sweden, the pupils agreed that the man who built the open-air museum was a citizen of whom Sweden may be proud.
A Tale of a Wandering Story-Teller
“Suppose we pretend that we are in the feast hall of one of the old guest houses of the Norsemen long, long ago,” said one teacher to her children after they had visited an open-air museum.
Then as the teacher told the children about an evening in a guest house such as they had seen at the museum, they imagined people seated around the long table eating from the rude bowls and drinking from an old drinking horn, while they listened to a tale told by a wandering story-teller.
A story-teller in those northlands was an important person in the old days before stories had been written in books for people to read for themselves. In those days, story-tellers went about from place to place telling tales. They were always welcome guests in any home, for people had little entertainment.
In the very earliest days, people knew little about why things happen as they do on the earth. They did not know why we have day and night, or summer and winter. They did not know why the rains fall, or the lightning and thunder come. Since they did not know the true reasons for these things, they made up stories to tell why they happen as they do. They said that many gods ruled over the earth. One god, called Wodin, caused the day. Since day has but one sun, Wodin had but one eye. The god Thor caused the lightning and thunder. Another god ruled over the summer, bringing the warm days when plants could grow. He was called Frey. And the god Tye ruled over war and brought victory in battle.
We use the names of the four gods, Tye, Wodin, Thor, and Frey, even today. From them we got the names for four of the days of the week: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday—Tye’s day, Wodin’s day, Thor’s day, and Frey’s day.
Those early people believed, too, that huge giants lived on the mountaintops and tiny dwarfs lived under the ground. The old story-tellers told many tales about fights between the gods and the giants. One of the favorite tales was about Thor, the god of thunder and lightning. The tale that Norwegian teacher told her pupils was about Thor and his Hammer. Her pupils listened almost as eagerly as those old Viking families had listened around the feast table hundreds of years ago.