Trondheim

BERGEN is the birthplace of Grieg and the town where Ibsen began his professional career in the theater. It maintains an annual music festival and a waterfront which, casually dug into some time back, proved to be made land — a fact long since forgotten by the locals. Since medieval Norwegians did not insist on clean fill, this ground is full of enlightening trash, and archaeologists rooting in the streets have become an established tourist attraction. A visit to Bergen is recommended by all proper citizens of Oslo. I took a ticket to Trondheim.

This move was only partly due to contrariness. My mind was corrupted by juvenile reading of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who, in case nobody else alive recalls it, once wrote a sequence of ballads based on Snorri Sturluson’s history of the early Norse kings. Mr. Longfellow’s hero was Olaf Tryggvason, but the tale began with the troubles of his predecessor.

Since Olaf was plainly a bloody-handed ruffian and Hakon’s previous conduct was never mentioned (it was not of the sort that Mr. Longfellow’s contemporary readers would have tolerated, and indeed, still distresses the writers of Norwegian guidebooks), my infant sympathies settled with the unlucky earl. They are still with him. It strikes me as unfair that a man should lose his head after going to the trouble of hiding under a pigsty.

Hakon of Lade was handsome, “a deadly man at arms,” a clever politician, and notably generous in an age that expected its great men to scatter gold like a tree shedding leaves. He was also ferocious, as quick to betray a friend as to ambush an enemy, and so incorrigibly woman-crazy that even Viking eyebrows were raised. It is, however, just possible that as a worshiper of Odin the Great, the deceiver, the shape-changer, Hakon himself considered his behavior reasonably virtuous.

It was at least consistent. Many of the kings in Sturluson’s history are shadowy figures engaged in ambiguous scuffles, but the doings of Hakon Sigurdson, who never was a king at all, are understandable. He had inherited Lade, which meant the district around Trondheimfjord and the loyalty of its notoriously hard-fighting inhabitants, and he meant to hold it. He had also inherited a simmering religious quarrel. Both these legacies came from his father, Sigurdjarl of Lade, who had an itch for kingmaking.

The king Sigurd made was a good one but also a Christian, and when, in the brusque fashion of the times, he was killed by ambitious cousins, a certain number of converts remained in the country. Young Hakon Sigurdson, inheriting Lade (the new Erikson regime had quickly murdered Sigurdjarl), stood by the old religion. It took him time to avenge his father’s death, but eventually, by an ingenious piece of treachery involving the king of Denmark, he swept the whole Erikson tribe out of the country and ruled the place himself, as viceroy to the Danish crown. He had sold Norway into vassalage, but he still had Trondheim and his head.

Despite protests from his Danish high king, who had inconveniently become a Christian, Hakon ruled Norway in the gaudy antique way, with gilded temples and blood sacrifices, concubines, Lapland warlocks, and Icelandic skalds. It was the last stand of paganism, and he maintained it for nearly twenty years. Then came an adventurer out of Russia, calling himself Olaf Tryggvason and claiming to be a true heir to the Norse crown. He arrived, rather too neatly, just as Hakon was on the run before a rising in Trondheim. There had been one woman scandal too many, and not only the badgered Christians but even the solidly heathen north rallied to Olaf, who was promising all sorts of glories, including freedom from Denmark. He promised a large reward for Hakon’s head as well, and the last great heathen chieftain died under Thora’s pigsty, murdered by his own body servant. When this fellow went to collect his reward, Olaf had him beheaded. Tryggvason was to prove quite as ready a liar as Hakon, without the excuse of being a worshiper of Odin, who, god of poetry as well as battles, had an understandable penchant for fiction.

THERE is nothing left of Hakon’s Lade, but Trondheimfjord is still solidly in place. I went there via Stamsund.

It was an overcast day, and Trondheim appeared with no warning. When the plane dove below the clouds, I saw, not the high, narrow, rocky pirate’s nest that I had imagined as appropriate to the history of the place, but wide slopes of green sprawling down to quiet water. There was a scatter of white farm buildings and a thicker scatter of animals, and despite considerable woodland, the nature of the country was instantly clear. There is lush cattle pasture above Trondheim, and some of the best farmland in Norway.

Granted that tenth-century Norsemen were as quarrelsome a lot as ever scuttled ship or cut a throat, they had practical reason for all the bashing and burning around Trondheim. Whoever held that fjord could count on living well.

Even in the chill of a spring rain, Trondheim was a likable town — an easygoing provincial capital fitted comfortably between the wide water of the fjord and a loop of the river Nidelv, so that nearly every street ends, eventually, at a dock or a bridge.

Baskets of real flowers (south Norway has discovered plastic) hung from the lampposts, and restaurants served, as a matter of course, beef that would warrant a brass band anywhere else. Questioned about the origin of this marvelous meat, the waiter answered, “Some farmer up the fjord.”

Like every Norwegian city I saw, including Oslo, Trondheim has something of the frontier about it — an indefinable air of makeshift impermanence, as though the whole place had been put up inadvertently and might be abandoned tomorrow for a gold strike over the mountain. I do not mean that it was dirty, or neglected, or poorly laid out, or built of oil cans and tar paper. Quite the opposite — everything was neat and slick, the streets ran straight, and the buildings tended either to board, batten, and discretion, or to stone and monumentality. I suspect that it is the proportion between buildings (generally low) and streets (generally wide) that, by letting in a lot of sky, produces the effect of a town not quite nailed down.

It is in fact thoroughly nailed down. Some of the buildings have been sitting there like boulders since the seventeenth century (the medieval town, founded by Tryggvason, was burned flat in 1681), and the place is a major railroad junction and the home of a number of thriving industries besides the predictable fish. As for the Trondheimers, they neither rush nor loiter, they dress with more regard for ease than for fashion, they keep ten or a dozen dance bands busy every evening, and they confront all problems, including tourists, with an amiable, offhand competence.

The one thing in which they are not competent (in my experience, no Norwegian is) is the giving of directions. The two golden-haired girls in the information office assured me that there are indeed numerous Stone Age rock carvings up in the hills, marked with yellow arrows by the archaeological service and easily reached by car. They themselves had never seen the things, having no interest in fourteen-foot elk sketchily incised on a rock in somebody’s pasture, but they turned up a map with the approximate location of various carvings ticked off. They called a garage and established the availability of cars and drivers. It remained only to close the deal, which had to be done in person. The girls explained, twice, in excellent English, where the garage was to be found and drew a nice clear map in case I should forget my instructions.

Undiscouraged by similar episodes in Oslo, I followed the map and fetched up in the lee of Olaf Tryggvason’s statue, staring gloomily at an establishment that most certainly did not rent cars. It had begun to rain with more energy than usual. I reminded myself that nobody is perfect and that the Norse are a noble race provided one doesn’t ask them for anything more specific than the difference between east and south. A policeman hustled out of the elegant eighteenth-century house behind me, which truly was the police station, and dove into a car parked at the curb. Then he peered back through the rain, climbed out again, and asked, “Are you lost?”

I explained the case. Where was that garage, really? The policeman replied that it was all too complicated and very much too wet. “I will drive you.” He did, gossiped with the garage staff while I chartered the car, and drove me back to the market square. He brushed off my thanks as unnecessary; it was, he said, a pleasure to exercise his English. This is the standard Norwegian excuse for prolonged exertion on behalf of strangers with no reasonable claim to assistance. It gets everybody off with dignity.

THE rain had now stopped. I will not discuss rain again. Let it be assumed that spits, drizzles, and squalls of water continued to occur. In between them the sun shone, the sky was blue, and everything about Trondheim glittered with hazy, moonstone highlights. Up Munkegaten, a broad street lined with shops designed to look as uncommercial as possible, I came on Mr. Müller the silversmith.

Trondheim is thick with silver stores, their windows baited with coffee services and tableware, reproductions of fluttery paper-thin antique peasant ornaments or heavy Viking brooches, and the light, brilliant enamel trinkets which are modern Norway’s characteristic jewelry. All these things are charming, and the same items appear all over the country. Mr. Muller’s white-painted, gingerbread-fronted shop was different. One window contained pitchers and bowls unlike anything else on display anywhere, rather small pieces with surfaces hammered into shapes as pettable as a kitten.

I went in and admired everything in sight, loudly, and eventually lured Mr. Muller out of the back room. Yes, the hammered pieces were done on the premises, by hand. Good, honest, heavy metal; he was eloquent on the folly of buffing out the hammer marks, which give distinction to the surface of silver. He also made a languid attempt to sell me a pitcher, but it was obvious that he expected no success. A dim memory flickered in my mind. Surely Trondheim was once a great silverworking town?

The museum of applied art proved to be full of the stuff. Tankards, posset cups, bowls, vases, trays, tumblers, ladles, sugar casters — everything that could ever possibly or conceivably be made of silver. The long shelves glowed with hundreds of little polished moons, and the glass cases, catching a whirl of reflections between tankard and platter, sparkled like prisms. The earliest pieces were baroque and the latest edged into art nouveau. If there was any unifying Trondheim style, it was too subtle for my eye. The pieces looked simply like fine silver in the best fashion of their time.

A couple of days later, having driven around the end of the fjord with a pleasant young Norwegian who found the Stone Age carvings in spite of being misdirected by his countrymen at no less than three crossroads, I went back to Muller’s. Mr. Müller said, “You’re still in Trondheim,” in the tone of one pointing out a surprising phenomenon. Well, I was. “You’ve been here a very long time.”

Mr. Müller looked to be around seventy, but was plainly as bright as any youth of forty. He knew perfectly well how long I had been in Trondheim. Wondering what this game was about, I asked why three days should be a long time. Mr. Müller smiled ruefully. “That’s a long time now. We’re used to people who get off the North Cape boats and see Trondheim in half a day.”

A partial list of things to see and do around Trondheim runs from Stone Age carvings, to the field of Stiklestad, where Olaf the Holy was killed, to the cathedral where Norse kings are still crowned, to trotting races and the museum of musical instruments out at Ringve. The staff at Ringve plays appropriate music on the old instruments, and visitors who want to have a go at the virginals or the jazzy brass harpsichord are encouraged to thump. There is also a site not mentioned by the tourist office — a complex of tunnels, sunken roads, and gun emplacements all strewn with rusty bits of metal and heavily masked by trees, brush, and moss that grows thick as a mattress. This fortification lies up a lonely, mean, gravel road on a hilltop that seems to be the end of nowhere, but its guns overlooked the fjord, and a handful of Norwegians held it ferociously against the Nazis. There is no official fuss about the place beyond a plain bronze plaque, but remote as it is, there was a bunch of flowers wilting in the moss beside the gate.

Half a day for Trondheim. Mr. Müller could remember when visitors were leisurely. “Spent two weeks at the Hotel Britannia, lived comfortably, and saw everything. Yachts, too.”

This explained the Britannia, where I had made reservations with no suspicion that I would be infesting the oldest and most elegant hotel outside Oslo. It was full of gilt and crystal and thick carpets and industriously helpful people in shiny buttons. The head waiter in the Palm Court, an extravaganza designed, it seemed, as set for some jeu d’esprit that Oscar Wilde never got around to writing, could not quite conceal his vexation at my arrival in shoes still oozing Lofoten peat bog. It was a splendid hotel, and I was sorry to disgrace it, but not sorry enough to move out of it.

Mr. Müller was still dreaming of yachts. There used to be a line of them in the fjord every summer, he said, sighing for those handsome, long-gone boats. It was not purely aesthetic nostalgia. In those days, twenty craftsmen worked silver in the Müller shop, and the pieces they made were carried off to Amsterdam and London and Philadelphia and San Francisco. Now, Mr. Müller complained, he can’t find one man to work for him, adding, with a grunt, “I couldn’t pay him if I did.”Everybody is rich today, he went on wryly, but nobody can afford handwork in silver because they can’t get servants to polish it. Young men haven’t the patience to learn the whole art of silverworking. Too slow, too little money. They all want to buy a car right away.

While Mr. Müller recalled his joy at owning his first bicycle, the young man working in the shadowy room behind the shop stiffened attentively. His head turned slightly. One ironic sea-blue eye caught my glance. I thought that eye winked, but a second later the fellow was bent over his tools.

Mr. Müller had got back to silver. The walls of the shop were altogether covered with framed photographs, each representing a silver piece and recording its date, subject, and the name of the buyer. At a distance, the objects seemed to be Victorian dust-catchers of the most Laocöon type, but this turned out to be an illusion. A number of them were impractical — there can’t have been much call for drinking horns in Philadelphia — but their ornamentation represented a serious and by no means unsuccessful attempt to re-create the decorative style of pagan times. Since this style was hardly known before the excavation of the Oseberg ship burial in 1904, the earlier pieces had to be guesswork— a bit of Celtic cross and a dash of William Morris worked out in highly rounded repoussé. The results were all wrong and yet unquestionably on the right track. It was a shrewd guess.

Later pieces were much closer to the real thing, with stiff little fighting men and demonic beasts entangled in flowing ribbon labyrinths, and the repoussé flattened and squared at the edges to resemble the sharp wood carving of the Viking age. One platter, on which the strange, angular creatures turned out to be simply all the animals of Norway, must have been a beauty and would be still, regardless of fifty years and changing tastes. That platter was unusual in its subject. Most of the pieces were based on some definite episode in Norse history or legend, and since one sword-fight in silver looks much like another, it must have taken great ingenuity to find differentiating details that could be used pictorially in metal. Had they ever done Hakonjarl?

“We did,” said Mr. Müller. “Now where is it?” After a prowl through all the pictures, he conceded, sadly, that it was not to be found. “We didn’t keep pictures of everything.” I had been reading the buyers’ names during the hunt, and had found them a very thorough list of North Atlantic wealth of the period from 1890 to 1925. The shop had purveyed to, and outlasted, more than one royal house.

Mr. Müller observed that the great days are gone. What with problems of time, training, and money, “everything comes from factories now. Made by spinning.”

Like glass?

“Exactly like glass except that you start with a flat piece instead of a lump.” The silver is whirled into a mold and comes out all neatly shaped. A very efficient method which Mr. Müller learned as a young man, along with other novelties, in the United States. He lifted a stubby, tumblerlike vessel from a shelf. Spun. Factory-made. Good, solid silver — not like this tinfoil here. He grabbed a bud vase (also factory-made) and pinched it cruelly to show what silver should not be, growling “I despise thin silver” as the bud vase visibly gave at the sides. But the spun cup, a useful pot to put things in or even to cosh burglars with, was acceptable. “Of course, they have to be all the same,” said Mr. Müller, “and you see, it’s still expensive.”

When he turned the thing over, the price was alarmingly close to the price of a similar pot handmade in the shop. I could see why I had not been able to find any other shop in Trondheim that showed anything original in silver. It seems probable that Mr. Müller loses money on every piece he makes and continues to hammer out silver only for love of the metal and the honor of five generations of Müller smiths.