Borgund Stave Church

Tree-ring dating of the pine timber used in Borgund stave church has shown that the trees were felled in the winter of 1180 to 1181, so the church can be reckoned to have been raised before the year 1200; the building is otherwise dated to somewhere between 1180 and 1250. It went up as the village church of Borgund in Lærdal, is named after Andrew the Apostle, and belonged to Lærdal parish in the Sogn deanery of the Diocese of Bjørgvin. It is classed as a triple-nave stave church of the Sogn type, its walls formed of vertical boards, or staves, standing on ground sills that rest on a stone foundation, with the outer timber darkened by protective coats of tar distilled from pine.

The ground the church stands on carries marks of an earlier building, which may have been a previous church or an old heathen hov. Of the Norwegian stave churches, Borgund is the one least altered since it was built.

The chancel and apse were added in the fourteenth century, opening off the ambulatory that runs around the raised central nave. South of the church stands a free-standing stave-built bell tower, probably put up in the middle of the thirteenth century, which covers the remains of the medieval foundry where the church bell was cast. It is the only free-standing stave-work bell tower left in Norway, and the only such tower in the country surviving from the Middle Ages. It was given a new door around 1700; the door was taken away and never replaced at some point between the 1920s and the 1940s, leaving the casting pit open to the weather, and new walls were built as cladding outside the stave walls in the 1990s to protect the interior. One of the medieval bells is displayed in the new Borgund church.

The inner walls of the choir and the west portal carry engraved figures and runes, some of them medieval. One is the commonest of all runic graffiti, 'Ave Maria'. Another, cut by a man named Þórir and written in the evening at St Olav's Mass, blames the pagan Norns, the female beings of Norse mythology and the Poetic Edda who were held to rule every person's destiny, for his troubles. The consecration crosses can still be seen on the inside of the nave's south wall.

After the Reformation the church was fitted out for Protestant worship, with pews, a pulpit and the other standard furnishings, and the medieval crucifix was taken away. The pulpit dates from between 1550 and 1570, as does a preserved sacrament house in the same manner; there is a lectern and a cupboard for the altar vessels from the sixteenth century, and an altarpiece of 1654 in a frame dated 1620, painted with the crucifixion flanked by the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. The medieval stone altar and the box-shaped soapstone font remained, and apart from the pulpit and the altarpiece the interior stayed much as it had been in the Middle Ages. A travelogue of 1668 claims that a reindeer was shot during a sermon; deer antlers hung on the lower east-facing pillars in the 1990s, and local telling has it that they are what is left of a stuffed reindeer shot when the animal tried to come in during Mass.

A new Borgund Church was built in 1868 a short distance to the south, and in that year the old building stopped being used for worship and was turned into a museum. That decision saved it from the commonplace demolition of stave churches in that period.

A restoration was carried out in the early 1870s under the architect Christian Christie, whose aim was to return the church to its pre-Reformation condition. He took out the benches, a second-floor gallery with seating, a ceiling that had been put over the chancel and several windows, including two large ones in the north and south walls, and all post-Reformation paintwork inside the building was stripped away.

The Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments bought Borgund stave church in 1877 and has funded and run it as a museum since. The first English-language guidebook to the church was published in 1898. From 2001 the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage has funded a programme to research, restore, conserve and maintain the country's stave churches, and the building is protected under Norwegian cultural heritage preservation.

Borgund was the model when several other stave churches were reconstructed and repaired in the late nineteenth century, among them Hopperstad, Gol and Vang, and when Fantoft stave church was reconstructed at Fana in Bergen in 1883. Fantoft was later lost to fire and rebuilt as a copy in 1997, again on Borgund's example. The Gustav Adolf stave church at Hahnenklee in Germany, built in 1908, was modelled on it, and four replicas stand in the United States: at Chapel in the Hills in Rapid City, South Dakota, on Washington Island in Wisconsin, at the Scandinavian Heritage Park in Minot, North Dakota, and at Lyme in Connecticut.

Borgund is what most people picture when they think of stave churches: roof above roof, spire above spire and dragon heads on the ridge. Most of the other surviving medieval stave churches do not look like that, and those that do were rebuilt in the late nineteenth century to resemble Borgund. Heddal is the exception, having kept all its roofs and spires before I. C. Dahl and others began to take an interest in the stave churches in the 1800s. The surviving medieval stave churches are only a very small fraction of those that once stood, and some hold that small plain buildings such as Haltdalen and Hedared are closer to the ordinary stave church than Borgund is. Borgund is nonetheless the one that became their emblem.