Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Arts & Architecture
ARTS
Like so many Norwegian forays onto the international stage, for more than two centuries
Norway's contribution to international Western culture has been in inverse proportion to its
size.
In the late 19th century and into the early 20th century, three figures - playwright Henrik
Ibsen, composer Edvard Grieg and painter Edvard Munch - tower over Norway's cultural
life like no others and their emergence came at a time when Norway was forging its path to
independence and pushing the creative limits of a newly confident national identity. More
than just artists, Ibsen, Grieg and Munch are an expression of the Norwegian soul. In the
20thcentury,threeNorwegianwriters-productsofNorway'sgoldenageofculturalexpres-
sion, won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Less decorated but of arguably similar cultural reach, the Norwegian contribution to con-
temporary music - especially jazz, electronica and heavy metal - has been considerable.
Literature
Medieval Norse Literature
Norwegian literature dates back over a thousand years to the sagas of the Vikings. The two
mainstays of the genre are skaldic poetry (
skalds -
the metaphoric and alliterative works
of Norwegian court poets in the 9th and 10th centuries) and eddic poetry (named after the
Edda,
themostimportantcollectionofmedievalIcelandicliterature).Thelatter,whichcom-
bines Christian with pre-Christian elements, is the most extensive source of information on
Norse mythology, but it wasn't written down until Snorre Sturluson recorded it in the 13th
century, long after the Christianisation of both Norway and Iceland. Its subject matter in-
cludes the story of the origin, history and end of the world, instructions on writing poetry,
and a series of disconnected aphorisms attributed to the god Oðinn. Apart from the
Edda
itself, there are three forms of eddic poetry: legendary sagas, heroes' sagas and didactic po-
etry.
