awesome museum, Saturday August 28

Me, having a very large mug of tea after a long day of museum-treking.
Happy Birthday, Paul!!!! (for those of you who don't know, Paul is my youngest brother, who lives just north of Baltimore. He's in a different decade of age from me :)

A number of years ago, when Nick and Anna were still quite young, we went to Toronto for a few days for the American Sociological Association's annual meeting (and when will it be held there again, I ask?). I was doing rather poorly, and needed to be in a wheelchair much of the time, and so was ostensibly at the mercy of Anna and Nick, who were pushing me around. I got it in my head that we needed to go see the Bata Shoe Museum (Mr. Bata was a Slovak immigrant who made it big in shoes, and the museum is dedicated, I kid you not, to footwear. I know, I know, my kids laugh every time they think of it, too).
http://www.batashoemuseum.ca/collections/permanent/index.shtml
(the above link will get you to their page of permanent collections, none of which is exactly what we saw that day)
Now, being who we were at the time, none of the three of us were interested in either the very popular temporary sports exhibit, which seemed to be mostly about basketball, nor in the fashion section, which seemed to involve many, many high heeled shoes.
http://www.batashoemuseum.ca/collections/permanent/history_western_fashion/index.shtml

However, there were two sections that the kids allowed me to see--they still joke about how they tried hard to push me through these rooms faster than I wished, and all 3 of us were snorting with laughter at the time, as I pleaded with them to slow down, and they pleaded with me to speed up. One was a temporary exhibit on the history of dance, which was exquisite, and the other, which I swear got Anna subconsciously interested in the topic she pursued for her UNC honors thesis, was a temporary one on Siberian tribal groups, with a special focus on shamanism.
http://www.batashoemuseum.ca/collections/permanent/circumpolar/index.shtml
http://www.batashoemuseum.ca/collections/permanent/north_american_indian/index.shtml

(the first link listed is to one on Inuit clothing and footwear, and for those of you who, like me, just seem drawn to the weirdest ways of accessing indigenous and other cultures, the second link here is to their web page on their exhibit on North American Indians. And for Grace and Doug--I hope you're reading this--they have a special exhibit on SOCKS, called "Between You and Your
Shoes", that shows on their page a pair of Croatian "mukluk" socks that I WANT!!! For anyone who, like me, is a bit crazy, they also have actual online exhibits that let you access audio and video clips. I'm telling you, this museum is AWESOME! )
It turns out that one of the things, among many, that distinguishes various tribal peoples from each other is not only their clothing but their footwear (stop laughing). At the exhibit we saw, each indigenous group had a large glass exhibit case, with video-tapes of real live 20th century shamans performing ritual ceremonies (now you're not laughing, are you?). The viewer was treated to the sounds and the sights of these rituals, and, in addition to the videos, the exhibits also showed the way of life and the clothing of these different indigenous peoples, with a special focus, of course, on their footwear. This exhibit was extraordinary, and if we were visiting it now, my kids would be fascinated with it. However, a shoe museum is not an ideal place to take two prepubescents, I guess.
I tell you this story to make the point that there are certain kinds of museum exhibits that are wonderful. The Smithsonian Museum of American History, a couple of years ago, had one on the history of American Labor that was similarly fascinating, because it focused on real people. For example, in a couple of rooms, the focus was on a real Connecticut factory town, and we learned about the lives of members of the family who owned the factory and the lives of members of a family who worked in the same factory. In another room we followed the route of a traveling Jewish trader as he moved west, and again followed the story of an individual worker's strike. These kinds of museum exhibits are fascinating, and make me wish I had gone into museum curating for a career.
Well, back to Stockholm. As you might guess from this long introduction, Donald and I today went to a wonderful museum. Actually, after being there for about 5 hours, we had only seen half of it, and the last section of that half we did at a run. We'll have to return, as we also must return to the Money Museum, which turned out to be fantastic. As you might guess from this, we both LOVE museums, or at least well-done ones, and we are the kinds of people who read EVERY sign and listen to every word on the audio-tapes, too. Oh--we also get the pamphlets when we go into a church, so we can understand who built it and who painted the paintings, even when we don't recognize a single name. Here are a couple of photos from one of Stockholm's central churches, Hedvig Eleonora--I gather that Lutheran churches don't have to be named after saints, and can be named, as this one is, after the wife of the king who ruled while it was being built. A wonderful choir and group of musicians practising in the church for one of their famous classical music concerts. The acoustics are wonderful in this high-domed 18th century church, dedicated to the Swedish Navy. Sitting and listening is a great way to get a free concert!The gorgeous pulpit. Oh--none of the pillars are real marble. This seems to be common in Stockholm churches--they painted the columns to LOOK like marble.

You can probably guess that we're also the kinds of people who stay until the end of the credits when we see a movie, so we know who made the film, even when we know that we don't know any of them.
The museum was the Historiska (History) Museum, whose main prehistory exhibit is based around the lives of 8 individuals whose graves were found across what is now Southern and Central Sweden, telling the story of about 12,000 years of prehistory. This prehistory ended, from an historical point of view, with the development of Viking culture (we visited this amazing exhibit, too), which is dated as officially beginning with the Viking raid on Lindisfarne, the Holy Isle off Southeastern Scotland/Northeastern England in 793 AD. Stone Age, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Early Iron Age, Roman Iron Age, Viking culture, gold hoards, burials in passage graves, grave mounds, cremations in boats, deities in metal and stone, large rune stones covered in runic writing and pictures, trade goods from Central Europe, Southern Europe and India and China, men's, women's and children's skeletons and grave goods, including dog and horse skeletons, social hierarchy, and even exhibits on how archeologists and anthropologists do their work and attempt to interpret their finds: OH MY! Plus an entire large exhibit of nothing but Norse gold in many, many forms: coins from Arabia, church goods, bracelets, torques, delicate hair circlets, brooches and pins, amazing necklaces that no one could have worn and were made only to be buried with a high status person or offered as a sacrifice and thrown into a swamp or lake--I kid you not! This was a museum to make those of us fascinated by history, pre-history, and archeology and anthropology drool. There were even displays on how Nazi propaganda and earlier Swedish nationalists had used Norse mythology and a made-up Viking history to promulgate notions of Scandinavian racial purity and of a thousands-years-old Swedish nation. As I said, 5 hours, and we got through half of the museum (the rest is on Medieval History, including church history, and a history of textiles, both of which I am looking forward to seeing. I also want to spend a little more time in the Gold Room, and this time listen to the free audio guide that was so helpful in the prehistory section. Oh--and we got, just the two of us, a personal guided tour in English of some of the Viking exhibit, which probably would have covered more of the exhibit's goods except that we--okay, I--kept asking questions.)
Anyway, here is a link to the Museum (with the writing in English). You can click on individual exhibits to see more. I hope you enjoy looking at some of this. I learned a lot about Swedish pre-history and Viking history, the most important bit of which is that the Viking culture was NOT primarily a raiding one, but was primarily a settled, village life with agriculture. There aren't even any helmets among any of the archeological finds from Sweden, never mind any horned helmets--that's an invention from movies and books, and has no basis in reality. They DID, of course, raid and invade and steal and pillage, but their culture was essentially agricultural and settled. Isn't that surprising?

http://www.historiska.se/home/misc/historiska-gemensam/groups/Easy-English/Exhibitions/