News of Norway, issue 2, 1998
The exhibit called West-Viking: The Norse in the Atlantic will present a full image of the Vikings, said head curator Dr. William Fitzhugh. It is a cooperation between the Smithsonian Institution and the Nordic countries: Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and Norway.
The Viking period lasted from 800 to 1050 A.D. Telling its story through around 300-400 objects, sagas, storytellers and life-sized models, the exhibit will take visitors on an adventure from Scandinavia and westward.
Scholars believe this carving found in an Inuit village on Baffin Island represents a Norse man, either a trader or possibly a priest because of the robe-like clothing. It has been dated back to the 1200s and the carving style proves its native origin. This shows that the Nordic people had face to face contact with Native North Americans 200-300 years before Columbus.
Previous Viking exhibits have featured a lot of Viking art and the Vikings as a force in Northern Europe, Dr. Fitzhugh said. "We want to show the different aspects of their lives, like war, farming, fishing, hunting, religious ideas and so on."
One third of the exhibit will be dedicated to establishing who the Vikings were, where they lived and what their culture was like. The Vikings came from what is now Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
The first part of the exhibit will also show the Vikings' trade and contact eastward. Waterways leading into Russia were controlled mainly by the Vikings. It will also show raids to islands north of Scotland, southern and northern England and Normandy, which are places where the Vikings eventually settled. According to Fitzhugh, this part of the exhibit will contain a lot of art while the rest of the story will mainly be told through sagas, storytellers and reconstruction of sites.
The latter part of the exhibit will sail westward with the Vikings, showing the settlement on Iceland, conquering of Greenland and the landing on the North American continent around the year 1000 A.D. It will show how the Vikings came in contact with the native people they encountered on their explorations. The exhibit will end with the transition to modern day with the Kensington stone and Newport Tower, touching on some of the claims made about the Vikings and their explorations westward.
This is a show about discovery, imagination and quest, Fitzhugh said. The idea for a millennium Viking exhibit came up a year ago, and the exhibit is scheduled to open at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in April 2000, marking the 1000 anniversary of the first Viking landing on the North American continent.
Essentially this will give the organizers around 2 years to complete an exhibit it normally takes 5 years to put together, according to Fitzhugh. Right now, he and his assistant, Elizabeth Ward, are the only two working full-time on the project. Along the way, they have gotten and are getting some help from other museum offices, and last December at the Nordic Council meeting, they met with 20 curators and specialists from the respective countries.
"This project came out of the ground," Fitzhugh said. "It was a flower that burst into bloom." In September, the exhibit will head to The Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa, Canada, where it will stay over the holiday season before traveling to New York. How long the Viking exhibit will stay in the Big Apple has not been decided yet, but several other cities have put in their dibs, as Fitzhugh put it, on getting the exhibit to their venue.
Mid-February, Fitzhugh found out that the Nordic Council has approved 1 million Danish kroner (approx. $150,000) for the project. This will cover about one-fourth of the necessary funds. At the moment, the exhibit is at a shortfall of what is needed, Fitzhugh said. He added that the rest of the funding will probably have to come from government, private and corporate sponsors.
The day after speaking with News of Norway, Fitzhugh was meeting with the Leif Erikson Millennium Committee for possible funding from them. He said that other Norwegian organizations who have heard about the project through the "thunderdrums" have also expressed their interest.
In addition to the big exhibit, a smaller panel show will be made available for travel to smaller cities around the country where the Nordic contingency is high. The Nordic countries made such an exhibit a stipulation for their involvement in and funding of the larger exhibit. Fitzhugh said that this smaller panel show will be an informational exhibit with photos and replicas of the artifacts in the big exhibit. In Canada, a small exhibit at L'Anse aux Meadows, where the Vikings probably had a settlement, is also being planned. The scope of this exhibit will fall between the larger exhibit and the smaller panel show, and, according to Fitzhugh, such an exhibit will be able to concentrate to a higher degree on the local regions.
The scope of the main exhibit is intended to be broad, and it will be presented in a broadly popular way according to Fitzhugh. The visitors will be able to see themselves in the role of Leif Erikson, Fitzhugh said.