Norway - Trondheim's Festival 28/07/2010

Today was the first day of Trondheim's festival to celebrate Saint Olav. The festival celebrates the traditional Christian pilgrimage to the cathedral here in Trondheim where King Olav is buried. King Olav was a Viking King in the 11th century whom converted to Christianity and died bringing the new religion to Norway albeit occasionally by the sword. The cathedral remained the most important pilgrimage in the Nordic world for many centuries. The festival has many medieval events at it as well as music and culture activities. This morning we were privileged to be able to go to the dress rehearsal of a concert Sigmund was concert master of. Set in the huge cathedral the concert involved a specialist medieval choir, his string orchestra and a amazing tissue dancer. It was really lovely to hear the music and singing and great to hear Sigmund play.

After this we visited the medieval market where you could observe black-smithing, look at the weapons shops and seeing weaving. The highlight however was the medieval jousting competition held that afternoon. This was a very competitive match between 7 knights kitted out in full medieval armour. They had warm up games of trying to pick up hoops with their lances, swords and spears as well as the final section of actual jousting.

In the evening I was able to have a look at Sigmund’s Hardanger fiddle. An traditional folk instrument from Norway. It has sympathetic strings running through the middle of the bridge which are not bowed but ring sympathetically with the bowed strings that cross the bridge above. The fiddles are ornately decorated and very pretty. There are a number of different tunings to the strings but the most common seems to be A, D, A, E (bottom to top). I had fun trying to play it. It had a very flat bridge so you could lay double stops. This is the best way for the fiddle to sound and most of the music is played on two strings at once.

Because the weather was so good, Sarah and Sigmund decided a BBQ was the go and so we enjoyed some delicious salmon, sausages and chicken kebabs on another perfect long summers evening.

Fred