THE STAVE CHURCHES OF MEDIAEVAL NORWAY

Abstract

The monograph presents a detailed panorama of the 12th–15th-century wooden religious architectural monuments located in southern and central Norway. These unique churches have a timber-frame (“stave”) construction and make up a complex of some of the most ancient surviving wooden buildings in the world. Despite this, while of indisputable artistic merit and historical significance the stave churches of mediaeval Norway remain insufficiently studied by Russian scholars. In that respect the monograph is a first attempt to summarize the history and specific character of Norwegian wooden church buildings. It proposes a variant method of classifying the structures and is accompanied by a detailed bibliography. The stave churches of Norway are analyzed in the broad context of wooden construction in the 7th–11th centuries in the British Isles, Denmark and Sweden, revealing them as a striking and original manifestation of the Norwegian architectural genius against the background of the general picture of mediaeval construction. It is only natural that in Norway, situated on the periphery of Europe, art acquired from the outset a distinctive local “endemic” character. The same factors also determined the unique character of the evolution of Norwegian construction, which was to a large extent founded upon the country’s domestic creative resources and retained its originality for centuries.