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Dragons crouch on the roof, and peer around the door frame. What is it? It's a medieval stave church. What's it doing in Minnesota?
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Monday, January 11, 2010
Building a Dream: The Moorhead Stave Church, the DVD about the building of the Hopperstad stavekirke replica, is available from the Heritage Hjemkomst Interpretive Center. This wonderful half hour film, featuring traditional Scandanavian music, and interpretation of the church by both American and Norwegian enthusiasts, is a music of wood on film. Please contact the Heritage Gift Shop (218-299-5511 ext: 6731) to order, or if you have any questions about the DVD. They will ship to most locations. Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Building A Dream: The Moorhead Stave Church is a half-hour film about the amazing construction of a replica of an 11th century Norwegian stavekirke. The film is screened daily or by appointment at the Hjemkomst Heritage Interpretive Center at 202 N. 1st Ave in Moorhead, MN. Copies of the film are available on the Hjemkomst's webpage: Click here! Any Sons of Norway club, Scandinavian heritage society, or other organization interested in screening the film for it's membership is welcome to do so, please call 651-224-5708. "Building A Dream" a film about the replica of the Hopperstad stave church continues to be screened at the Hjemkomst Heritage Interpretive Center at 202 N. 1st Ave in Moorhead, MN. Copies of the film are available from: Any organization, Sons of Norway club, or Scandinavian heritage society that wants to screen the film as a program for it's member is welcome to do so, please call 651-224-5708. Monday, January 05, 2004
Building A Dream: The Moorhead Stave Church will air on Twin Cities Public Television, Channel 2 on Saturday, February 7th at 7 P.M. Check your local guide for listings. VHS and DVD copies of the program are also available from the Heritage Hjemkomst Interpretive Center bookstore. Call (218) 299-5511 Saturday, January 03, 2004
It's wierd, it's wonderful, and now there's a film about it. Driving north through Moorhead, Minnesota, you may notice the strangest piece of architecture you've ever seen. In that same community where a retired school teacher once built a Viking ship, another enterprising individual has created a hand-built replica of a 13th-century wooden Norwegian stave church on the grounds of the Heritage Hjemkomst Interpretive Center. It looks a bit like a pagoda, with mythical beasts, carved in wood, hanging off the eaves. How did it come to be there, and what did it take to construct it, and what's it about? See the film! Building A Dream: The Moorhead Stave Church will be broadcast in Minnesota on public television, Channel 2 in February. The documentary shows, for the first time, how the replica of the Hopperstad church was actually constructed, using 20th century technology, and how it came to be that Guy Paulson, a retired biochemist, spent five years of his life to bring it to life. Building a Dream: The Moorhead Stave Church, Saturday, February 7th at 7 P.M on Twin Cities Public Television, TPT-2. Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Building a Dream: The Moorhead Stave Church 29 minutes. Five years in the making, the film is the heartwarming story of a man who pursued a lifelong dream to build a Scandinavian stave church in America. It will be screened daily for visitors in the Hjemkomst Center auditorium in Moorhead, Minneosta. It will also be available for broadcast on your local public TV station. The film features music on original Viking instruments by the group Krauka, as well as music by the award winning Oslo choral group Trio Medieval. It tells the story of Guy Paulson, a South Dakota native, and expert woodcarver, who took early retirement from his job as a research biochemist, to build a stavekirke in Minnesota. With a team of architects and engineers, Guy managed the building of a replica of a full-sized replica of a 13th-century stave church - one of those uniquely Norwegian wooden structures with soaring spires, hand-carved beasts and a heavily shingled roof. Much of it was accomplished within a year. It was not only the major construction that was challenging, having to fell twelve huge hundred year old pines to erect the main pillars, but also thousands of details - like cutting the 24,000 hand-beveled cedar shingles. The church's carvings- an elaborate portal filled with intertwined dragons, and interior altar, or baldachin, took another four years to complete. In the film, which uses original documentary footage, you'll be able to see all this for the first time. Make a point to see it. Visit the Hjemkomst, or check your public television listings. If you don't see it there, call your local public television station and give them this information. Building A Dream: The Moorhead Stave Church Available from: Heritage Hjemkomst Interpretive Center 202 First Avenue North Moorhead, Minnesota 56560 (218) 299-5511 Monday, March 10, 2003
In the last few months I've been discovering the world of traditional Scandinavian music. I've been looking into music of the period between 900 A. D. and 1300 B. C. Christianity arrived late in this remote corner of Europe. For centuries, the new religion mingled with the older Norse traditons of feasting, merry making and storytelling. There are only intriquing fragments of this era, and little remains that wasn't written down by monks. But there seems to be the same kind of explosion of interest today in roots music in Scandinavia that there was during the folk/rock revival in England in the late 60's, or that exists for blues in the United States today. Though the written music sources are slim, we know a little about the instruments. Willow flutes and goats horns were used by herders. Other instruments, lyres and harps, have been found in burial ships or other archeological excavations. Viking Era Instruments One of the few sources on how these might have sounded is an Arab merchant visiting Hereby, Denmark, in the 10th century, who was not exactly complementary. "The growling sound coming from their throats reminds me of dogs howling, only more untamed." The group Krauka, from Norway, is one of several that has taken up these old instruments, and found or created music that might represent the Viking era. We have their permission to use music from their CD in our documentary. This is a wonderful, charming album, full of energy and high spirits and lilting tunes. Get your own copy at: Krauka Thursday, February 06, 2003
Last night I watched a 1950's film about Vikings that I found through a web film archive. Like anything educational from that era, it had it's own earnest charm. Though, as a school child myself in the 50's, the familiar bass timbre of that Voice of God narrator would have put me to sleep before the first sword thrust. Retro films are chic. I'm a fan of Bill Nye, the Science Guy, who uses clips of old educational films to spice up his own postmodern magic act. Check out Bill Nye's site! A side angle of tiers of oars, working in tandem, a hand sewn sail billowing in the sky, lips reaching out to kiss a cross, there's some wonderful images here, worth repeating. With a little image manipulation and selective editing, mixed in with contemporary photographs of Viking relics from museum collections, it could work. And it spares me the expense of decking out my own Viking ship.
Saturday, February 01, 2003
Video is a visual medium. A book can come to life with the barest of images, a photograph or two, and we, the audience, fill in the blanks. Video's different. For every line of thought, you need those visual counterpoints. Dziga Vertov once wrote, you can only film the present. It becomes a challenge when your subject is the past. Luckily, we were present to document events happening as this replica stavekirke was being built. We have scenes of the first white pine crashing to earth, and of Guy stacking and cutting some of the 44,000 shingles that now adorn the roof. I'm now hunting for images that will somehow call up the 11th and 12th century in Northern Europe, which is when the original stave churches were conceived and built. There are scraps and fragments left of that era, mostly in the form of runestones, and some burial items that were excavated and now are scattered in the collections of museums all over the world. I mentioned this dilemma to Kathleen Laughlin, my editor. She sent me a video on Vikings she did in the early '80's for Minnesota public TV. A enterprising filmmaker is a bit like magician who conjures wings out of thin air. Kathleen has an amazing eye, and is known for her imaginative style. Kathleen's website In her short about Vikings for Minnesota public TV, she managed to combine silhouettes of longships, with rugged coastlines studded with pines and roiling water shots- with artifacts shot in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts- and used animation as a bridge. Animation is always a delightful solution- and it's particularly stunning the way Kathleen uses it in this piece, where her live silhouettes melt into equivalent pen strokes of dark helmeted men rowing and seagulls hovering. I marvel at the energy and work that is hidden in those suggestive images. We will have to rely on photographs of artifacts, and a few drawings. On our budget, we won't be flying to Norway to tape the coastline and the original church anytime soon. Pine trees and water shots, I think we could manage. I'm conjuring. I'm counting on thin air. Sunday, January 26, 2003
Wow. Gorgeous. I'm listening to Trio Mediaeval, three women from Oslo who sing sacred music from the 13th and 14th centuries on their debut CD, Words of the Angel. It took me almost two months to get my hands on this album, and it's been worth it. Stunning. 
My mother used to love choral music, and long before the popularity of "Chant!" she had turntable records of Gregorian chant. I have a few albums of my own. But if I hadn't been searching for medieval Scandinavian music I would have missed this little gem. Here's a review from the Austin Chronicle: Thursday, January 23, 2003
I'm going through all the tapes we've shot to see what we have. The originals are on BetaSP, a television format, and I've been doing all my transcriptions from audio tape. Now I type in all the time code numbers from the tapes into my transcripts so I know where each image or each soundbite comes from. Lots of film-making is just being a glorified secretary. Letters, transcripts, invoices, administrative papers up the wahzoo. But having organization really pays off when you begin to edit. It's great to be able to look down at a script that tells you exactly where this shot comes from and how far to fast forward to find it. One of the tapes was from early on in our shooting. I was hired the week of the dedication, after the church was mostly finished, and that week a group of Norwegians flew in from Vik, where the original Hopperstad church is located. It amazes me that 150 people flew here from a tiny town in Norway just to see this church. Especially when the original is right there in their own backyard. At this point, Guy is having a great time showing off this reconstruction, and enjoying the amazement of the visitors. Of course, they notice and question every detail that is different. The wood is new, not darkened with creosote. The arches that hold the St. Andrews crosses haven't been put up yet, and the balachino, a 13th century altar that is one of the treasured features of the original church, had not yet been constructed. So Guy is peppered with questions about these things. The Vik church has accumulated lots of interesting character in 900 years of use. No one will ever be buried, for example, under the Moorhead church floor. In the rafters of the Vik church, medieval workers made practise carvings that are currently being studied by scholars. One of the visitors makes Guy laugh when he asks if he plans to replicate the graffitti. Wednesday, January 22, 2003
Tuesday, January 21, 2003
I'm working on transcribing interviews for our video about the stavekirke replica, pulling all the material together for an edit. We have probably thirty hours of field material. And on top of that, fifteen more hours of interviews. This church in Moorhead, Minnesota is a replica of the Hopperstad Stave Church in Sogne Fjord, Norway. Guy Paulson wanted to build a full-size church as exact as he could make it. Today I hunted through a lot of tapes to find the interview we did with Don Guida, the owner of Straight River Log Homes, who did the major construction. Don's a sturdy, cheerful man. A relatively small person, he's like a ruddy acorn, just packed with energy and physical strength. Guy had told me that he'd bandied around the idea with a number of builders at the Home Show, and most of them passed on it. Don's the only one who jumped at it. He is not a man to turn down "a challenge." What I learned from Don's interview is that it's the vertical nature of the stave church that makes it really distinct from a builders point of view. Both the upright staves and all the upright paneling are unusual from the point of view of contemporary timber framing practise, where all the wood is horizontal. It's more vulnerable to wind, and the old way they dealt with that was through the structure- both the arches and the St. Andrews crosses contribute tensions that contribute toward an overall balance that is flexible but internally consistant. Even though the originals have stood in Norway for 900 years, in this case the builders weren't able to trust that- they had to follow city code. "We have a lot of steel and bits and bolts kind of hidden away in the big timbers." Don said. Monday, October 28, 2002
This week I've started transcribing interviews beginning with Guy Paulson, the man behind the stavekirke replica in Moorhead. I asked him about his sources of inspiration, and as we talked he began to tell me about the "do-it-yourself" attitude he learned during his childhood on the farm. "We lived twenty five miles from town. So if we wanted a toy, you would probably have to make your own. If something broke down, machines or something, we fixed it as best as we could. You looked at things and you figured out what's going on, and you fixed it. So you learn by doing, you learn by observing. And everybody was pulling in the same direction. Eveyone wanted the hay to get cut, and the hay to get stacked, and the cows milked." I'm beginning to realize that is a good description of how the church got built. Lots of hands, lots of back and forth between the builder and construction team with fresh ideas, and a spirit of friendly collaboration- getting the job done. Monday, October 21, 2002
Hello. We've been working on a video about the stavekirke in Moorhead, the church that Guy built. The stavekirke is a unique architectural structure, a Scandinavian take on a Romanesque cathedral. These churches, all made of wood, and decorated with elaborate carvings in the old Norse style, still exist in Norway. It's likely that the same craftsmen who built the great halls and the Viking ships built these. Nine hundred years later, Guy Paulson, a retired research biochemist, got it into his head that he wanted to build a replica of a stavekirke in Minnesota. The Heritage Hjemkomst Interpretive Center was delighted to offer their site for the project. In 1997, the foundation went in and the first staves were erected. And the rest, as they say, is history. Check it out at: Heritage Hjemkomst Interpretive Center |
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