Borgund Stave Church

Borgund Stave Church is the building most people picture when they think of Norwegian stave churches: roof above roof, spire above spire, with dragon heads rearing from the gables. It stands in the Lærdal valley in western Norway, dark with pine tar against green slopes, and it is also one of the least altered. Tree-ring dating shows that the pines used for its timber were felled in the winter of 1180 to 1181, so the church was probably raised before 1200. It served the local parish until 1868, when a new church was built beside it, and it has since been cared for as a museum by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments.

The construction is ingenious. The walls are made of vertical staves, tongued and grooved into one another and set into sills on a stone foundation, while inside twelve free-standing columns rise to carry the roof, tied by rows of X-shaped braces. The result has been described as a cube within a cube. A covered gallery runs all the way round the outside beneath the overhanging shingle roofs, and the chancel and apse were added in the fourteenth century. So many other stave churches were restored in the late nineteenth century to look like Borgund that it became the model for the whole type, and copies stand as far away as Germany and South Dakota.

Look closely at the carving. On the gables, four dragon heads, probably eighteenth-century replacements of the originals, swoop out from ridge crests carved with openwork vines. The west portal is framed by dragons biting one another in a dense interlace, spewing tendrils from their mouths, and the tops of the columns inside are carved with grotesque masks. The interior is dim, lit only by small round openings high in the walls; much of the medieval fitting survives, including a soapstone font, and the walls carry runic graffiti, one of which reads Ave Maria and another blames the Norns for its writer's troubles. Beside the church stands a free-standing stave bell tower, probably from the thirteenth century, the only one of its kind left in Norway.

Getting there

Borgund lies in Lærdal Municipality, about 25 km up the valley from Lærdalsøyri, the village at the head of the Lærdalsfjord with its own well-preserved wooden old town. The nearest airport is Sogndal Airport (SOG) at Haukåsen, about 10 km from Kaupanger, which lies across the fjord about 15 km from Lærdalsøyri. There is a visitor centre beside the church.