This weekend I visited Oslo Museum of Cultural History for the first time, and I was fortunate enough to be able to visit the medieval exhibition, which is going to be taken down on October 10. This exhibition, which has been in its place since the 1970s, contains an array of various and very different objects from medieval Norway, from a fifth-century runestones to wooden sculptures produced in the 1520s. There are many amazing and breathtaking objects in the collection, and my hope is that I will have the wherewithal to write more about some of them on the blog. For this post, however, I will limit myself to one item that in and of itself is rather simple, but which did absolutely take my breath away as I noticed it.
The object in question is what we in Norwegian call "tvare" or "tvore" (in my dialect, "tvøre"). Its function was to stir porridge and stews to prevent lumps or thickening, and a friend told me that this kind of object is called a spirtle in Scottish. The "tvore" always ends in a cluster of small spikes, and was a typical implement in historical Norwegian kitchens.
The Oslo Museum of Cultural History
The reason why this ordinary household item took my breath away is that I encountered this implement growing up. That is, I have never seen one in use, let alone used one myself, but the generation of my grandparents (born in the 1910s) still used these for cooking, and they have been kept in the house where my grandaunt lived when I was a child.
What fascinates me about the "tvore" is not so much that it has been in continuous use since the Middle Ages. Several items used in the modern world came into their known shape in the medieval period, even before, but there are two important aspects with these particular cooking implements. First of all, the "tvore" has remained unchanged in form as well as in its material since the Middle Ages, which is something we very rarely observe in household items. When we consider how certain tools and implements have changed over the centuries - such as the saddle, the spade, the hammer, the bucket - such permanence is noteworthy. Secondly, unlike the aforementioned tools, the "tvore" is no longer in use. This means that something in the way we cook our food has changed so drastically as to superannuate the "tvore" as a kitchen item. The discontinuing of the "tvore" should probably be seen as a consequence of electricity and a change in the diet, and in this way, the "tvore" is a testament to the dramatic nature of the changes in everyday life that took place in rural Norway in the early twentieth century. In short, the way we cook and the way we eat changed to such a degree in the early twentieth century that utensils that had been used since the medieval period were no longer needed.
Naturally, it is important to keep in mind that there were other changes in Norwegian rural society that marked a break or a discontinuity with the medieval period long before the twentieth century. Changes in growing techniques, the introduction of the potato in the early eighteenth century, changes in social patterns, the transition to more commercially oriented farming practices in the nineteenth century, all these and other elements of Norwegian history were different from how agriculture and the rural life had unfolded in the medieval period. Yet despite such changes, certain things remained long into the modern world, such as the "tvore". And because the enduring materiality of the "tvore", in form as well as matter, the discontinuation of this item signals a break with the past - it signals that some aspect of society is irrevocably and totally different. And it is this change that the "tvore" represents.
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