Stone fragments from medieval Oslo

A couple of weeks ago, some colleagues and I took a guided tour at Akershus Fortress, a castle complex that was begun sometime at the turn of the thirteenth century, and that received most of its current shape in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We had requested a tour that focussed on the medieval parts of the castle, and the guide did an excellent job showcasing the surviving and often hidden remnants from the Middle Ages.

For me, however, the highlight was not any of the gatehouses or rooms whose foundations were put in place from the late 1300s onwards, but rather a collection of medieval remnants that had originally nothing to do with the fortress and became a part of the castle complex sometime around 1600. These remnants are now embedded into a defensive outer wall that was built to provide a bulwark against artillery fire on the north-northeastern side of the fortress. In the Middle Ages, no such walls had been needed as the nascent gunpowder technology had not reached the point where it posed a threat from that angle, since the terrain on that side is difficult for unwieldy artillery. With the evolution of military technology, however, the defensive needs changed, and a wall was put together with stones gathered from the then-defunct medieval stone churches and mendicant houses in Oslo's old city, and also probably from the ruins of the monastery of Hovedøya, a Cistercian house founded in 1147. Today, only the excavated foundations of the buildings in the old town remain, while somewhat more of the Cistercian abbey can be seen at Hovedøya. 

The guided tour at Akershus Fortress came only a few days after another guided tour to the aforementioned ruins in the old town, and during that tour we had really come face to face with the colossal absence of what had once been beautifully carved and decorated religious houses. At the castle, we saw some of these disjecta membra embedded into the mortar in angles that often were contrary to their original purpose, with slightly curved arches bending downwards or capitals aslant and askew. Despite the sorry state of these stone fragments, it was nonetheless immensely thrilling to be able to catch a glimpse of the kind of decorations, as well as their quality, that had once been part of far more intricate and impressive religious complexes in medieval Oslo. Due to their current state and placement, it is impossible to say anything certain about their origins and date, but several of them seemed typical of twelfth- and thirteenth-century masonry, typical of the patterns and shapes popular in those centuries. It is comforting, in a very strange way, that we have these witnesses to medieval Oslo available, as they provide a very faint outline of the now-lost totality of the medieval city's religious architecture.