My prediction about my scuffle with Omar the Norwegian was correct.
This morning it was the topic of discussion at breakfast, along with the fact the airline had apparently sat my mother and father-in-law’s luggage down in standing water––the clothes inside were so wet we they had to be wrung out.
Yet, we were determined not to let a physical assault or lost or wet luggage deter us from our quest.
We were here to study the Vikings.
So we began at the Viking Ship Museum. We ubered there with an interesting Norwegian in a gull-winged Tesla. He told me he had spent a year in Hawaii trying to live totally self-sufficient. He lasted about year. People are not intended to live self-sufficient. We need one another. The wheat even need the tares. Tares build Teslas.
The Viking Ship Museum featured three very well preserved Viking longships, each approximately 1,200 years old, along with sleds, carts, and other viking possessions. We have these items because prominent pagan Vikings were buried with them. They were discovered and unearthed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Egyptians also buried people with their worldly possessions. It’s interesting. The materialism of pagans is no different than that of secularists today. They spend their whole lives seeking and accumulating things. These pagans insisted on being buried with their things, apparently in the hope they would be useful in the next life. The Apostle Paul said, “We brought nothing into this world, and we can take nothing out of it.” I Timothy 6:7. Instead, Christians are taught, “A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.” Proverbs 13:22. Christians are to be selfless in death just as they are in life.
From the Viking Ship Museum, The Wife, Ann, and I walked over to the Norse Folk Museum, the highlight of which was the Stave Church, a church built out of wood and which sits on staves (poles) in the thirteenth century.
We had an interesting discussion with the twenty-something guide inside about Norwegian history. He told us Olaf Triggvison converted Norway to Christianity with the sword. We later asked him the name of the current king of Norway. He didn’t know.
How is it he “knows” Christianity was imposed on Norway in a Christianized jihad but doesn’t know the name of the current king of Norway? He has only been king since January 17, 1991.
Our last stop of the day was The Royal Palace. Here, I have to give credit to The Wife’s 86 and 89 year old mother and father, who walked nearly half a mile up the hill to the Royal Palace, stood through a one hour tour, and then walked nearly a mile back to our hotel. No wheelchairs, no walkers; just the same peds God gave them when Herbert Hoover was president.
Tomorrow we will introduce the Viking whose life we came here to study as we travel from Oslo to Bergen, Norway. GS