About the National Historical Museum
The National Historical Museum is one of Sweden’s largest museums. Its collections comprise archaeological artefacts from Sweden and Swedish ecclesiastical art.
Detail of the gold collar from Ålleberg.
The artefacts come from the whole country and all periods of history. The collections contain more than 10 million individual objects catalogued under around 34,000 inventory numbers. The exhibitions display thousands of years of history from ancient prehistory to the Viking period and the Middle Ages. The museum also houses temporary exhibitions and activities for various ages. Lectures, themed weekends, school visits, history workshops for parents and children and storage area open days are just some of the activities on offer for visitors.
The Prehistories exhibition tells not one story, but several stories from different periods. Visitors encounter prehistory through eight personal life stories. Unique prehistoric finds are on display, including Sweden’s oldest preserved garment, a cloak over 2000 years old, woven in a shepherd’s check pattern.
The Vikings exhibition displays four thousand original objects from the Viking period. It describes daily life a thousand years ago, travel near and far, and tells the stories of men and women, aristocrats, farmers and thralls. A large model of one of Sweden’s first towns, Birka, is also on display. The exhibition also addresses the role the Vikings play in our own period: how nationalism and Nazism made use of the Viking period in propaganda.
The Gold Room displays many gold treasures found in deserted places and deriving from the period imbued with myth, which even today is known as Scandinavia’s Gold Age. These include the 1500 year-old gold collar from Ålleberg which was made so skilfully that today’s goldsmiths still can’t work out how it was done.
The Textile Chamber contains medieval textiles from Swedish churches, textile objects used by the clergy or to decorate churches in various ways.
The National Historical Museum also houses one of the finest collections of medieval ecclesiastical art in Northern Europe in the form of impressive triptychs, baptismal fonts, and gold and silver treasures, all in the atmospheric setting of a rural church dating from the 12th century.
The National Historical Museum also has the status of a “responsible museum” in the fields of archaeology and ecclesiastical art history. This means that the museum is to:
- work to achieve appropriate coordination of museum activities, primarily between museums at central and regional level.
- assist other museums, particularly at regional level.
- work to develop contacts between museums and the community at large.
The museum also houses Café Rosengården and the museum’s own shop.
- Updated: 12 October 2011
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