Håkon Christie: A Lifetime Reading Wooden Churches
In 2009, at eighty-seven, Håkon Christie published a book about Urnes stave church. He had begun studying Norwegian church architecture in 1950. Fifty-nine years on one subject is not a career; it is a form of devotion, and it produced the most complete account any European country possesses of its medieval religious buildings. When he died the following December, the survey he had started was still going.
A Provost's Son
Christie was born on 30 August 1922 at Nannestad in Akershus, the son of Hartvig Caspar Christie, a provost of the Church of Norway who lived from 1893 to 1959, and Elisabeth Theodora Stabell, who lived from 1898 to 1977. Growing up in a clerical household in rural Akershus meant growing up among parish churches, and the man who spent sixty years documenting them started by living in one's shadow.
He graduated from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim in 1949, trained as an architect. While still a student he worked as an assistant to Gerhard Fischer, the archaeologist and building historian who was then the leading Norwegian authority on medieval stone and timber structures. That apprenticeship set the direction of everything after it: Christie learned to approach a building as a physical document to be excavated and read rather than a design to be admired.
The Directorate
From 1950 he was a building-historical consultant and research fellow at the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage, the Riksantikvaren. He became an antiquarian there in 1970 and retired in 1991 — forty-one years in the same institution. Retirement barely interrupted him; in 1994 he took up a post as a researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research.
Norges Kirker
The central work of his life began the year he joined the Directorate, and he did it with his wife. Sigrid Marie Christie, born 18 April 1923, had taken a master's degree in art history at the University of Oslo in 1949; she was a research fellow from 1950 to 1970, took her doctorate in 1974, worked at the National Archives from 1970 and co-edited the Norwegian Artists' Lexicon from 1978 to 1986. From 1950 the two of them worked jointly on the history of Norwegian church architecture, and above all on stave churches.
The result was *Norges Kirker* — the Churches of Norway — a systematic survey conducted church by church, region by region. The Christies' own contribution ran to seven volumes covering Østfold, Akershus and Buskerud, with the first appearing in 1959 and further volumes in 1969. It is a scholarly form barely attempted elsewhere: not a selective history of the important buildings but a comprehensive inventory of all of them, each measured, dated, described and set in its context. Sigrid died on 16 May 2004.
Reading Timber
Alongside the survey came the interpretive books. *Middelalderen bygner i tre* — medieval buildings in wood — appeared in 1974. *Stavkirkene*, on the stave churches themselves, followed in 1981. *Urnes stavkirke* closed the sequence in 2009.
The stave church is a peculiar and demanding object of study. These are timber buildings, some approaching nine hundred years old, that have been repaired, moved, extended, stripped and restored so many times that almost nothing in them is straightforwardly original. Reading one means distinguishing a twelfth-century post from a seventeenth-century replacement by joint type, tool marks and wear — archaeology conducted on standing wood. Christie was an archaeologist as much as an architect, and that is the skill the work required.
Honours
The recognitions accumulated: Knight First Class of the Order of St Olav, the Grosch Medal, the Urnes Medal, and the Europa Nostra Award, which he shared with Arne Berg. The joint citation honoured the two men "for their complementary contributions to the understanding of medieval vernacular and ecclesiastical wooden architecture in Scandinavia" — Berg for his six-volume study of Norwegian medieval timber houses and pre-industrial farm buildings, Christie for the ecclesiastical half of the same world. Europa Nostra credited him with shaping the understanding of Norwegian wooden architecture broadly, with particular expertise in stave church design, and noted that *Norges kirker* had substantially influenced how scholars comprehend Norwegian artistic heritage. It also singled out something less measurable: that he had fostered academic connections across Europe.
He died on 14 December 2010 and is buried at Ullern Church in Oslo.
Why Håkon Is Called a Genius
This is a case where the word must be used carefully or not at all, because Christie's gift was not the kind that produces a flash of insight. He designed no buildings and proposed no grand theory. What he had was an extraordinary capacity for sustained, exact, unglamorous attention — and a specific technical skill that very few people ever acquire.
That skill is the reading of altered timber. A stave church is a palimpsest: nine centuries of repairs, replacements and restorations layered on an original frame that may survive only in fragments. To establish what is medieval and what is not, using joinery, tool marks, timber conversion and wear, is a forensic discipline requiring both an architect's structural understanding and an archaeologist's evidential discipline. Christie possessed both, and applied them to essentially every church in three Norwegian counties.
The other claim is about scale of conception. *Norges kirker* is a survey designed to outlast its authors — an infrastructure project in scholarship, begun in 1950 and still unfinished when he died sixty years later. Choosing to spend a life on that, rather than on the interpretive books that make reputations, is a judgement about what actually serves knowledge. Europa Nostra's jury made exactly that judgement in his favour.
The honest counter-case is that this is diligence at an exceptional level rather than originality. Christie worked in a tradition he inherited from Gerhard Fischer, on a national inventory model used elsewhere in Europe, and his conclusions revised rather than overturned the field. His honours are Norwegian and European rather than global. Nothing he wrote changed how anyone outside Scandinavian building history thinks. Call it mastery, and the description holds; call it genius, and you are stretching the word to cover a rarer virtue — the willingness to be thorough for sixty years.
Legacy
Norway's stave churches are now among the most closely studied timber buildings in the world, and they are studied on foundations Christie laid. Every conservation decision taken about them draws on the survey he and Sigrid began in 1950 and on the volumes they published across five decades. His last book, on Urnes, was written when he was in his late eighties about a building he had known most of his life — the appropriate ending for a scholar whose whole method was to keep looking at the same thing until it gave up what it knew.
Achievements
- Grosch medal
- Order of St. Olav
- Trained at Norwegian Institute of Technology
