Borgund Stave Church

Where it sits. Borgund Stave Church stands on a low terrace above the Lærdalselvi river in Lærdal Municipality, Vestland, about 30 kilometres inland from the Sognefjord at Lærdalsøyri. The site is not accidental. It sits on the old route over the Filefjell mountain pass, the corridor that carried traffic between eastern and western Norway for a thousand years, and the church served travellers as much as the local valley. The modern E16 runs past the door; the medieval and eighteenth-century versions of the same road, the Kongevegen or King's Road, can still be walked in restored sections nearby. The Lærdal Tunnel, at 24.5 kilometres the longest road tunnel in the world when it opened in 2000, begins a short drive west.

The building itself. Borgund was raised around 1180 to 1200 and is the best preserved of the 28 stave churches surviving in Norway out of the thousand or more that once existed. It is a triple-nave church of what specialists call the Sogn type: an inner frame of free-standing staves, or masts, carries a raised central space, with an ambulatory running round all four sides beneath a lower roof. Everything is pine, much of it heartwood from slow-grown trees felled in winter, and the whole structure rests on stone sills so the timber never touches damp ground. The exterior is clad in shingles and coated in tar, which is why the church is almost black; the tarring is repeated on a cycle of several years and is the reason the wood has lasted eight centuries.

Details worth looking for. Four carved dragon heads rise from the gable ends, a motif that borrows straight from ship prows and is the clearest visual link between Christian building and Norse craft tradition. The west portal carries interlaced vine and beast carving of a quality found in only a handful of surviving Norwegian monuments. Inside, the space is dark, narrow and vertical, with no windows to speak of beyond small circular openings high in the walls; medieval congregations stood, and there are no pews of any antiquity. More than thirty runic inscriptions have been recorded on the walls, most of them short and personal rather than liturgical. In the churchyard stands the only free-standing stave-built bell tower left in the country, a squat shingled frame that looks improvised and is in fact the last survivor of a once-common type. The altarpiece dates from 1654 and the pulpit from the seventeenth century, both later insertions into a medieval shell.

On screen, and the animation question. Borgund has never been a feature-film set, and claiming otherwise would be wrong. Its screen significance is different and, for once, better documented than most: it is among the buildings repeatedly cited by Walt Disney Animation Studios as reference for the architecture of Arendelle in Frozen, following the studio's 2012 research trip to Norway. The steep multi-tiered roofs, the shingle scaling, the dragon finials and the dark tarred timber all read directly into the film's town and chapel designs. Frozen is animated; nothing was photographed here. What the artists took away was a vocabulary, and the church is the clearest single place to see that vocabulary in its original form rather than in a stylised version.

What is actually there today. The church stopped holding regular services in 1868, when a new Borgund Church was built a short distance away, and the old building was bought by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments in 1877. It has been a museum ever since, which is the reason it survived largely unaltered: there was no pressure to install heating, electricity or nineteenth-century pews. A visitor centre opened across the road in 2005, with an exhibition on stave construction, a model showing the frame assembly, and the ticket desk. Allow an hour for both. The interior is genuinely dark, and photography without a tripod is difficult.

Getting there and timing. Borgund is about two and a half hours by road from Bergen and four and a half from Oslo, and it sits conveniently between the Sognefjord ferries and the Valdres valley. Public transport is limited to regional buses on the E16. The church and visitor centre open daily through the summer season, roughly May to September, with reduced hours at either end; outside that window the exterior can still be viewed from the churchyard, which in deep snow is arguably the better picture. Morning light falls on the west portal and the carved doorway; late afternoon in summer puts the sun behind the roofs, which flattens the shingle detail. Lærdalsøyri, half an hour down the valley, is worth the detour for its street of preserved wooden houses from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the ferry from Kaupanger reaches Urnes Stave Church, the oldest of them all and a World Heritage Site in its own right, on the far shore of the Lustrafjord.