Welcome to the first POLAR NIGHT of the year!
Wednesday, January 25 at 7:00 PM. Director of the Frammuseet, Geir Kløver, opens a rich museum year in Brandal. The Ishavsmuseet will focus heavily on communicating polar history throughout 2012, and is planning many exciting events throughout the year.
The first speaker on Wednesday, January 25th, will be Geir Kløver, director of the Fram Museum in Oslo. Kløver is an expert on Nansen/Amundsen and the great polar expeditions. He has had a very busy year in connection with the anniversary in 2011, and has traveled \"around the world\" with lectures and events. On January 17th, Kløver was at the Polar Institute at the venerable Cambridge University, an institute named after Robert F. Scott, and marked the 100th anniversary of Scott reaching the South Pole.
Kløver is a highly sought-after and skilled speaker. On Wednesday evening he will be visiting the Ishavsmuseet with the lecture: Roald Amundsen and the South Pole expedition through the crew's diaries. The lecture discusses Roald Amundsen's South Pole expedition, spiced up with pictures from Amundsen's own lecture, as well as the crew's private diaries and photo albums.
The South Pole Diaries: On May 20, 2011, the Fram Museum launched the private diaries of the 15 crew members of the Fram. The lecture discusses both the process of obtaining and making available this material, and the content of it.
North Pole expedition becomes South Pole expedition.
Amundsen began preparing for an expedition to the North Pole, but when both Fredrick A. Cook and Robert E. Peary claimed to have reached it in 1908 and 1909 respectively, Amundsen secretly decided to change his plans, and the journey went south to Antarctica in a race with Scott to the South Pole. Amundsen reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911, 5 weeks before Scott, who died on the return trip. Amundsen's strength was thorough planning, very good preparations and choice of equipment. He was actually an informal leader, but preferred to be called "the boss", says director Geir Kløver at the Fram Museum.
The diaries from the South Pole.
Ever since Amundsen's South Pole expedition was celebrated around the world in 1911, the expedition's source material was strictly controlled by Amundsen himself. Diaries, photographs, documents and records could not be made public. And so it has been until the Fram Museum in collaboration with the National Library of Norway's manuscript collection is now publishing eight volumes and 2400 pages of handwritten diaries from a total of 14 of the 19 members of the Fram crew.
"Now all the diaries from the South Pole expedition, both in public and private ownership, have been published," says director Geir Kløver at the Frammuseet. Kløver says that the project of deciphering and rewriting has been going on for six years.
