By Lisa Torvik            

Imagine my surprise when, at the end of a lovely dinner with my old friend “H”, her family and some of my relatives, she plucked something off the wall in the corner and proudly showed it to us:  a genuine Hannah Ryggen tapestry!  My jaw just dropped.  I have visited this home many times since the mid-1980s, since her parents, then her brother and finally she and her family lived there, on her mother’s ancestral farm outside of Trondheim.  Though we seldom dined in the formal dining room, which they call the Red Parlor, I was amazed that I had never noticed this particular part of the décor, somewhat obscured by her great grandmother’s wedding veil.

How did it come to be there?  Here is the tale in “H’s” own words, my translation:

“The story:  At the end of the 1950s, Hannah Ryggen broke her ankle. At that time my father was a “young” doctor at the Central Hospital in Trondheim.  He operated [on Hannah] and set in a screw. When she left the hospital he said he thought he deserved a tapestry for the good job he had done, said with a gleam in his eye of course (you well remember my father….).  She replied that he would never be able to afford to buy one of her tapestries.  Certainly said with a gleam in her eye, also. When she came for a checkup some weeks later she had this tapestry with her, which of course shows the ankle with the screw and the doctor’s hand. Now it hangs in the Red Parlor!!”

Not a bad “tip” for good medical care, I would say.

Bio: Lisa Torvik credits early influences of her mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends in Norway for her knitting, sewing, embroidery and weaving interests.  She spent a year in her youth studying weaving at Valdres Husflidsskule in Fagernes, Norway, and now focuses on projects in traditional Norwegian techniques and more contemporary applications.

March 2025

Editor’s note: If you want to celebrate and view the work of Hannah Ryggen this summer, visit the Hannah Ryggen Trienniale 2025 sponsored by the Nordenfjelske Kunstindustrimuseum.

Read more: Minnesota weaver Christine Novotny visited the Trienniale three years ago, and reported on her experience in this Norwegian Textile Letter article, “Anti-Monument: The 2022 Hannah Ryggen Triennial.”