L to R: Robert “Bud” Larsen, Amy Rand, and Rinita Dalan holding the wood that will become The 2025 Fiddle.

Clay County Histories

Markus Krueger | Program Director HCSCC

Have I got a story for you, my friends! Oh, where to begin…How about the 4th of July, 1825? That’s when a ship called the Restauration left Stavanger, Norway, with 52 Norwegians bound for America. They landed in New York City on October 9, which is why that date was chosen as Leif Erickson Day, the celebration of Norwegian American heritage.
The Restauration was Norway’s Mayflower. Those 52 were the first Norwegian immigrants to America. In the coming decades, more than a third of Norway’s population moved to our country, and the Red River Valley was one of their primary destinations. If you’re reading this paper, you likely know more Norwegian Americans than you can shake a lefse stick at.
If you do some arithmetic, you’ll find that next year is the bicentennial of that voyage, and our Norwegian cousins want to make a big celebration of it. Well, we have an idea. No, we are not sailing a Viking Ship to Norway, we already did that back in ’82. This time, we are making a fiddle.
And not just any fiddle. A Hardanger Fiddle, the beloved folk instrument of Norway and Norwegian America. Picture a violin. Add a lower layer of strings untouched by the bow that drone harmoniously along with the others. Doodle all over the front and back with folk art floral designs. Inlay mother-of-pearl designs into the black ebony neck. Instead of topping it with a scroll, carve a monster.
We make them and play them here because among those hundreds of thousands who left Norway was a Hardanger Fiddle maker named Gunnar Helland. In 1955, at the age of 70, Gunnar took on a teenaged apprentice who lived down the hall from his Fargo violin shop. That apprentice, Robert “Bud” Larsen, now 80, is teaching new apprentices to make Hardanger Fiddles together in the Fargo-Moorhead area. Thanks to a grant from the Sons of Norway, I am one of the new apprentices.
In January, fiddle-makers Amy Rand, a teacher at Fargo’s Adult Learning Center, and Rinita Dalan, a recently retired MSUM archeology professor, had an idea. We apprentices of Bud Larsen, under his guidance, will collectively build a Hardanger Fiddle in honor of the bicentennial of Norwegian immigration to America, and we want the whole community to help us. The Fargo Moorhead Convention and Visitors Bureau loved the idea, so they paid for all the materials as the official sponsor of the project.
“The 2025 Fiddle” made its public debut in Bismarck at a January 29 concert of the Fargo Spelemannslag, the Hardanger Fiddle band that formed around Bud Larsen’s students. Members of the audience helped scrape the fiddle’s ribs (wooden side pieces) to 1 millimeter thin. Fred Renner, our club’s first apprentice, is currently bending the ribs into fiddle-shape with the help of his family. Our goal is to get as many hands on this fiddle as possible, shaving and shaping the wood, designing the “rosing” doodles and inlay patterns. Watch for the 2025 Fiddle at River Arts in Moorhead this summer, cultural events like the Scandinavian Festival, and whatever else comes up.
I can’t tell you how much fun I’m having making my own Hardanger Fiddle. Okay, I lied. As I build my fiddle, I fully intend to keep you updated with articles about how much fun I’m having, and the history of this instrument, and who Gunnar Helland was, and how the bicentennial 2025 Fiddle is coming along. But don’t wait until my columns come out. Follow “The 2025 Fiddle” on Facebook.