"1854-1860 Norway uniforms and costumes" Topic

So I am getting ready for my Texas Brigade's (US) Bosque Battery, and I need to do some research on 1850's and 1860's Norway. What sort of resources are out there for (a) Norwegian military uniforms of the era and (b) Norwegian peasant/artisan clothing of the era?

Good luck with that. I wrote a similar question (1848) for the Norwegian Military Museum, About a month later they sent me two sources:

Den Norske Haerskampf by Rudolf Muus

Odd Linbroeck Den Norske Haer by someone named Larson

Neither are easily found.

This should do you for the military uniforms.

Vinkhuijzen collection

This may help with the peasant artisan clothing.

Costume

Hope these help.

Thanks, Mahotsukai. I'll have to check that out in more detail later, but it looks like it will help. Do the prints have captions/metadata somewhere, or is there a good way to figure out what militia would be in Norwegian/Swedish?

There seems to be very little in the way of captioning other than that on the actual images.

What scale of miniatures are you using? Also what scale of conflict are you intending? Just so that I can provide relevant information.

Ralf Weaver in The Armies of the 1st Schleswig-Holstein War 1848-51 gives 2 pages on the Scandinavian armies. It also covers the armies of Denmark, Schsleswig-Holstein, and Prussia. As well as details of the states providing units to the Federal German army involved in the war.

Paraphrased from R Weaver:
The Swedish army was made up of three types of units the regular army made up of volunteers who served for up to 14 years, the provincial regiments (Indelta), and the reserve all able bodied men between the ages of 20 and 25. The Indelta and the reserve were little better than partly trained militia.
The Swedish regular army consisted of 3 regiments of infantry each of 2 battalions, 2 regiments of cavalry and, 13 foot and 4 horse batteries in 3 artillery regiments.
The Indelta was comprised of 45 battalions of infantry and 6 regiments of cavalry.
The Norwegian regular army had 22 battalions of infantry a regiment of artillery and a cavalry brigade in all about 15,000 men. In support was a militia of about 9,000 men.
The infantry uniform for both was a single breasted dark blue tunic with coloured collar patches for the Swedes and red for the Norwegians. Both armies wore a helmet akin to the Prussian pickelhaube the Swedes had a yellow metal plate with the Swedish three crown emblem, the Norwegians a heraldic lion holding an axe.
Although Norway and Sweden were separate countries with separate armies, they were unified under the Swedish king. So expect to fight both.

I'm theming a 28mm brigade of Unionist Texans (ACW) around the different national and cultural groups found in the state that were friendly to the North/unfriendly to Virginia (Tejanos, Germans, Freedmen, etc. I've just about finished a regiment of Texas-born Texans). Right now my focus is on a battery manned by Norwegian immigrants that settled in Bosque County between 1854 and 1860. I want to give them some sort of "back-home" flair (either a local militia uniform based on Norwegian uniforms or clothing details based on common clothes back home) to differentiate them from generic ACW artillery crew, but based on those prints it looks like the Swedish/Norwegian infantry wore a dark-blue/light-blue uniform like the Union forces, which is a bit discouraging.

The Norwegian artillery wore a uniform similar to this,

link

The difference being dark grey trousers piped crimson. That and the helmet would differentiate them from the other batteries.

Neat! Is that a tunic or a shell jacket? It's a bit hard to tell on my phone.

It looks to be a tunic.
However with union uniforms being the same basic colour maybe shell jackets could be replacements. so for ease you could just use union figs with a head swap.

Or possibly use Bavarian artillery from the franco prussian war such as these;

link

The Vinkhuijzen collection only shows Swedish uniforms, if I recall correctly.

I'll probably stick with kepis. My converting skills are not the best and trying to swap out whole heads could be a bit too messy for me right now (since I am using the Perry plastic artillery with captured Confederate 12-pounders as a basis for the battery). After all, they probably procured their uniforms either from a pre-war uniform tailor in a larger city, or it is home-made and dyed to look dark gray.