Odda (help·info) was a municipality in Hordaland county, Norway. The municipality was located in southeastern Hordaland county, surrounding the southern end of the Sørfjorden. The administrative centre is the town of Odda, which is also the main commercial and economic centre of the entire Hardanger region. Other villages in the municipality include Botnen, Eitrheim, Håra, Røldal, Seljestad, Skare, and Tyssedal.

The 1,616-square-kilometre (624 sq mi) municipality is the 42nd largest by area out of the 422 municipalities in Norway. Odda is the 150th most populous municipality in Norway with a population of 7,025. The municipality's population density is 4.8 inhabitants per square kilometre (12/sq mi) and its population has decreased by 1.8% over the last decade

The new municipality of Odda was established on 1 July 1913 when the southern district of Ullensvang was separated out to form its own municipality. Initially, Odda had 3,077 residents. During the 1960s, there were many municipal mergers across Norway due to the work of the Schei Committee. On 1 January 1964, the neighboring municipality of Røldal (population: 676) was merged into Odda, bringing the total population of the new municipality to 10,163 residents.[4]

On 1 January 2020, the three neighboring municipalities of Jondal, Odda, and Ullensvang are going to be merged. The new municipality will be called Ullensvang and its administrative centre will be the town of Odda.[5]

Name[edit]

The municipality (originally the parish) is named after the old "Odda" farm (Old Norse: Oddi), since the first Odda Church was built there. The name is identical with the word oddi which means "headland".[6]

Coat-of-arms[edit]

The coat-of-arms is from modern times; they were granted on 8 October 1982. The arms show a canting of an arrowhead (Norwegian language: pilodd). The name of the municipality, however, is not derived from the word for arrowhead.[7]

Churches[edit]

The Church of Norway has four parishes (sokn) within the municipality of Odda. It is part of the Hardanger og Voss deanery in the Diocese of Bjørgvin.

The Røldal Stave Church was built in the years 1200–1250 in the present-day village of Røldal. This is one of the oldest structures in the municipality.

During the 19th century, Odda became a significant tourist destination. Visits ranged from English pioneers around 1830 to the German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II, who visited Odda every year between 1891 and 1914. This led to the construction of several hotels in the municipality.

The present Odda municipality is centred on a modern town which grew up around smelters built at the head of the Sørfjorden branch of the Hardangerfjord in the mid-twentieth century, drawing migrants from different parts of Norway.

The carbide production and the subsequent production of cyanamide was started in 1908 after the water power plant was operational and provided the necessary electricity for the arc furnaces. The plant was the largest in the world and remained operational till 2003 shortly after the plant was sold to Philipp Brothers Chemicals Inc. The Norwegian government tried to get the site recognized together with other industrial plants as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.[8][9][10] In 2010 an international report stated: What makes Odda smelteverk so important and central to the application of Norway’s hydro power sites and pioneer chemical industry as a World Heritage Site is the fact that here in an internationally unique way the physical remains of an early chemical production process are still present.[11]

Dialect

Odda grew up around this smelter in the early-twentieth century, drawing migrants from different parts of Norway. As a result, there developed a new dialect, a mixture of that spoken in the home regions of the migrants - a phenomenon termed by linguists "a Koiné language". The town of Odda and neighboring village of Tyssedal - which arose in the same time and socio-economic circumstances as those of Odda - provided valuable insights to linguists studying this phenomenon. The researcher Paul Kerswill conducted an intensive study of the Norwegian spoken in the two communities, relating them to very different geographical origins: The workers in Odda came predominantly (86%) from western Norway. In Tyssedal only about one third came from western Norway; one third came from eastern Norway; and the rest from other parts of the country. The dialects that evolved in these two communities were radically different from each other, though spoken at a short geographical distance from each other.