This document contains lecture notes on the course of general relativity FX2 H97 read in the fall semester 1997 at the Physics Institute of NTNU. It is not aimed to be a textbook, but rather a guide through the textbooks and other literature recommended to the students. The basic textbook for this course is Part I of "General relativity" by R. M. Wald, [6]. It is highly recommended to the students to solve the exercises contained in the lecture notes, because some of them illustrate important applications of the main text. Similar exercises (or some other, which can be found e.g. in [4] or [6]) will be used also at the examinations.