We visited multiple museums on this day. I will include two in this post. I’ll start with the Viking Museum because the Scandinavians seem to identify so much with the Vikings. I’ll also include our visit to the Fram Museum in this post.

The Viking Age was from around 800 – 1100 AD. Much of the Viking notoriety stems from their sea explorations and Viking longships. For me, I was aware of their exploits to England and Scotland as well as to Greenland. I was also aware that they “discovered” north America some 500 years before Columbus. But I didn’t know that they had sailed into the Mediterranean and many of the major European rivers as far as Istanbul and the Black Sea. Viking ship technology made them a dominant force in medieval times for warfare, trade, and politics. I won’t go into too great a detail about the Vikings and for me, the greatest part of the museums was the actual ships, recovered from ancient burials in incredibly great shape.

The Viking Museum houses three longships: the Oseberg, the Gokstad, and the Tune ships. The first two photos are the Oseberg ship. It was actually a pleasure ship. It is 70 feet long and 16 feet wide. It had a single square sail and 15 pairs of oars. Researchers estimate that it could reach speeds of up to 10 knots. It was determined that the ship dates from before the year 800 and that it had been buried since 1834. It is the most complete Viking ship ever found. It was part of the excavation of the largest known ship burial in the world. The Oseberg was richly decorated and contained lavish burial gifts for the two women buried onboard. It took 21 years to restore the ship and the related finds.

I included Vicky in the first photo with the Oseberg ship for perspective. I took the second photo from the balcony to better show the entire Oseberg longboat. I don’t doubt the claims about the effectiveness and efficiency of the Viking longboats but I still have a difficult time imagining sailing in these boats from Scandinavia to Greenland and North America and back. Where did they store all their provisions for 30 rowers and the rest of the crew?

When digging up the three ships displayed in the museum, many other artifacts were also uncovered. Those include three sleighs, beds, wood carvings, tent components, buckets, dresses, combs, pearls, fine white linen, and the horse cart seen in the third photo. The carving on the horse cart bed and other parts of the cart are incredible but I mostly liked the wheels on the cart.

The Fram Museum is next to the Viking Museum and several other museums. The Fram Museum was inaugurated in 1936. The Fram was the strongest wooden ship ever built and still holds the records for sailing the farthest north and farthest south. Like the Viking Museum, at the Fram Museum the ships were the best part. These were really great old ships. On both the Fram and the Gjoa, visitors are allowed to go on board the ships and see how the crew and dogs lived to survive the coldest and most dangerous places on earth, the Arctic and the Antarctic. The Gjoa was the first ship to transit the Northwest Passage with Roald Amundsen and a crew of six and it took them three years to complete the journey in 1906.

The Fram is in the fourth photo. The construction is incredible. It’s a wooden ship made to break through icebergs and ice shelves. In climbing all over the ship from stem to stern, up and down, I would say it’s bigger than it looks in the photo.

You can see me at the helm in the last photo. Down below the ship was really interesting. We got to see all the crew’s cabins, food storage including animals such as pigs, food preparation, ship repairs area, and everything else. Fascinating!