Plan to move Viking ships raises dire predictions

OSLO, Norway — The University of Oslo has decided to move three grand Viking ships, probably by truck and barge, to a new museum across town despite dire claims that the thousand-year-old oak vessels could fall apart en route.

A retired curator of Oslo's current Viking Ship Museum said the delicately preserved ships, two of which are nearly 80 feet long, were almost equal in archaeological importance to the pyramids.

"Even if I have to live till I am 100, I will go on fighting this move," the former curator, Arne Emil Christensen, 70, said in an interview. "The best way to stop it is still through diplomacy, but, if necessary, I will be in front of the ships, chained to the floor."

The university's board of directors voted, 8-3, this month to move the sleek-hulled vessels over the objections of Christensen and several other Viking Age scholars, including the former director of the British Museum, David Wilson, and the director of Denmark's Center for Maritime Archaeology, Ole Crumlin-Pedersen. The board wants to transport the popular ships from a remote Oslo peninsula where they have been housed for more than 75 years to a large, multifaceted museum in the center of the capital.

The three ships were pulled in pieces from separate Viking burial mounds more than a century ago, then painstakingly reassembled with rivets, glue, creosote and linseed oil. Since then they have deteriorated markedly. Christensen said they have the consistency of knekkebrod, a type of Norwegian cracker.

The most spectacular of them, the Oseberg ship, was built around the year 800 and has enlivened the covers of many history books. Its towering, carved snakehead prow and 30 oars offer insight on the old English prayer, "Deliver us, O Lord, from the fury of the Norsemen." Viking raiders carried by such ships were the scourge of Britain and much of the European continent from the 8th to the 11th centuries.

Engineers from Det Norske Veritas, a risk management foundation, have modeled the Oseberg ship by computer and concluded it could be moved "with little probability of damage" if a gyroscopically controlled cradle is designed to bear all five tons of oak without the slightest stress or tilt. The most likely travel route would be in three segments: downhill by truck for 750 yards, across the Oslo Fjord by barge for 2.5 miles, and uphill by truck again for several hundred yards.

"It will be a dramatic day, for sure, but I will stay calm," said the University of Oslo president, Geir Ellingsrud. "I am convinced that the move will take place without significant problems."