Updated October 2, 2025 at 9:15 AM CDT
The Oseberg longship – considered one of the most important historical discoveries of the Viking age — voyaged to its final destination last month. But the journey it took to get there was complicated.
The ship, built about 1200 years ago during the height of the Viking age, was first discovered in 1903 in Norway.
Jan Bill, a professor of archeology at the University of Oslo, said the ship may have been built for someone important.
"It might have been a king, might have been a queen," Bill told NPR.
Bill is also the curator of the Viking Ship Collection at the university's museum, where the Oseberg ship is kept.
"[The Oseberg ship] showed us for the first time what a Viking ship would look like," he said.
Etched into the ship are intricate carvings and mounts for shields.
"It's really like how we imagine the Viking ship should look like with the shields along the side of the ship," Bill said.
Researchers found the ship in a "remarkably well-furnished grave" in "exceptionally favorable preservation conditions," according to the University of Oslo's Museum of the Viking Age.
"Basically all of the stuff that was put into the grave still exists today," Bill said. "All of the wood, lots of ropes, the things [made] of leather."
The quality of the find allowed 20th century researchers to rebuild the Oseberg ship – mostly using the same parts. About 90% of the ship's timbers are original.
For almost 100 years after it was discovered, the vessel remained intact. But in the 2000s, Bill said he and his colleagues noticed small pieces of the ship were loosening and falling off.
The building where the ship was housed wasn't meant to preserve an artifact more than a millennium old. It got humid and even the breath of tourists increased the moisture levels of the air around the ship, leading to its deterioration.
About 10 years ago, a panel of outside experts and consultants recommended relocating the Oseberg ship, and the other boats in the collection, to a brand new building.
The museum spent the next decade constructing a new building to better house its entire ship collection. This new facility was designed to better handle large numbers of visitors and to last longer than the old museum. Adding to the construction timeline was a massive crane system needed to move the Oseberg ship into its new, safer home.
On Sept. 10, the Oseberg ship was wrapped into a steel cradle that weighed 50 tons and then moved very slowly, about 10 inches per minute, 300 feet away.
"It was one of the most amazing moments in the time that I've been working as an archaeologist," Bill said.
He and other staff members celebrated, but there's still work to be done. The two other vessels in the museum's collection, Tune and Gokstad, still need to embark on their final voyages to the new building as well.
The ships' new home is scheduled to open to the public in 2027, and is designed to last for two more centuries.
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