From Oslo to England: Harald Hardrada's Viking Fleet

In the winter of 1879, two sons of the Gokstad farm outside Sandefjord had nothing to do and a large mound on the property. One brother had already emigrated to America and the others were thinking of following him, so a local man told them to dig into the mound instead, where the money was. They found oak planking. By spring the archaeologist Nicolay Nicolaysen had taken the site off them, and over the ten weeks of the excavation roughly 25,000 people came to watch, most of them by boat.

What came out of the mound is the largest preserved Viking ship in the world. It is one of three that were dug out of grave mounds around this one fjord, and the three of them are the best-preserved Viking ships anywhere. The Viking fleet of the Oslofjord is a buried one, and it is the reason we know what the ships of the period looked like instead of reading them out of the sagas.

The Gokstad ship

Tree rings put the Gokstad ship in the 890s and the burial around the year 900. It is just over 23 metres long and about 5 metres across, clinker-built from oak with sixteen strakes, and it carried sixteen pairs of oars and a crew of well over thirty with rowers, a helmsman and a lookout. Clinker construction means overlapping planks riveted together, which gives a hull that bends with a sea rather than bracing against it. The draught is shallow enough to run the ship up a beach. When we take the narrower channels between the islands, those are channels a Gokstad-class ship could have used without slowing down.

The grave goods say more than the hull does. Behind the burial chamber lay two peacocks, two goshawks and a duck or a goose. Outside the ship were twelve horses and at least seven dogs, five of them built like today's greyhounds and the rest closer to elkhounds. Read together, the animals describe a man who hunted on horseback with hawks and hounds. The peacocks are the odd ones out, since those birds reached rural Vestfold along trade routes running to the Mediterranean and beyond.

The mound had been broken into and rifled long before Nicolaysen arrived, and objects had been moved or destroyed. He still recovered a sledge, five simple beds, wooden buckets and plates, a water barrel, a large bronze cauldron with a runic inscription, a board game, and three smaller boats stowed inside the ship.

The Oseberg ship

The Oseberg ship came out of Revehaugen at the Oseberg farm in Tønsberg, found in 1903 and excavated the following year. The timber in the burial chamber dates the funeral to 834, and the ship itself was built around 820 in western Norway. It is about 22 metres long and 5.10 metres across, built for both rowing and sailing, and it is the best preserved of the three.

Two women were buried in it. The younger was about 50 to 55, the older around 80 or more, and both stood about 158 centimetres tall. The last examination of the skeletons ran from 2005 to 2007 and found rheumatoid changes throughout the older woman's spine and cancer metastases in her pelvis and ribs, which points to breast cancer that had spread. An earlier generation of scholars read the pair as a queen and a sacrificed slave, and named the queen as Åsa of the Yngling dynasty, grandmother of Harald Fairhair. Both readings have since fallen away. The teeth and skeleton of the younger woman put her in the upper class as well.

The grave held the four-wheeled Oseberg cart, its sides carved with figure scenes that probably come from old legends, three ornamented sledges and their shafts, five animal-head posts, textiles, farm tools, kitchen gear, beds and chests. It also held the object known as the Buddha bucket, a wooden pail whose brass mounts show a cross-legged human figure. One pail hints at how far the networks reached.

The Tune ship

The third ship came up at Rolvsøy in Fredrikstad in 1867, out of a mound about 60 metres across and four metres high, one of the largest in the country. The excavation was the first archaeological work Oluf Rygh ever led, it lasted a fortnight, and parts of the hull still carry the marks of the spades. Tree rings date the grave to around 910.

Tune is the fragmentary one, and its original length is unsettled. Store norske leksikon reads the surviving timbers as up to 22 metres by 4.35, while English Wikipedia puts it at up to 18.7 by 4.2. Both give it 11 or 12 pairs of oars. Knut Paasche's laser scan of the wreck in the 2000s, the first time the method was used on a Norwegian heritage object, showed a hull flatter in the bottom and a different length-to-beam ratio than the other two, and it changed the reading of the ship from a shallow-water second-rater to a fast sailer.

What these ships could do

In 1893 a near copy of the Gokstad ship, built at Rødsverven in Sandefjord and named Viking, crossed the Atlantic under Magnus Andersen with twelve men aboard. She sailed from Bergen by way of Newfoundland to New York, up the Hudson, through the Erie Canal and into the Great Lakes, and reached Jackson Park in Chicago on 12 July 1893 for the World's Columbian Exposition. The voyage settled the question of whether these hulls were ocean boats.

The trade those hulls carried has its own address on this fjord. Around 800 CE, a settlement called Kaupang, Old Norse for marketplace, was laid out by Viksfjorden near modern Larvik on the western shore of the outer Oslofjord. Archaeologists read it as Norway's first town: divided into plots like the other early Scandinavian towns, lived in year round rather than seasonally, perhaps 500 residents, in contact with much of northern Europe. It ran from the early 800s into the 900s.

1066, and the end of it

Harald Sigurdsson was born around 1015 and fought at Stiklestad at fifteen, in 1030, alongside his half-brother King Olav II. Olav was killed, Harald took a wound and went east. He turned up at Yaroslav's court in Kyiv, went south to Constantinople and served in the Varangian Guard, fought in Sicily, Bulgaria and the Holy Land, and came home in 1046 with money, experience and the name Hardrada, the hard ruler. He took the throne, fought the Danes for twenty years, and in 1066 went after England.

He began assembling the fleet at Utvær in Solund, in the Sognefjord, in March or April 1066, and it was ready by the start of September. His own ship was called Ormen, the Serpent. The force was raised as a leidang, the old national levy, which drew ships and men off the whole coast. Before leaving he had his son Magnus proclaimed king of Norway, and he took Queen Elisiv, their daughters and his younger son Olaf with him, which is what a king brings when he means to stay in the country he is invading.

Counting the ships depends on the source. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says the Norwegians assembled 300, without separating warships from supply craft. Snorri Sturluson, writing around 1230, has "over two hundred ships, apart from supply ships and smaller craft." By the time Harald met Tostig Godwinson at Tynemouth on 8 September, the usual figure is 240 to 300 longships carrying 10,000 to 15,000 men. The army that actually reached the field is put lower, at 7,000 to 9,000, after the Orkney reinforcements were added and crews were left behind with the ships.

The fleet went by Shetland and Orkney, both Norse territory, where Harald picked up the Thorfinnsson jarls and their men. At Dunfermline, Malcolm III of Scotland gave him around 2,000 soldiers. Tostig, the exiled brother of the English king Harold Godwinson, brought only twelve ships and a great deal of local knowledge. They landed near the Tees, moved into Cleveland, burned Scarborough when it refused to surrender, then sailed up the Humber and the Ouse and put the army ashore at Riccall on 20 September. The same day they beat an English army under the earls Morcar and Edwin at Fulford, three kilometres south of York. York surrendered. Harald, at fifty-one, had taken the north of England in one engagement.

Five days later Harold Godwinson arrived at Stamford Bridge with an army that had covered 300 kilometres in four days. It was a warm day and many of the Norwegians had left their mail at the ships, expecting a hostage exchange. Harald took an arrow in the throat. Tostig fell beside him. Of the ships that had sailed from Norway, twenty-four were enough to carry the survivors home.

What 1066 did to England

Stamford Bridge is the date historians use for the end of the Viking Age, the last major Scandinavian invasion of the British Isles after three centuries of Norse expansion from Dublin to Constantinople.

The consequences ran past the battlefield. Harold Godwinson had force-marched north to fight it, and William of Normandy, himself descended from Norse settlers, landed at Pevensey on the English south coast on 28 September, three days after Stamford Bridge. Harold's army marched another 300 kilometres south and met the Normans at Hastings on 14 October. Harold lost, and William took England.

Two invasions and two battles fell inside three weeks. Without Harald pulling the English army up to Yorkshire, William would have landed against a rested opponent, and English history would read differently.

The same waters

The Oslofjord is quieter now. Sailboats and motor yachts gather where cargo and warships once did, and the islands are summer places rather than lookout posts. The sheltered bays where crews loaded provisions are the bays where people anchor for a swim in July.

The ships themselves went into mounds around this water and came back out to Bygdøy, where all three are now housed in the new Museum of the Viking Age. That building is closed until 2027, while the water outside it keeps no hours at all. Come out and see the fjord those hulls were shaped for, and then stay out a while.

Museum status and reopening year last checked against the museum's own pages on 30 July 2026.

The three best-preserved Viking ships in the world all came out of mounds around this fjord, and all three sit on Bygdøy now. We pass the museum on most trips out of Tjuvholmen, on the way south past Hovedøya.