The ship that went furthest north and furthest south, indoors, and you can walk all over it.
Fram — “forward” — is the strongest wooden ship ever built, and it holds the records for the furthest north and the furthest south any wooden vessel has sailed.
The museum is built around it, and you can walk onto the deck and down into the cabins.
The idea
Fridtjof Nansen worked out that the Arctic ice drifted from Siberia across the pole towards Greenland, from wreckage of the Jeannette that turned up on the wrong side of the ocean.
So he had a ship designed — by Colin Archer, in 1892 — with a rounded hull so that instead of being crushed by ice, it would be squeezed upwards and sit on top of it.
Then he deliberately sailed into the ice and let it freeze in.
Fram drifted for three years, from 1893 to 1896. When it became clear the drift would not cross the pole itself, Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen left the ship with dogs and sledges and went north on foot, reaching 86°14’N — the furthest north anyone had been — before turning back and wintering in a stone hut on Franz Josef Land eating walrus.
Everyone survived. The whole business is one of the most extraordinary stories in exploration and it is told properly here.
The South Pole
Roald Amundsen took Fram south in 1910, having told everyone including his own crew that he was going to the Arctic.
He reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911, thirty-four days before Scott. His party used dogs, skis and depots; they all came back.
The museum handles the comparison with the British expedition carefully and without triumphalism, which is more than some accounts manage in either direction.
The building and the other ship
The main hall is a triangular concrete structure built over the ship in 1936, with an Arctic simulator, a northern lights display and a great deal of original equipment.
A second building holds the Gjøa, the small sloop in which Amundsen made the first complete transit of the Northwest Passage between 1903 and 1906 — a voyage that took three years, largely because he spent two of them among the Netsilik Inuit near King William Island learning how to travel and dress in the Arctic.
He was explicit that what he learned there is why he reached the South Pole and Scott did not. The museum says so.
Practical
Charged; a combined ticket with the neighbouring Kon-Tiki Museum — Thor Heyerdahl’s balsa raft, and the Ra II — is usually available and worth it.
Bus 30 from the centre runs all year and takes about twenty minutes. The ferry from the City Hall pier runs in summer, takes fifteen minutes, and is much the nicer approach.
Two hours, more if the polar history grips you, which it tends to.
More Museums
The Munch Museum
Thirteen floors of a leaning tower that Oslo voted against, holding almost everything Munch owned when he died.
The National Museum
The largest art museum in the Nordic countries, opened in 2022, holding the version of The Scream you know.
The Viking Ship Museum
Closed. The best-preserved Viking ships in the world are behind hoardings until the new museum opens.