A NEW VIKING IN OSLO

-text and photos Andrei Dorian Gheorghe
design Florin Alexandru Stancu-

The Viking Age (end of the 8th century - beginning of the 11th century)
was marked by the territorial conquests of those terrible fighters
coming on the sea and speaking Old Norse.

The most performing of them in navigation were those from current Norway,
veritable masters of fiords,
who founded the city of Dublin in Ireland,
colonized Iceland and Faroe,
reached Greenland through Eric the Red
and even the Atlantic Coast of North America.

They were so fearless that nothing could stop them:

neither the cloudy weather…

… nor the sunny weather
(which I imagine that made them feel glad
because Balder, their god of light, was favourable…)

The best variant to understand them better
was for me a cruise in the Olso fiord (July 2015).

After I remarked that Balder was favourable to my cruise, too,
I watched from the distance the Bygdoy Peninsula,
where the Norsk Folkemuseum is accompanied
by the Navigation Museums, including:
-Three Viking ships;
-Fram, the wooden ship which realized the most advanced approach
to the (North and South) Poles (a performance both geographical and astronomical),
and was led (after almost one millennium from the Viking Age)
by other extraordinary Norwegian generation of navigators,
culminating with Frodtjof Nansen (1861-1930,
who made a world record in approaching to the North Pole,
crossed Greenland by ski,
and made complex explorations in northern waters)
and Roald Amudsen (1872-1928,
the first man who reached the South Pole and then the two Poles);
-Kon-Tiki (an older name of Viracocha,
creator of the Universe in Pre-Columbian mythologies),
a wooden ship made by Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002),
who crossed the Pacific Ocean in 1947
to demonstrate that the old trans-oceanic trips were also possible
in the southern hemisphere.