This guide is part of our complete guide to historical sites in Scandinavia.
Start with the bad news, because it will change your itinerary: Norway’s Viking ships are not on display and will not be until 2027 at the earliest. The Viking Ship Museum on Bygdøy closed in 2023 to be rebuilt as the Museum of the Viking Age. The Oseberg, Gokstad and Tune ships are in conservation storage with no public access, and as of mid-2026 no firm opening date has been announced. Plenty of guides and itineraries still tell you to go and see them. Don’t plan around it, plan around this instead.
PastPathways Tip: if the point of your trip is seeing a real Viking ship, go to Roskilde in Denmark. We will update this guide the moment Oslo confirms a date. Source: Museum of the Viking Age.
What the Ships Are (and Why They Matter)
- The Oseberg ship (c.820 AD) was a burial vessel for two women, one of them buried with extraordinary wealth; sledges, a cart, textiles, and carving of a quality that defines an entire art style.
- The Gokstad ship (c.895 AD) is the seagoing one, a replica crossed the Atlantic in 1893 to prove it could be done.
- The new museum will show all three ships plus around 5,500 objects from the Oseberg, Gokstad, Tune and Borre finds.
Urnes Stave Church
- Norway’s oldest stave church and the origin of the “Urnes style”: the last great phase of Norse animal ornament, all interlaced beasts and tendrils, carved into the surviving 11th-century portal.
- UNESCO-listed. Roughly 28 stave churches survive out of what were once well over a thousand.
- Borgund is the most complete and most photographed; Heddal is the largest.
Reality check: Urnes is on the Sognefjord and takes real effort to reach. car plus ferry. If you have one day and want a stave church, Borgund is far easier.
Bryggen, Bergen
The leaning wooden wharf on Bergen’s harbour, UNESCO-listed, and the surviving face of the Hanseatic League’s grip on the Norwegian trade. It has burned and been rebuilt repeatedly — what stands is largely post-1702 on medieval foundations. The Bryggens Museum, built over an excavation, holds a remarkable collection of runic inscriptions on wood: shopping lists, business notes and rude jokes from ordinary medieval people.
Lofotr, Borg: The Longhouse
In the Lofoten islands, archaeologists found the largest Viking building ever discovered, a chieftain’s longhouse 83 metres long. It has been reconstructed on the site, and the setting, above the sea under Arctic peaks, does as much work as the building. Remote, and worth it.
Gjellestad: The Ship Found Without Digging
In 2018, a georadar survey in Østfold detected a Viking ship burial under a ploughed field, no excavation, no spade, just ground-penetrating radar returning the unmistakable outline of a ship. It was subsequently excavated after fungal decay was found to be destroying the timber. It is the first Viking ship burial excavated in Norway in about a century, and a good demonstration that there is still plenty down there.
Also Worth Knowing
- Alta rock art (UNESCO), thousands of carvings in the far north, some over 7,000 years old.
- Røros (UNESCO): a preserved 17th-century copper-mining town.
- Borre, in Vestfold, the mound cemetery that gave its name to another Viking art style, with the Midgard centre alongside.
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Where to Stay in Norway
Oslo and Bergen are the two practical bases.
