The Hjemkomst

Across the Red River from Fargo, in the city of Moorhead, Minnesota, there is a museum that houses a full-scale replica of a Viking longship. It is called the Hjemkomst, a Norwegian word meaning homecoming. The ship is sixty-seven feet long. It was built in a potato warehouse in Hawley, Minnesota, by a school guidance counselor who was diagnosed with leukemia while he was building it, and who died four months into its maiden voyage.

Robert Asp conceived the project in the summer of nineteen seventy-one while recovering from a broken leg. He had been spending time with his Norwegian heritage, and the idea came to him that he would build a replica of the Gokstad ship, a Viking vessel discovered in Norway in eighteen eighty, and sail it to Norway. His plan was straightforward in conception and extraordinary in execution. He found a warehouse. He taught himself the techniques. Over the following years, more than one thousand volunteers contributed more than one hundred thousand hours of labor.

Construction began in nineteen seventy-four. That same year, Asp was diagnosed with leukemia. He continued building. By nineteen eighty, the ship was ready for a trial run on Lake Superior, and Asp served as captain. Four months later, on December twenty-seventh, nineteen eighty, he died. He had never reached Norway.

In May of nineteen eighty-two, Asp's children and eight crew members decided to complete the voyage. The Hjemkomst departed Duluth on May eleventh, nineteen eighty-two, reached New York City by June eighth, then crossed the Atlantic and arrived in Bergen, Norway on July nineteenth, nineteen eighty-two. It was the homecoming Robert Asp had imagined and never made.

The ship returned to Minnesota and has been displayed at the Hjemkomst Center in Moorhead ever since. It sits alongside a replica of a medieval Norwegian stave church. Standing next to it, you are looking at something a man built in a potato warehouse and sailed to another continent.