A lot of people didn’t think this ship would float. The Hjemkomst was built on the prairie, for one thing, in northwest Minnesota, far from any ocean or even a respectable lake. In fact, it was built in a former potato warehouse in Hawley, near Moorhead, by a junior-high guidance counselor named Bob Asp.
The Hjemkomst, soon to be sailed to Norway, at the opening of a Vikings exhibition at the MIA in 1981.
It took him six years, weekends and summers. Soon after he began, in 1974, he was diagnosed with leukemia. The wood was milled, appropriately enough, near Viking, Minnesota, and Bob prepared all 11,000 board feet of it himself. Finally, in 1980, the boat was taken to Duluth with the idea of sailing to Norway.
But by March 1981, when these photos were taken, the boat had instead wound up in the courtyard of the MIA. Bob had died after sailing the boat around Duluth the previous summer. The MIA was playing to the state’s Scandinavian heritage by holding a major exhibition of art and artifacts from the Viking era. Governor Al Quie, noting that “Minnesotans of Scandinavian heritage have played a major role in the development of our great state” and that “Many direct descendants of the Vikings settled in the Upper Midwest,” declared March to be Viking Heritage Month.
The exhibition was a blockbuster. The boat stayed in the courtyard through the spring, and when the show was over the dream of Norway was revived. The following year, the boat was once again hauled to Duluth. Four thousand people, including Quie, showed up for the launch in early May. There was a parade, blessings, a banquet held by the Sons of Norway and Lutheran Brotherhood. By July, two months later, the 12-man crew had sailed the boat into Bergen, Norway. Today, it’s kept at a museum in Moorhead, and the Vikings exhibition remains one of the MIA’s best attended shows.
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