Born 1861,
Oslo, Norway
Died 1930,
Oslo, Norway
Fridtjof Nansen was born in the Norwegian capital of Oslo, then known as Christiania. His mother, Adelaide, was a baron’s daughter who eloped with a baker’s son and had five children. When he died, she married a lawyer, Baldur Nansen, and had two more sons, of whom Fridtjof was the older. Nansen grew up on the couple’s farm outside of Oslo and loved the outdoors, spending much of his free time camping and skiing. He attended the University of Christiania and majored in zoology. One of his professors there suggested that a trip to the Arctic on a sealing ship would be a worthwhile experience. Nansen sailed aboard the Viking for six months in 1882. While the ship was caught in the ice pack off the east coast of Greenland for 24 days, Nansen developed the desire to explore the great island.
When he returned to Oslo, Nansen became the curator of natural history at the Bergen Museum in Norway’s second-largest city. He took some time off to study marine zoology in Naples, Italy, in 1886. On his return from Italy, he worked on a plan to cross Greenland from east to west.
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