Fridtjof Nansen Trivia
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59 free Fridtjof Nansen trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Fridtjof Nansen trivia quiz follows one of the most varied lives of the modern age. Nansen was a national ski champion and world-record skater before he was twenty, a neuroscientist whose doctoral work helped establish the neuron doctrine, the first man to cross the Greenland ice cap, and the explorer who deliberately froze the Fram into the pack ice to drift towards the North Pole, then left the ship with one companion and a team of dogs to set a Farthest North record that stood for five years. The second half of his life is just as rich, and the quiz covers it: the secret mission that gave Norway its king in 1905, the London ministry, the oceanographic instruments still named for him, and the League of Nations years in which he repatriated more than 400,000 prisoners of war, fought the Russian famine, invented the Nansen passport for stateless people and won the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize. Expect questions on ships, dates, companions, rivals and the odd surprising detail, such as the walrus attack that saved his life and the airship ambition Amundsen beat him to. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Nansen, the Nansen passport and the Nansen bottle, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Fifty-four questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Nansen was born in 1861 near which capital city, then called Christiania?
Oslo
Oslo was still called Christiania then. From the family estate on its edge, the schoolboy Nansen would vanish into the Nordmarka forest for days at a time, sleeping outdoors whatever the weather.
Q 02Which body asked Nansen to run Russian famine relief?
Red Cross
The Red Cross asked him in 1921. With the Soviet regime distrusted abroad, governments held back, and Nansen had to raise most of the money from private charities instead.
Q 03How did Nansen's six-man team first traverse the Greenland interior in 1888?
On cross-country skis
On cross-country skis, but only after a false start: pack ice kept their boats from shore, and the party spent days camped on a floe that carried them far south before they could row back up the coast.
Q 04What made Nansen turn back at 86°14′N?
Ice ridges ahead
Ice ridges ahead: scouting in front, Nansen saw what he called a veritable chaos of ice blocks stretching to the horizon, and decided to stop wasting time and make for the nearest land.
Q 05What subject did Nansen study at the Royal Frederick University in Christiania?
Zoology
Zoology appealed because he thought it promised a life outdoors, and it delivered: it soon had him aboard an Arctic sealing ship, studying the animals of the ice.
Q 06Nansen's early research on marine creatures helped establish which idea?
Neuron doctrine
Neuron doctrine: in primitive sea creatures he could find no fusion between nerve cells, against the then-popular picture of one continuous nerve net. Cajal shared a 1906 Nobel for the same idea.
Q 07In 1905 Nansen campaigned for Norway to break its union with which country?
Sweden
Sweden had shared a king with Norway since 1814. When the union collapsed in 1905, the prime minister sent the famous explorer abroad to argue Norway's case to the world.
Q 08In wartime Washington, what did Nansen negotiate for Norway?
Food shipments
Food shipments: when the United States joined the war, the tightened Allied blockade left neutral Norway short, and Nansen spent almost a year in Washington winning an exemption.
Q 09On which sealing ship did the young Nansen make his first Arctic voyage in 1882?
Viking
Viking carried the 20-year-old student into the ice off Greenland, where his first distant sight of the great ice cap planted the idea of crossing it.
Q 10Why did Nansen cross Greenland from the empty east to the settled west?
The party would have no line of retreat
The party would have no line of retreat, so safety lay only ahead, in the settled west. Decades later Nansen told students that a line of retreat is a snare, and urged them to burn their boats.
Q 11How did Nansen and one companion reach Godthaab once off the ice cap?
In a boat made from their tent
In a boat made from their tent: with no way through overland, they stretched the tent floor over ribs cut from willow bushes, then rowed the tiny craft down the fjord for days.
Q 12Before sailing for Greenland, Nansen recruited two members of which people for his crossing party?
Sami
Sami: Nansen wanted men at home in snow and cold, so he sent to Karasjok in Norway's far north for Samuel Balto and Ole Ravna, and both made the full crossing.
Q 13Nansen's Greenland crossing ended at Godthaab, a town known today by which name?
Nuuk
Q 21Why was the Fram's hull rounded?
So ice lifted her
So ice lifted her instead of crushing her: Nansen wanted a ship that would slip like an eel out of the embraces of the ice. Critics doubted any hull could survive, but at the first pressure she simply rose.
Q 22Who served as second-in-command on the Fram expedition?
Otto Sverdrup
Otto Sverdrup had already crossed Greenland with Nansen. When his leader left for the pole he took sole command, worked the Fram free of the ice and reached Norway only days after Nansen himself.
Q 23Hjalmar Johansen later shared Nansen's dash for the pole, but in what capacity did he sign on to the Fram?
Ship's stoker
Nuuk, now Greenland's capital, was the Danish colony of Godthaab in Nansen's day. He had aimed for a harbour farther north, but with the season running out he swung the party toward the nearer town.
Q 14Reaching Godthaab after crossing Greenland, Nansen was amused to be congratulated first on what?
His doctoral degree
His doctoral degree: he had defended his thesis days before leaving home, and found it comical to cross Greenland only to be congratulated on that. Nothing, he wrote, could have been more remote from his thoughts.
Q 15Why did the party spend seven months in Greenland after the crossing?
No ship would call until spring
No ship would call until spring: the season's last vessel had already sailed when the party reached the coast, so they wintered among the Greenlanders, and Nansen later turned the stay into a book on Inuit life.
Q 16Whom did Nansen marry in September 1889, a few months after returning from Greenland?
Eva Sars
Eva Sars was a celebrated concert singer. As the story goes, he first met her in the hills above the capital, when he went to investigate a pair of boots sticking out of a snowdrift.
Q 17What does Fram, the name of Nansen's polar ship, mean in English?
Forward
Forward: his wife christened the ship at her launch. Months into the drift, doubting the ice would carry them far enough, he wrote in his diary that there was but one way, and that is Fram, forward.
Q 18Wreckage from which sunken American ship suggested a current across the Arctic Ocean?
USS Jeannette
USS Jeannette was crushed in the ice north of Siberia in 1881. Three years later, clothing marked with her crewmen's names turned up frozen into a floe off southwest Greenland, on the far side of the polar sea.
Q 19What did the Fram's drift reveal about the central Arctic Ocean?
It was thousands of metres deep
It was thousands of metres deep: Nansen himself had called the polar basin small and very shallow, but soundings through the ice ran past 3,000 metres, and the drift sighted no new land.
Q 20Who designed and built the Fram?
Colin Archer
Colin Archer, born in Norway to Scottish parents, had made his name with pilot boats built to ride out the worst weather. Nansen later wrote that the expedition owed its success in no small degree to him.
Ship's stoker was the only post left, and Johansen, an army reserve lieutenant, wanted to go so badly that he took it. Nansen later chose him from the whole crew as his one companion on the ice.
Q 24What powered the Fram's electric lamps through the polar night?
A windmill
A windmill on deck drove the dynamo once the engine fell silent. While the sun stayed below the horizon for months, the crew read, feasted and held concerts in a saloon bright with electric light.
Q 25Which phenomenon slowed the Fram along the Siberian coast?
Dead water
Dead water strikes where fresh water lies over heavier salt water. A study Nansen later prompted showed why: the ship's power was going into raising hidden waves between the two layers.
Q 26Why did Nansen leave the Fram in 1895 to go on with dogs and sledges?
The drift would miss the pole
The drift would miss the pole, Nansen realised, carrying the ship past it well to the south. Satisfied she would ride out the ice without him, he handed her to her captain and set off with one companion.
Q 27What did Nansen do when the kayaks holding all his gear drifted away?
Swam after them
He swam after them through icy water and was almost too numb to haul himself aboard. Paddling back, stiff with cold, he still stopped to shoot two seabirds for supper.
Q 28What mistake left Nansen and Johansen unsure of their position?
They forgot to wind their chronometers
They forgot to wind their chronometers, and both ran down. Restarted on Nansen's guess at the time, the watches could no longer give a sure longitude; weeks later he wrote that the pair had paid dearly for it.
Q 29Where did Nansen and Johansen spend the winter of 1895-96?
Franz Josef Land
Franz Josef Land: they walled a hut of stones and moss and sat out the dark on bear meat and blubber. Far from starving, both men ended the winter heavier than when they had left the ship.
Q 30Which animal's attack on the kayaks caused the delay that led to the rescue?
A walrus
A walrus drove its tusks through the side of Nansen's kayak, which was hauled onto the ice on the point of sinking. The halt for repairs kept the pair in place just long enough to be found.