Images of the sleek keels, elegant planks and dragon-headed prows of Viking longships have been reproduced countless times on postcards, book covers, souvenirs and in television shows and movies. These vessels are, quite literally, the poster-ships for the Viking Age, which ran from around 750 to 1100 CE.
So what made these ships so special, and why were these advanced shipbuilding techniques so crucial to the Vikings’ success?
In Old Norse, there are two words for Viking — víkingr refers to a person, while víking is an activity. Neither word is inherently negative nor associated with violence.
A víkingr is someone (who may or may not identify as a pirate) who undertakes víking expeditions (sometimes to pillage, sometimes not), and whose life and livelihood have strong connections to the sea. By the mid-eighth century, these people were keen to expand their horizons and branch out from local economies, coinciding with a number of large and lucrative mercantile towns springing up around north-west Europe in this period.
Among other factors, Vikings travelled further westward and eastward as part of an ongoing and complex power grab for portable wealth, territory and control of trade routes. From the 750s on, the Vikings’ advanced shipbuilding technology helped give them the edge.
Gamechanging technology
The unique design of Viking ships and their trademark square sails were absolute game-changers in this period. There are many different types of Viking ship, but the most relevant here are the langskip (longship) and knörr (cargo ship).
Like all Viking vessels, these are clinker-built — the hull’s long, curved sides are assembled out of slightly overlapping planks, held together by iron nails (the “clinkers”). Along with their strong but slender keels and stems, this innovative construction made for incredibly flexible, light and sinuous vehicles that could be powered by oars or by sail and withstand wild ocean swells.
With their narrow silhouettes and their ability to gently twist and yield to the waves, it is no wonder longships were called snekkja (serpents), dreki (dragons) and skeið (sliders). Another small but significant improvement that made longer-distance travel possible was the oar-hole.
Until the early Viking Age, pegs called tholepins stuck up from the gunwales (upper rim of the boat) to hold oars in place and act as fulcrums for rowing, meaning ships’ sides could never sit very high above the water. (Imagine trying to row with your oar at head height.)
By cutting holes through the side planks — which could be plugged when the oars were shipped and the sail raised — it became possible to build taller, more seaworthy ships. The boats had shallow drafts, meaning much of the hull sat above the waterline, which enabled these “sea-snakes” to slither further inland than ever before since they could tackle riverways other boats simply could not navigate. They could also be dragged across land.
Longships also had symmetrical prows, meaning the “back” of the boat was just as high as the “front”. This design allowed Viking raiders to pull right up on the riverbank, then “hit and run” — without all the slow awkwardness of reversing and turning the whole boat around for the getaway.
Square sails also increased both the distance and speed of Viking travel. Norse explorers like Eirik rauða (“the Red”) and his son Leif (who reached North America nearly 500 years before Columbus) would not have taken a warship to Iceland or Greenland — instead, they probably kitted out a knörr, a heavy-bellied merchant ship much like the one described in an ancient Icelandic text called Egil’s saga:
richly painted above the plumbline and fitted with a black-and-red sail […] loaded with stockfish, hides and ermine, and a great quantity of squirrel skins and other furs […] a very valuable cargo.
When powered by four oars, a modern reconstruction of just such a knörr reached a speed of 1.5 knots, with the sail raised speeding along at 13 knots (around 24 km an hour). A much larger longship with 60 oars could row at 4.5 knots and reach a maximum sailing speed of 17 knots, or around 31.5 km an hour.
Crafted by Hand
The most impressive stats about Viking ships are not about how fast or far they went, but rather how much time, effort and natural resources went into building them — the sheer industry of it all is astonishing. Every piece was crafted by hand, with axes shaping the floor timbers, planking, masts and beams.
Dozens of oak trees (8–10 metres long and at least a metre across) went into the hull, with dozens more pine trees burnt to make tar for sealing the wood — 600 litres for a 60-oar longship, which took more than 2,000 hours to produce. More pine and alderwood went into the oars and mast, and then there is all the iron — 450 kg of it to make the 8,000 nails needed for this same longship.
An average knörr‘s sail was 90 m² (smaller than the longship’s) and used the wool of 200 sheep, all of which had to be spun into thread and woven into continuous lengths of fabric, each 65 cm wide. This spinning and weaving work took experimental historians 7,850 hours to recreate, or around 4.5 years for one person.
Another month was needed to sew the sail panels together, cut to shape and reinforce the edges, with the ship’s cordage demanding so much horsehair, hemp and linden bast (a plant fibre) for 3,000 metres of rope. This constant and large-scale manufacturing paints an evocative picture of the Vikings’ everyday shipbuilding life — it was all hands on deck, so to speak.
Please note: This article uses extracts from an article that was republished in The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Originally published by Lisa Bennett, Associate Professor in Creative Writing and English Literature, Researcher in Old Norse Literature, Flinders University. Read the original article.
