Without their ships the Vikings would never have become Vikings. The longship was the high technology of its time – fast, seaworthy and yet light enough to beach on any shore. Here lies all the engineering skill of the North.
It sounds exaggerated, but it is true: the entire Viking Age hangs on a single tool. The longship carried the Norsemen across the open Atlantic all the way to Iceland, Greenland and America – and at the same time upriver deep into the interior of Europe, right up to the gates of Paris, Cologne and Aachen.
The secret lies in the hull. The planks overlapped like roof shingles and were joined with iron rivets – so-called clinker construction. The result was not a rigid box but a shell that moves with the wave: it flexes instead of breaking. A shallow keel kept the draught low, often under a metre, so the ships could land on any beach and travel up shallow rivers.
A longship was a forest given form. The wood was not sawn but split along the grain – radially out of the trunk, which makes the planks especially strong and water-repellent. A single large oak often yielded only a handful of planks, and everything was shaped with the broad axe. The saw played almost no part.
The ship was driven by one large, rectangular square sail and – in a calm or in battle – by the rowers. Good longships made 10 to 15 knots, breathtaking by the standards of the day. By trimming the sail skilfully they could even tack at an angle against the wind.
"Longship" is really a collective term. The slender Snekkja was the fast standard fighter, the large Skeið the warship of the fleet leaders, the Dreki ("dragon") a particularly splendid vessel with a carved head on the stem. For freight across the Atlantic there was the bulging Knörr.
The carved animal or dragon head on the stem gave the ships their nickname. It was meant to intimidate enemies and ward off evil spirits. How seriously this was taken is shown by an Old Icelandic law: anyone approaching their home coast had to remove the dragon head so as not to frighten the friendly land spirits (landvættir).
What we know we owe above all to ship burials and harbour finds. The richly carved Oseberg ship (around 834) and the seaworthy Gokstad ship come from Norway; a Gokstad replica crossed the Atlantic with ease in 1893. At Danish Roskilde, five ships were sunk around 1070 as a harbour barrier – the Skuldelev ships show the full range from freighter to warship. The longest known longship, Roskilde 6, measured around 37 metres.
The Vikings knew no magnetic compass. They navigated by the sun and stars, by coastlines, clouds over land, the colour of the water and the flight of birds. A wooden sun compass (find from Uunartoq, Greenland) helped them hold a course. The famous "sunstone" for locating the sun under cloud cover, by contrast, is appealing but scientifically disputed.
These ships carried the Northmen as far as Vinland (Newfoundland) – some 500 years before Columbus. Just how well they really sailed is proven by experimental archaeology: the Skuldelev replica "Sea Stallion of Glendalough" sailed from Roskilde all the way to Dublin. And in 1066 the Norman heirs of the Vikings crossed to England with exactly this construction – immortalised in the Bayeux Tapestry.
Rarely have craft and meaning belonged together as closely as with the Vikings: the carved stem was technology and symbol in one. That very idea also guides our engravings.
