The origins of the
Viking Longship goes back 10,000 years to the stone age when, as the ice
retreated after last period of glaciation, man was beginning to move
north following the animals that he hunted. These early
migrants settled on the coasts of Norway, Sweden and Denmark and found that
using the sea was the easiest way to get from one place to another.
It was the beginning of a culture based on seafaring traditions that
continues to this day.
The earliest boats were little more
than canoes made from dugout tree trunks or of waterproof seal hides
laced around a wooden frame, but they served their purpose; the
long slender lines cut through the water efficiently and allowed
these pioneers to move freely from place to place to hunt and fish.
The Bronze Age,
with new opportunities for trade, saw the development of these small
fishing boats into strong and light sea going vessels constructed
of overlapping wooden planks held together with metal fittings. By
around 1500BC these vessels would be making journeys to places as
far away as Britain and France. The boats still used
paddles for propulsion; oars were not introduced until much later
and it wasn't until around the eighth century that sails were
fitted.
This is a section
of the hull of a long ship:
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information.
All ships were made
chiefly from wood by very skilled people called shipwrights. The
wood could be from most types of trees including oak, ash, pine, elm
and other types; what was important was the natural shape of the
wood rather than the type. For the rakes (planks) the trunk of a straight tree
that hadn't twisted would be most suitable and for the beams it was
best to find a part of the tree that had grown into that shape
naturally - this made the wood strong because the shape went with
the grain. It was the shipwrights who would go into the woods and select
the trees.
A Longship was
'clinker-built', which means that it was constructed from long
overlapping planks called strakes. The strakes were held together by
iron rivets and sealed using a mixture of moss and hair coated in
tar. The hull was given strength by the use of a vertical keel that
ran down the middle of the whole length of the ship and by beams
that ran across the ship that were secured to the strakes by nails
or by being tied on to special cleats fixed to the hull. The tall
fore and aft posts were attached to the keel at either end and were
specially shaped to take the ends of the strakes.
The introduction of
the sail made it possible for the Danes, as the Saxons referred to
them, to travel vast distances across the Oceans to paces as far away
as America and Africa. However, it wasn't as easy as it sounds, even
for a seafaring people like the Vikings; the Longships were prone to
capsizing if the wind was blowing from the beam (the side) and it is
thought that almost half of those ships that set sail for Greenland
and Iceland were lost due to bad weather.
The greatest
advantage of these ships was their low draught, as little as 50
cm. It allowed the Vikings to travel far up rivers or to come
ashore on any convenient beach where they weren't expected.
The dominance of the
Longship continued up until around AD1100 when it was succeeded by
another type of flat bottomed ship called a 'Cog'. The design
persisted
on for several centuries in the form of fishing boats and trading
boats but the time of the Viking raids was over.
