Viking Ships

A Viking ship was built of overlapping planks riveted together with iron along a keel, then braced inside with frames and cross-beams. The planks were cleaved along the grain, from oak or, in western Norway, from pine, and the overlap, called clinker building, made the hull strong as well as light. The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde defines a longship archaeologically as a ship driven by both oars and sail and at least five times as long as it was wide. It carried one square sail of wool or flax and was steered with a steering oar. The Oseberg ship, built in south-west Norway around 820, has oak planks only two to three centimetres thick below the waterline.
Most of what is known comes from a handful of finds. Two came out of Norwegian burial mounds: the Oseberg ship, buried in 834 with two women, and the Gokstad ship, built around 890 and buried around 900 with a man in his fifties. Gokstad is 23.22 metres long, with sixteen oar holes a side and room for a crew of up to 67. At Ladby on Funen only the iron rivets survived, still in place, outlining a longship of more than 21.5 metres. Hedeby harbour gave up a warship built around 985 and fit for a king or an earl, 30.9 metres long and only 2.7 metres wide. In 1962 archaeologists raised five ships that had been sunk as a barrier in Roskilde Fjord near Skuldelev. Skuldelev 1 is an ocean-going cargo ship of pine from western Norway; Skuldelev 2, the great longship, was built of oak near Dublin around 1042, about 30 metres long, with 60 oars and a crew of 65 to 70; Skuldelev 5, a small longship of 17.3 metres, had 26 oars. The longest Viking ship found so far, Roskilde 6, was about 36 metres.
The written sources sort ships by use. The knörr was the merchant ship, set against the langskip, the ship of war. In skaldic verse the commonest warship word is skeið; snekkja is rarer, and dreki, 'dragon', seems to be a poetic name for a great warship rather than a type. Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, written around 1220 to 1230, describes the most famous of them: Óláfr Tryggvason's Ormr inn langi, the Long Serpent, built near Trondheim with 34 rúm, the spaces between the frames where the rowers sat, one pair of oars to each. The Roskilde researchers point out that Snorri is more likely describing the shipbuilding of his own century than that of the year 1000. Drakkar is not an Old Norse word at all: it is first recorded in French in 1840, borrowed from Swedish.
Ships also carried the dead. At Oseberg and Gokstad a burial chamber was built on the ship itself, horses and dogs were laid with the dead, and the whole was covered by a great mound. At Lindholm Høje in north Jutland about 700 graves were excavated, many of them marked with stone settings, and the ship-shaped settings are the latest, from the Viking Age itself. On Gotland, picture stones raised as grave monuments often show ships. Myth has its ships too. Snorri says that dwarfs, the sons of Ívaldi, made Skíðblaðnir and gave it to Freyr: it is big enough to carry all the Æsir with their weapons, has a fair wind as soon as the sail is raised, and folds up like a cloth to go in a pouch. Naglfar, the largest ship, is made from dead men's nails, so that anyone who dies with uncut nails adds to it, and at Ragnarök it floats free with the giant Hrymr at the helm.