Viking Ships and Technology: Longships, Sails, and Iron
An overview of Viking shipbuilding, sailing technology, navigation, weapons, and the iron, textile, and craftwork that sustained the Viking world.
Introduction
Viking shipbuilding was, by general consent, the most advanced in early medieval Europe. The longships, with their shallow draft, symmetrical double-ended hull, and combined sail-and-oar propulsion, allowed Norse sailors to cross the North Sea, the Baltic, and the Atlantic; to penetrate far up the rivers of Russia; to land on beaches in a manner impossible for the round-hulled ships of their contemporaries; and to project power over a range unmatched by any other people of the period. Yet the longship was only the most spectacular product of a wider technological culture that produced excellent iron, distinctive jewelry, fine woolen cloth, and durable everyday objects. The Vikings were, in the words of the Danish archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl, “a nation of excellent shipwrights and ordinary farmers,” and to understand the Viking expansion is to understand both halves of that description. For the wider story of the expansion that this technology made possible, see the Viking raids and expansion; for a focused account of the longship itself, see what was a Viking longship.
The Longship
The Viking longship is one of the most distinctive ship types in maritime history. Its hull was clinker-built, with overlapping planks riveted together with iron nails, and was made watertight by caulking of tarred wool or moss. The frame was light, flexible, and strong; the keel was heavy enough to give stability under sail but light enough to allow the ship to be beached or even portaged. The single square sail, made of woolen cloth, was carried on a removable mast that could be lowered in harbor or in heavy weather. When the wind failed, the longship could be driven by oars, often 16 to 25 pairs in a warship, and 13 to 15 in a smaller vessel. The combination made the longship a fast, weatherly, and extraordinarily versatile vessel.
Longships came in several sizes. The smallest were the small boats, with 13 pairs of oars, suitable for coastal voyages and for use by individual chieftains. The medium-sized warships, called snekkjar, had 20 to 25 pairs of oars and were the workhorses of the Viking fleets. The largest longships, the drekar or “dragon-ships,” were reserved for kings and great earls; the famous Skuldelev 2, raised from a Danish fjord and now in the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, was a small warship about 30 meters long, but the Long Serpent of King Olaf Tryggvason, described in the sagas, was reportedly 44 meters long, with 34 pairs of oars. Such large ships were a mix of warship and royal yacht, designed as much to overawe as to fight.
The double-ended design of the longship was one of its most useful features. With identical bow and stern, the ship could reverse direction without turning, a great advantage in narrow rivers and in sudden attacks. The hull was also flexible, designed to bend with the waves of the open sea, and a well-found longship could cross the North Sea or the Atlantic. The famous voyage of the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl in 1947, when he crossed the Atlantic in a replica of a reed boat, was an attempt to show that prehistoric peoples could have reached the Americas; but the genuine Viking crossings of the Atlantic, in ships that were clinker-built like the longships, are well documented in the sagas and confirmed by archaeology.
Cargo Ships and Coastal Craft
The longship was the warship; the merchant ship, called a knarr, was built along similar lines but was wider, deeper, and slower. The knarr had a displacement of perhaps 50 tons, was single-masted with a square sail, and was designed to carry bulk cargoes across the North Sea and the Atlantic. The biggest ships of the Viking Age were the knarrir of the Icelanders, which carried everything from livestock to timber to the families of the settlers on the long voyage to the new colonies. The keel of a knarr excavated at Skuldelev, also in the Roskilde fjord, was 16 meters long, and the ship was probably about 20 meters in overall length. A reconstructed knarr, the Sea Stallion from Glendalough, was sailed from Denmark to Dublin and back in 2007, a striking demonstration of the seaworthiness of these vessels.
For coastal and river work, the Norse also used smaller, lighter craft. The faering was a four-oared rowing boat, suitable for fishing and for travel in protected waters. The ottar, a small cargo boat, was used for river traffic. These smaller vessels have left less of an archaeological trace than the longships, but they were the everyday vehicles of Norse transport, and they were probably far more numerous than the warships. For the technology of the longship in detail, see what was a Viking longship.
Navigation and Seamanship
The Norse sailors who crossed the open Atlantic had no compass, no astrolabe, and no charts in the modern sense. Yet they sailed the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea, the Baltic, and the North Atlantic with a high degree of skill. Their navigation depended on a combination of dead reckoning, observation of the sun and stars, and a knowledge of the signs of land. The sagas describe Norse sailors using a sunstaff, a kind of astronomical measuring device, to find the height of the sun at noon, and a solarsteinn, a stone used to find the sun’s position when the sun itself was hidden by cloud. The exact nature of the solarsteinn is debated; one popular theory is that it was a crystal of cordierite or calcite that polarized light.
Landfinding was a more important skill than offshore navigation. Norse sailors looked for the flight of seabirds, which usually meant that land was within a certain distance; for the cloud formations that often form over land even when it is out of sight; for the color of the sea, which is often a different green or blue over the continental shelf than over the deep ocean; for the drift of seaweed and driftwood. The Norse knew the great circle route from Norway to Greenland, sailing well to the west of the great-circle route and then turning north, and the sagas record voyages in which ships deliberately set out to make landfall in places they could not see.
A distinctive feature of Norse seamanship was the use of crew hierarchy. Each longship had a captain, who held the tiller, a steersman, and a lookout at the masthead. The lookout was the most important, for he had to see the signs of land and call out commands. The rowing crew was organized by pairs, with the strongest rowers in the middle, where the oars were easiest to pull, and the less experienced at bow and stern. The captain, called the stýrimaðr, was often a wealthy man who had financed the construction of the ship and led the crew in person.
Weaponry
The Viking warrior is best known for his sword, his battle-axe, and his seax, a single-edged knife. The Viking sword was a long, double-edged weapon with a distinctive hilt, often richly decorated with silver, copper, and gold. Viking swords were made by pattern-welding, a process in which strips of different types of iron were twisted and welded together to produce a blade that combined the strength of high-carbon iron with the flexibility of low-carbon iron. The pattern-welded blade was a technical triumph, but it was also expensive, and most Viking warriors would have carried a battle-axe or a spear rather than a sword.
The spear was the most common weapon of the Viking warrior. It was cheap, easy to make, and deadly in the shield wall, the standard Viking battle formation. The Viking battle-axe had a long, often slender, blade, and a two-handed grip. The Dane axe, with its great broad blade, was the weapon of the professional warrior; smaller axes were carried by farmers and used as everyday tools. The seax, a single-edged knife that was the ancestor of the later seax, was a working tool as well as a weapon; the word “seax” gives its name to the Saxons.
Viking warriors also used the bow, especially when hunting, and the saga literature records a few cases in which skilled archers turned the tide of battle. The Vikings had no stirrup, and they fought on foot in battle; the great cavalry charges of the later Middle Ages were not a feature of Viking warfare. The principal defense was the round shield, made of wood and faced with leather, and a helmet of iron. The mail coat, called a byrnie in Old English, was the mark of a wealthy warrior. There is no evidence that Viking helmets were horned; for the definitive debunking of this myth, see did Vikings wear helmets with horns.
Iron and Metalwork
The Viking Age was, technically, an iron age. Iron was the principal metal of Norse tool-makers, weapons, and ship-fittings, and Scandinavian bog iron was the basis of a flourishing iron-smelting industry. The process of extracting iron from bog ore was labor-intensive but produced a usable metal. The Norse smith worked with charcoal-fired forges and used both hammering and pattern-welding. The finished products, from axe-heads to swords to plowshares, were of high quality and were widely exported.
The Norse also worked extensively with non-ferrous metals. Bronze, brass, and silver were used for jewelry, and the great silver hoards of the Viking Age, often in the form of cut-up dirhams and Frankish coins, are evidence of the wealth that flowed into Scandinavia. Gold was rarer but was used for the richest objects, including the regalia of kings. The Norse were skilled in filigree, granulation, and the casting of bronze and brass. The distinctive brooches, pendants, and buckles of the Viking Age are found in graves and hoards from Dublin to Kiev and from Iceland to the Baltic.
Other Technologies
The Vikings were also skilled in other crafts. They were master textile workers, producing woolen cloth that has survived in the peat bogs of Scandinavia and that was an important export. The Norse comb-maker produced antler and bone combs in enormous numbers, and many of these have been found in graves and in trading centers. The Norse potter made simple, unglazed pottery that was adequate for household use. The Norse carpenter built not only the longships but also the great halls, the churches, and the bridges of the Viking Age, the most famous of which was the Great Belt bridge built by Harald Bluetooth around 965.
The Vikings were also farmers, and their agricultural technology, while not as advanced as that of the Romans, was perfectly adequate to the Scandinavian environment. The heavy plow, imported from the Frankish world, was used in the rich soils of Denmark and southern Sweden. The light ard plow was used in the thinner soils of Norway. The Norse farmer also used irrigation and manuring to maintain the fertility of the soil, and the long, narrow field strips that are a common feature of the Danish and southern Swedish landscape are a direct inheritance from the Viking Age.
Conclusion
Viking technology was a combination of tradition and innovation, of inherited skills and new techniques. The longship was the most famous product of this technology, but the iron, the jewelry, the cloth, and the everyday objects of the Viking world were also distinctive. The Vikings were not, in the narrow sense, a “technological” people; their culture was rooted in agriculture and trade. But they had a gift for applying inherited technology to new ends, and the longship, in particular, allowed them to project power over an astonishing range. To understand the Viking Age is to understand both the technology and the people who used it.
Further reading
- Ole Crumlin-Pedersen, Viking-Age Ships and Shipbuilding in Hedeby, Haithabu and Schleswig (Viking Ship Museum, 1997).
- Jan Bill, Viking Ships and the Sea, in Stefan Brink and Neil Price (eds.), The Viking World (Routledge, 2008).