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Longships () were long clinker built (, Old Swedish: hærskip) propelled by , and later also by sail, used by the Norsemen and surrounding Germanic tribes from at least the 4th century AD and throughout the Viking Age, being part of the Nordic ship building tradition. As the name suggests, they were long slender ships, intended for speed, with the ability to carry a large crew of warriors. They are sometimes called "dragonships" () due to a tradition of the fore and aft ends being decorated with a raised dragonhead () and tail respectively, with the sail making up the "wing" of the dragon. The largest types were thus called "dragons" ( dreki), while smaller types had names such as karve ( karfi), snekke ( snekkja), and skeid ( skeið).
Archaeological finds have been made of longships from the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries in Denmark, Norway and Germany, (2025). 9780851159034, Boydell Press. ISBN 9780851159034 with motifs on dating to the 8th century or earlier. It is thought that the Norse specifically invented the design for Viking usage, which included raiding and warfare, exploration and commerce. The longship is a rather distinctly Norsemen () construction, with bronze age petroglyphs in Sweden indicating a long tradition of building long animal-headed naval ships in Scandinavia. Equivelant clinker-built naval ships by the Wends (a South Baltic Slavic people) were much smaller and shorter in comparison.
The principles leading to the longship's design evolved over a long period of time. A big technological advancement came around 300 AD, when clinker-building was invented, as seen in the Danish Nydam boat and Swedish Björke boat, both from around 320 AD, with their features being subsquently adopted in the ships of other cultures, including those of the Anglo-Saxons, as seen in the 7th century Sutton Hoo ship. They continued to influence naval engineering for centuries, and the character and appearance of these ships have been reflected in Scandinavian boat building traditions to the present day. The particular skills and methods employed in making longships are still used worldwide, often with modern adaptations. They were all made out of wood, with cloth sails (woven wool), and had various details and carvings on the hull.
The archaeologists Julie Lund and Søren M. Sindbæk cite a dataset generated by a reconstruction of annual summer temperatures over the past 2,000 years that indicates a distinct warming trend in the 8th and 9th centuries, reviving earlier hypotheses that a milder climate was an impetus for the expansion of Norse maritime activity and colonization. Neil Price proposes that the maritime raiding practices which constitute what he calls the "Viking phenomenon" may have begun earlier than ordinarily believed, and beyond the environs of the North Sea. He argues that recent finds such as the Salme ships from c. 750 suggest that raiding might have originated in the Baltic region, especially in the east.Lund & Sindbæk 2022, p. 172
The Norse had a well-developed naval architecture, and during the early medieval period, their ship designs were advanced for their time. The ships were owned by coastal farmers, and under the leidang system, every section in the king's realm was required to build warships and to provide men to crew them, allowing the king to quickly assemble a large and powerful war fleet. The historians David Bachrach and Bernard Bachrach say that Viking longships were part of a long tradition of oared warships operating in the northern seas. The main purpose of their warships was to "land troops rather than to engage in combat at sea", and to swiftly carry as many warriors as possible to a scene of conflict. In the 10th century, longships would sometimes be tied together in offshore battles to form a steady platform for infantry warfare. However, examples of more traditional naval combat also exist, such as the Battle of Svolder, where various projectiles and bow and arrow were used, as well as naval boarding.
The Viking longships were powerful naval weapons in their time and were highly valued possessions. Archaeological finds show that the Viking ships were not standardized. Ships varied from designer to designer and place to place and often had regional characteristics. For example, the choice of material was mostly dictated by the regional forests, such as pine from Norway and Sweden, and oak from Denmark. Moreover, each Viking longship had particular features adjusted to the natural conditions under which it was sailed.
During the 9th-century peak of the Viking expansion, large fleets set out to attack the declining Frankish empire by attacking navigable rivers such as the Rhine, the Seine, the Loire and others. Rouen was sacked in 841, the year after the death of Louis the Pious, a son of Charlemagne. Quentovic, near modern Étaples, was attacked in 842 and 600 Danish ships attacked Hamburg in 845. In the same year, 129 ships returned to attack the Seine.Magnus Magnusson. The Vikings. p. 71, History Press. 2008, They were called "dragonships" by enemies such as the English because some had a dragon-shaped decoration atop the bowstem.
On 1 October 844, when most of the Iberian peninsula was controlled by the Emirate of Córdoba and was known as al-Andalus, a flotilla of about 80 Viking ships, after attacking Asturias, Galicia and Lisbon, ascended the Guadalquivir to Seville, and after a brief siege and heavy fighting, took it by storm on 3 October. (2025). 9781134318261, Routledge. ISBN 9781134318261 They inflicted many casualties and took numerous hostages with the intent to ransom them. Another group of Vikings had gone to Cádiz to plunder while those in Seville waited on Qubtil (Isla Menor), an island in the river, for the ransom money to arrive. Meantime, the emir of Córdoba, Abd ar-Rahman II, prepared a military contingent to meet them, and on 11 November a pitched battle ensued on the grounds of Talayata (Tablada). The Vikings held their ground, but the results were catastrophic for the invaders, who suffered a thousand casualties; four hundred were captured and executed, some thirty ships were destroyed. It was not a total victory for the emir's forces, but the Viking survivors had to negotiate a peace to leave the area, surrendering their plunder and the hostages they had taken to sell as slaves, in exchange for food and clothing.
In 859, a major long-distance Viking expedition set out for al-Andalus. They tried to land at Galicia and were driven off. Then they sailed down the west coast of the peninsula and burned the mosque at Išbīliya (Seville), but were repelled by a large Muslim force there before entering the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar and burning the mosque at al-Jazīrah (Algeciras), following which they headed south to the Emirate of Nekor in modern Morocco, plundered the city for eight days, (2025). 9786188536043, Norwegian Institute at Athens. ISBN 9786188536043 and defeated a Muslim force that attempted to stop them.
The Vikings made several incursions into al-Andalus in the years 859, 966 and 971, but with intentions more diplomatic than bellicose, although an attempt at invasion in 971 was frustrated when the Viking fleet was totally annihilated.
The Hjortspring boat, a vessel designed as a large canoe, closely resembles the thousands of petroglyph images of Nordic Bronze Age ships found throughout Scandinavia. Dating to the 4th century BC, it was found in a bog in southern Denmark. About long and wide, the boat is the oldest find of a wooden plank-built ship in the Nordic countries. (2025). 9780192854346, Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780192854346 A large array of weaponry, including shields, spears, and swords, was found with the boat. (2025). 9781785703676, Oxbow Books. ISBN 9781785703676
A later development of this style of ship is the Sutton Hoo ship, found in an Anglo-Saxons grave in Sutton Hoo, England, dating to around 620. The Anglo-Saxons were at this time very cognate to the Norse, and the finds in the grave shows a close relation between these cultures. Albeit completely rotted away, the remnant shape in the earth shows a low prow and stern like the Nydam ship, with a total length of .
The Kvalsund ship, one of two vessels found in a Danish bog, was built in the late 8th century. According to the dendrochronology research team led by Sæbjørg Walaker Nordeide, a specialist in Medieval archaeology, the Kvalsund ship is a link in the transition from the ship technology of the early Iron Age to that of the Viking Age. They say that based on dendrochronological dating of the wooden remains, the trees used to construct the two vessels are estimated to have been felled at the end of the 8th century, ca. 780–800, dating the vessels to "the threshold of the Viking Age". The ship, known as Kvalsund II to distinguish it from the boat that was found with it, is estimated to be long and wide, with 10 pairs of oars. A mast was found, but it is not known to which it belonged.
Crumlin-Pedersen refers to the word 'longship' as being commonly used to mean the "swift raiding vessels and landing crafts of the Vikings". Longships made it possible for the Vikings to raid the coastal regions of Western Europe and to sail up its rivers. The Vikings were successful in warfare with these ships of advanced design, using them in sea operations as landing vessels for warriors to be deployed in land battle. Longships also enabled the establishment of permanent Scandinavian settlements in the Northern Isles of Scotland, parts of Ireland, the Danelaw area of England, and Normandy in France.
According to Judith Jesch, a scholar of the Viking Age and Old Norse language and literature, the Old Norse word langskip occurs just twice in the stanzas. 'Longship' is used only once in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in the form langscip, in an entry for the year 896 that describes King Alfred's part in the Anglo-Saxon and Viking warfare of the late 9th century. In the Chronicle and other Anglo-Saxon written sources, the Danish ships are called æscas or they are referred to by the type names snekkja, skeið or dreki. Crumlin-Pedersen says skeið appears to have been the most common name for longships in Scandinavia.
Modern-day knowledge of Viking ships comes from iconography such as the pictures found on runestones, in written accounts, especially the Old , and finds of the remains of actual ships. The philologist Eldar Heide argues that most classification schemes used in introductions to the subject of old Scandinavian ship types, such as knorr, snekkja, or karfi, are problematic, and calls for more emphasis on research of the textual evidence to understand what they were called and what they were like. Jesch says that any kind of Scandinavian ship could be long, and that longship is not a technical term. She says furthermore that text in the skaldic corpus calling a large warship a dragon, whether or not it has a dragonhead prow, is more likely a poetical conceit rather than a technical term for warships.
Ole Crumlin-Pederson was the founder of the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde and made important contributions to maritime archaeology research. According to Crumlin-Pedersen, information on the origin and dating of early ships from Northern Europe can "be determined by independent natural scientific methods, primarily by dendrochronology", and it is not necessary to use sequential typology to date archaeological finds of such vessels. (2025). 9781785704642, Oxbow Books. ISBN 9781785704642
A Viking Age skeid known as Skuldelev 2, a long, slender warship about long, was discovered in the Roskilde finds of 1962. Dendrochronology shows that this vessel was built in Dublin around 1042. Skuldelev 2 had 30 benches and could carry a crew of 65 to 70. It was likely a skeid, and considering its size certainly belonged to a high-ranking chieftain, according to the linguist Angus Somerville and the historian R. Andrew McDonald. In 1996–97 archaeologists discovered the remains of another ship in the harbor. This ship, called the Roskilde 6, is the longest Viking ship ever discovered and has been dated to around 1025. It was long and had a beam of . The vessel drew about of water, and carried about 100 men, including 78 rowers. (2025). 9780851159034, Boydell Press. ISBN 9780851159034 Skuldelev 2 was replicated as Seastallion from Glendalough ( Havhingsten fra Glendalough) at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde and launched in 2004.
The earliest mentioned dreki was the ship of unstated size owned by Harald Fairhair in the 10th century. Short says that warships were measured by the number of rúm, "rooms", they contained, a room being the space between the crossbeams, a little less than . A room could accommodate two oars, one on each side of the ship. According to N.A.M. Rodger, ships of 30 rooms or more were very unusual. The first drekki ship whose size is known was Olav Tryggvason's 30 room Tranin (Crane), built at Nidaros in 995. His later ship Ormrinn langi (Long Serpent) of 34 room (assumed to be long) built during the winter of 999 to 1000, was the most well-known of such ships in this period. The common word for dragon in old Germanic languages such as Old Norse was not "dragon" ( dreki), but rather "serpent", specifically "Germanic dragon" (, , ). This is mirrored in the name "Long Serpent" (Ormrinn langi), or "Long Dragon", as given by the philologist Hans-Peter Naumann, for example. (2025). 9783772054358, Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. ISBN 9783772054358
The city seal of Bergen, created in 1299, depicts a ship with a dragon's head at either end, which might be intended to represent a dreki ship.
Longships were not fitted with benches, and apparently had movable seats. When rowing, the oarsmen may have sat on sea chests (chests containing their personal possessions) that would otherwise take up space. These chests would be brought aboard the ship when it was manned. Oars were fashioned of varying lengths according to their position in the ship. In the construction of longships, rounded or rectangular oarports were cut through the upper strake on both sides along the full length of a warship, while on merchant ships they were fitted only near the ends.
An innovation that improved the sail's performance was the beitass (Old Norse), a wooden luff or tacking spar that stiffened the sail, thus allowing the vessel to tack (sail into the wind, on a zig-zag course). It was used especially on the knarr. The windward performance of the ship was poor by modern standards as there was no centreboard, deep keel or leeboard. To assist in tacking, the beitass kept the luff taut. A step was built into the ship just forward of the mast with one or two sockets on each side. The heel of the beitass was stepped into one of these when the vessel was underway. Sometimes blocks of wood were to the sides of the hull, with each hole angled forward to receive the end of the tacking spar.
The steersman was the skipper ( styrimaðr) of the vessel, and set its course and speed, sailing by observation of the sea, the sky, and the wind, as well as by weather signs such as the behaviour of seabirds. The maritime archaeologist Timm Weski cites Schnall for the information that a number of coastal currents are mentioned in the Nordic sources, along with the danger they represented to sailors, who, however, seemed to pay no attention to currents on the open sea. They did not take them into account when steering a course in a long-distance passage, nor did they take advantage of following currents that would have given them a boost in their direction of travel.
According to the Old Norse philologist and runology Tristan Mueller-Vollmer writing with Kirsten Wolf, a specialist in Old Norse and Scandinavian linguistics, it is nearly certain that the Vikings could set their latitude on a voyage, but little is known of how they might have done this. Viking mariners probably depended on oral headings when they set a course to sail, having no magnetic compassVilhjálmsson, 2001 p. 120 and no charts. They likely used basic celestial navigation, tracking the sun's movement during the day and the position of the stars at night, primarily Polaris, called leidarstjarna (lode star) in Old Norse. However, the Pole Star would only have been visible in the early and late parts of the sailing season because of the long hours of summer daylight in the north. Weski says that nowadays the position of the Pole Star is almost directly overhead at the pole, but in 1000 it circled around the pole at a distance of about 7° in the sky.
Thorsteinn Vilhjálmsson, a specialist in the medieval history of science in Iceland and Norway, considers the voyages to Vinland made by the Vikings as "the crowning medieval Norse achievement in the field of seamanship and navigation." They were the culmination of hundreds of years of experience sailing across the northern Atlantic. The influence of these voyages on later historic events may have been negligible, but they had a lasting impact as an essential part of the Norse heritage of the Icelandic sagas.
In 1975, the maritime historian Uwe Schnall published a study, Navigation der Wikinger, about Viking-Age navigation based on Old Norse texts held at the University of Göttingen. Schnall wrote that navigational aids such as the supposed '"sun stone" ( sólarsteinn), often associated with sun compasses, are mentioned only once in the , in the second section of Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, a biography of Saint Olaf, "St. Olaf's Saga". The story is about a wager between King Olaf and the farmer Sigurծr, but not in a navigational setting. Sigurծr declared that he could find the sun's position in the sky, even though it was an overcast day with snow being blown in the wind. King Olaf held a sunstone in the air and viewed the sun, confirming Sigurծr's claim. Schnall says that all other references to sólarsteinn concern precious stones, which were not used to navigate.
No sunstone has ever been found in Viking archaeological investigations. Consequently it is not known if Vikings ever actually used sunstones, but they could have been useful navigational aids, as much of the area they sailed over and explored in the North Atlantic was near polar latitudes, where the sun is very close to the horizon for much of the year.
An astronomer for the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Bradley E. Schaefer, writes that there is no useful textual, ethnographic, or archaeological evidence for the use of "sunstones" as celestial navigation aids, thus their nature is unknown. He declares that his extensive tests with "many crystals, many configurations, and many cloud conditions, all throughout the North Atlantic around Iceland and Greenland" show that in real-world practice, the crystals perform very poorly and can be used to determine the sun's direction "only when the sky has large blue patches", in which case its location is already obvious from observations with the naked eye.
Archaeologists have found two devices which they interpret as navigation instruments. Both appear to be sundials with gnomon curves etched on a flat surface. The devices are small enough to be held flat in the hand at diameter. A wooden version dated to about 1000 AD was found in Greenland. A stone version was also found at Vatnahverfi, Greenland. By looking at the place where the shadow from the rod falls on a carved curve, a navigator is able to sail along a line of latitude. Both gnomon curve devices show the curve for 61° north very prominently. This was the approximate latitude that the Vikings would have sailed along to get to Greenland from Scandinavia. The wooden device also has north marked and had 32 arrow heads around the edge that may be the points of a compass. Other lines are interpreted as the solstice and equinox curves. The device was tested successfully, as a sun compass, during a 1984 reenactment when a longship sailed across the North Atlantic. It was accurate to within ±5°.Cultural Atlas of the Viking World. Ed. J Graham Campbell et al. Andromeda. 1994.
Cook duty on voyages was assigned by the cast of lots among the men who lived in a fylki, i.e. ship district, or county, who had to carry on the work at their farmsteads. The cook was paid the same wages as the sailors, who received one øre per month.
A master shipwright called the "hofudsmidir" ( hǫfuðsmiðr) was in charge of the construction of large ships. It was his responsibility to ensure that all required materials were available at the shipyard or worksite and that the craftsmen were fed and paid for their labour. McGrail says building the ships required a large number of workers, with various skills and levels of expertise. Long Serpent ( Ormr inn langi) was built for Olaf Tryggvason at Trondheim in 998 or 999 by a team with these job descriptions: labourers, tree fellers, general carpenters or plank-cutters ("filungar"), and stem-and-stern wrights or "stafnasmidir" ( stafnasmiðr). who were paid twice the wages of plank cutters. The stafnasmidir shaped the keel and the carved those stems that were decorated artistically, while the filungr used axes and adzes to cleave the planks. In one scene of the Bayeux tapestry a man, almost certainly a stafnasmidir, is depicted standing in front of the stem of a boat, inspecting the workmanship and checking that its lines are fair.
According to Angelo Forte, a maritime historian, Viking shipwrights used timber that had been recently cut, and may have immersed it in water to make it flexible enough to bend in the shape of the hull. They took advantage of the natural shapes of tree trunks, branches and roots to form those parts required for a ship's construction. These are very strong because they are aligned with the tree's fibres. Tall, straight trees were most suitable for working into masts, keels, and planking for the hull. The forestem and sternpost would be carved as single pieces from curved trunks. Forked branches were made into floor timbers, and curved ones were made into frames. The natural bend where a trunk joined a root was optimal for fashioning into knees, used as braces to stiffen the joint between two pieces of timber fastened at angles to each other. (2025). 9780521829922, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521829922 Boatbuilders chose a log with a branch that had the correct shape. Generally made from a straight piece of timber and fastened using a knee in each side of the hull, biti were the cross beams that functioned as the rower's seat. They are an essential part of the frame—a bite with its floor timber, knee and is the stiffest joinery in the boat.
Timber was worked with iron and axes. Most of the smoothing was done with a Broadaxe. Other tools used in woodwork were hammers, wedges, drawknife, and planes.
The historian F. Donald Logan says the sail of the Gokstad ship was rectangular in shape or nearly a square of possibly , and that it was made of wadmal ( vaðmál), probably striped or checked, and hung from a yard. Lines were attached from the bottom of the sail to points along the gunwale, allowing the ship to reach (sail across the wind) and to tack (sail towards the wind). Logan says that the mast of Gokstad ship, for example, has not survived in its original state, thus its height and the height to which the sail was raised are not certain. However long the mast was, apparently between , it was set into the keelson, a heavy wooden housing on the keel amidship, from which it could be removed as necessary.
Lise Bender Jørgensen, an archaeologist, writes that because Viking ship sails were made of wool, large amounts of it would have been necessary for their production, as demonstrated by experimental archaeology. With the introduction of sails in Scandinavia around 700, there would have been a great increase in demand for wool sailcloth and the labour of women to produce it. The researchers that Jørgensen cites say of sailcloth, warp yarns and weft had to be spun and woven into 15–16 lengths of cloth before the sailmakers could begin their work. (2025). 9780851158679, Boydell Press. ISBN 9780851158679
The nautical archaeologists Cooke et al describe how, with the aim of reconstructing sails to rig replicas of four of the Skuldeleve ships from Roskilde Fjord, the Viking Ship Museum initiated research in the archaeological record and in the literature to define its specifications for weaving the fabric. Because woollen square-sails had been used until the 20th century in Scandinavia and in the Faroe Islands, a good deal of practical information about making them was still available, and a few sailmakers who worked in wool were still alive. The museum began its research into woollen sails in 1977, and in the years afterwards several reconstructions of Viking Age ships were outfitted with wool sails. According to the museum, it appears that three types of weave were used to produce wool sail cloth in Viking times, depending on the available resources and the local traditions of the area where it was made. The museum decided to use 2/1 twill ( tuskept) for the weaving of the wool sail for its reconstructed ships, basing this decision on the only available archaeological material, fragments of heavy woollen sailcloth dated to the mid-13th century found at Trondenes church in Norway.
According to the mariner and archaeologist Seán McGrail, masts have only rarely been found in excavations, and these are the lower parts of them. Little evidence of the standing rigging needed to support a ship's mast has survived to modern times, other than that found in iconography, and the slight evidence that does exist comes mostly from the Norse tradition. Depictions on sources such as the Bayeux tapestry indicate that the masts of ninth- to 12th-century vessels were braced by a forestay to the bowstem or a forward beam and shrouds to the top strakes or to an accessible crossbeam. The halyard may have served also as a backstay to support the mast from an after thwart or beam.
Willow Withy, or osiers, were also required for attaching rigging to the hull and securing the rudder to its frame. MacGrail says the consensus among modern scholars is that rigging in Early Medieval times was made from the bast fibre of Tilia trees or possibly from hemp. In situations where extra strength was needed, ropes were made from seal, whale, or walrus walrus hides cut spirally. McGrail says the whale skin and seal skin ropes described by Ohthere to King Alfred were 60 , or 15 fathoms long. Jørgensen says ropes made of walrus hides were renowned for their strength. Pine tar was used to preserve organic materials such as the wood of boats, ropes, sails and fishnets. (2025). 9780851158679, Boydell Press. ISBN 9780851158679
Writing on the process of the working of wood in the period when Viking ships were built, Forte describes the contents of a 13th-century Norwegian treatise, Konungs skuggsjá, which lists the tools used by of the time. These include broadaxes, augers, and gouges, but no saws. He notes that the Bayeaux Tapestry contains a scene that shows the construction of a ship from the felling of trees for its timber to its fitting out. The scene depicts men using axes to fell trees, cut branches, and cleave planking for the hull. An axe with a longer blade and a shorter handle is shown being used to shape the planking. , a router, and a bore are also shown, but again no saw is in evidence. Some of the planks of the Skuldelev vessels had distinct axe cuts, and possibly adze cuts as well. The smooth cutting marks and occasional gouges left by planes are visible in the wood worked during the ships' construction. The marks left by routers, drawknives, and scrapers are apparent. Drilled holes are also to be seen.
Seán McGrail writes that woodworking tools excavated in a number of Viking Age burials demonstrate that Viking shipwrights used a wide variety of handtools. He says inspection of these tools, of toolmarks found on the wooden remains of Viking boats, and of boatbuilding scenes portrayed by artists of the early Middle Ages, such as on the Bayeux Tapestry, indicate that the premier Viking Age shipbuilder's tool was the axe. The craftsmen who used the tools were so skilled that they commonly performed the final dressing of oak planks with axes. The planks of the ships in the Skuldelev finds were finished with a drawknife, and adzes apparently were used to shape some curved surfaces. Hammers and mallets, knives, gouges, wedges, and chisels were often employed, while holes were bored with a bit inserted in a T-shaped handle.
Historians, archaeologists and adventurers have reconstructed longships in an attempt to understand how they worked. The longship was light, fast, and nimble. The true Viking warships, or langskips, were long and narrow, frequently with a length to beam (width) ratio of 7:1; they were very fast under sail or propelled by warriors who served as oarsmen. The overall length to beam (width) ratio of the excavated Viking longships Skuldelev 5 and the Ladby ship was 7:1, and that of Skuldelev 2 was 8.3:1. (1989). 9780851155265, Boydell & Brewer Ltd. ISBN 9780851155265
In Scandinavia, the longship was the usual vessel for war until the 12th–13th centuries. Leiðangr fleet-levy laws remained in place for most of the Middle Ages in Norway, where the active participation of the leiðangr was still strategically necessary —their military obligations had not been fully replaced by systems of taxation as they had been in Sweden and Denmark. These laws required that when summoned by the Crown, the freemen peasantry should build, man, and furnish ships for war—ships with at least 20 or 25 pairs of oars (40 or 50 rowers). By the late 14th century, these low-boarded vessels were at a disadvantage against newer, taller warships. When the Victual Brothers, in the employ of the Hanseatic League, attacked Bergen in late 1393, the "great ships" of the pirates could not be boarded by the Norwegian levy ships called out by Margaret I of Denmark, and the raiders were able to sack the town with impunity. While earlier times had seen larger and taller longships in service, by this time the authorities had also gone over to other types of ships for warfare. The last known mobilization of the leiðangr occurred in 1429, when the Victual Brothers defeated the naval levies of the Norwegian western counties ( fylker) outside Bergen.
Even in those instances where archaeological, iconographic or textual evidence is available for the replica builder to consult, there are frequently large gaps in the original sources on the nature of the equipment and rigging of ancient ships, and even of important hull components. A lack of research, poor construction techniques, and inept seamanship on the part of the crew because of inadequate experience, may lead to false conclusions about the characteristics and seaworthiness of the ancient vessels. The naval historian Alan Binns says even modern-day replica Viking ships that are accurate reproductions of the originals must be treated cautiously as historical evidence for a ship's capabilities, as they are usually sailed by professional sailors with modern backup, and are not representative of the actual ships that sailed in the Viking Age. (2025). 9781351665018, Routledge. ISBN 9781351665018
According to Anton Englert, an archaeologist and curator of the Viking Ship Museum, most of the trial voyages of reconstructed ancient ships have been performed by amateurs who wanted to prove a certain hypothesis by re-enacting a voyage. He says it is arguable whether or not such hypotheses have contributed to experimental archaeology. Only a few projects were built on substantial archaeological evidence, as with the construction of Viking and Saga Siglar. (2025). 9781785703690, Oxbow Books. ISBN 9781785703690 Forte writes: "The fact that a reconstruction of the Gokstad ship successfully crossed the Atlantic should not be interpreted as indicating that this was the type of vessel that travelled the North Atlantic runs to Iceland and Greenland a thousand years ago." Binns says Magnus Andersen's replica of the Gokstad ship, with its deeper keel, buoyancy fender, continuous deck, and anachronistic rig (including staysails), cannot reasonably be considered evidence for the sailing characteristics of the original.
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