Introduction
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of Frankish vessels that have been found in the Sleswig borderland; most of the household utensils were made either of iron, or horn, or wood, or stone, and in Norway a special pot-stone was quarried for this purpose, being employed in making large basins and long-handled bowls. Similarly in poverty-stricken Greenland soapstone was the favourite material for cups and dishes.
The abundance of iron tools and the plentiful supply of wood made plank-work easy and cheap so that the viking became proficient to an extraordinary degree in timber-architecture and shipbuilding, especially the latter. Even before the Viking Period, as the larger of the two Kvalsund boats (1) shows, the Northmen could make strong, well-proportioned, clinker-built craft that were as much as 50 feet in overall length and about 9 feet wide amidships. It was to this type of boat, built of unpainted oak and clinched with iron nails, broad and shallow, of easy entrance and run, with a deep rockered keel and a steep sheer, that the viking shipbuilder always remained faithful; but he learnt to build much bigger boats, and of the larger warships there is a noble example preserved in Oslo to this day, namely the Gokstad ship (2), a boat that was in commission during the reign of Harald Fairhair at the end of the ninth century. Her overall length is nearly 80 feet and her displacement about 30 tons; she had a mast capable of being raised and lowered, and a large square sail, but she did not depend only on the wind and could be propelled also by 16 pairs of oars worked through circular oar-ports; the boat must have had a crew of perhaps 40 men and no doubt could carry 60 or 70 persons in all. She had a tall, good-looking prow and stern, rising boldly up from the water and alike fore and aft, and her rudder was fixed over the starboard quarter. She carried three small dinghies, had five portable berths forward and a striped tent as shelter amidships when not at sea; the great circular shields of the warriors, painted yellow or black, lined her gunwales on the outside. In fair weather she could perhaps exceed 10 knots.
The Gokstad boat was of the 'long-ship' or man-of-war class, and since speed was required of her she had less freeboard
1. Her length (54 feet) is estimated only, as the frame is incomplete. These two boats are dated fifth to eighth century and are now at Bergen. Pictures of them will be found in Dr. A. W. Brøgger Ancient Emigrants, Oxford, 1929; but for a full description, see H. Shetelig and F. Johannesen, Kvalsundfundet, Bergens Mus. Skrifter, N.R. II, 2 (1929).
2. Found at Gokstad, Sandefjord, Norway, in 1880. N. Nicolaysen, The Viking-Ship discovered at Gokstad, Oslo, 1882 (in English and Danish).
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Fig. 1
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than the ordinary viking craft; these 'long-ships' were not intended for great voyages upon the open sea, but that a boat like the Gokstad vessel could cross the North Sea or the Baltic comfortably was proved in 1893 when a crew of Norwegians piloted a replica of her over the Atlantic to America, taking four weeks for the crossing and finding no fault with their craft. She was far from being the biggest boat of her kind, for the most famous example of the class, the Long Serpent of Olaf Tryggvason, was propelled by 34 pairs of oars and was 160 feet in overall length, a noble ship that perhaps bore to her last tragic sea-fight off Svold (A.D. 1000) as many as 250 men under the great king who was her captain. The carving on the Stenkyrka stone (Pl. IV) from Gotland shows two other 'longships'; the greater of these has the line of round shields on the bulwarks such as lined the gunwales of the Gokstad boat, very curious multiple sheets, and a 'dragon' head adorning the prow. This was a favourite figure-head for the vikings' boats, but unhappily no actual example has survived.
The boats, commonly called 'knörrs', that were used on the big viking expeditions overseas and the long, hazardous trips to Ireland, Greenland, and America, were different craft from the 'long-ships' of the kings and chieftains, being shorter, sturdier, and carrying a higher freeboard and having a great beam and a wide bottom. They depended almost entirely upon sail-power, using their oars only as auxiliaries if the wind deserted them, and they were capable of travelling about 75 miles a day, so that the journey from Norway to Iceland probably took on an average 9 days and the crossing of the North Sea 3 days. They carried about 20 to 30 men as crew, but some of the knörrs were obviously big boats and could take much larger numbers, or could accommodate 40 or so human beings with live-stock besides, and food and fodder sufficient for several weeks. Such boats must have had a displacement of 50 tons or thereabouts.
No viking boat hitherto found has better illustrated the truly admirable skill of the northern shipbuilder than Queen Asa's yacht, the lovely 'Oseberg Ship' that was built about A.D. 800 and in which the queen herself was subsequently buried. The
1. Like Gokstad, Oseberg is situated on the Vestfold side of the Oslo fjord; the boat was excavated in 1904 and is described in that mighty work Osebergfundet, Oslo, 1917- 1928; for shorter accounts (in German and English), F. A. van Scheltema, Der Osebergfund, Augsberg, 1929 (Führer zur Urgeschichte, 7), A. W. Brøgger, The Oseberg Ship, SagaBook of Viking Society, X, i (1919-24), p. 1, and H. Shetelig, Queen Asa's Sculptures, ib., p. 12.
Plate III
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craft was designed only for cruising in the quiet waters of the fjords, but she was over 64 feet long and 15 feet broad amidships, and had a mast and sail and accommodation for 15 pairs of oars; most of all she is remarkable for her graceful lines and her tall curved prow with its richly carved stem and gunwales and its delicate volute-tip. As most travellers to Oslo know, the funeral chamber on this beautiful boat was filled with Queen Asa's treasures, a marvellous array of carved wooden furniture that has made the discovery of the royal grave one of the most astonishing and illuminating archaeological finds of this century; no visitor to the museum gallery where these beautiful things are set out, no one who has looked at the ship herself in her
Nor dare man assert that the Swedes and the Danes loved fine ships and beautiful ornament less than those Norwegian vikings whose splendid vessels have thus been so luckily preserved for posterity. It is true that the Greeks often affected to despise, as well they might, the open craft of the Russians, referring to them contemptuously as monoxyla, mere dug-out canoes; but the sagas and the rune-stones attest that the Swedish and the Danish vessels were the equals of the Norse, and the lesson of the smaller articles of the Viking Period, brooches, weapons, and the like, is that all three northern peoples shared a taste for the same variety of ornament and could have differed but little from one another in the matter of arts and crafts.
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The favourite decoration of the Northmen was an intricate arrangement of animal-forms, knots, and worm-twists. This has survived chiefly in its miniature variety on small metal brooches and so forth, but it was employed also in works of a grander sort such as in the carvings on the Oseberg ship, or upon the woodwork of the mast-churches and the hall-pillars and gables of houses, or upon the great rune-stones that commemorate the noble dead. The history and development of this northern ornament have been studied with exemplary thoroughness by Scandinavian and Danish archaeologists who have pieced together a story of unusual interest.
At the beginning of the Viking Period the craftsmen of the north were using for their pattern-making a formula known as the Late Vendel (1) style, a beautiful animal-ornament in the
form of a writhing network of a creature's limbs, head, and body, seen in profile, but twisted and contorted almost out of recognition; it is illustrated here (Fig. 2) by an often-published drawing of the detail of a brooch from Kaasta in Uppland, Sweden, and also (Fig. 3) by a drawing, with detail above, of an oval brooch from Bergen in Norway that is illustrated again in half-tone (Pl. II, 6). But it was not long before new influences began to alter the work of the viking craftsmen as they became increasingly familiar with the weapons and ornaments of foreign folk and saw something of the handicrafts of the far-away Byzantine-Oriental world. One result of this was the introduction of some severity and restraint in design, so that instead of the overloaded and crowded work of the Migration Period
1. So-called because it is seen typically in the famous cemetery of boatgraves close to Vendel church in north Uppland, Sweden. Late Vendel is the equivalent of Style III in B. Salin's renowned analysis of the Germanic animal-ornament.
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