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calendar   Tuesday - March 13, 2012

A Dragon Rises

This is another one of Drew’s long winded, esoteric, and perhaps dull and boring posts on things that catch my interest online. I’ll put up a couple of pictures, and the major links, which some of you might follow. But from my end this post is somewhere between a book report and a research project. I spent at least 5 hours on this yesterday, running down dozens of links and learning a whole bunch of stuff, from history to construction techniques to archaeology. And the little you see here took me hours to write. And I still have no idea how I got on the subject to begin with. So here goes ...



The Vikings Are Coming! The Vikings Are Coming!

… sometime next year, if things go right




Work nears completion on the Draken Harald Hårfagre (English: the Dragon Harold Fairhair), the first full size standard model Viking longship built in at least 800 years. Launch date set for March 2013.

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Read all about it, with lots of pictures and links to videos, right here.


Even more iconic than a German Luger, just about everyone knows what a Viking longship looks like, even though the Vikings have been gone for around 900 years now. It is as if this kind of ship spotting is engraved in our genes; Vikings! Danger! and we remember across the generations. In all the world only the tiniest handful of real longships still exist, perhaps half a dozen in all the museums everywhere. But while we know the shape, we really don’t know the size, and the (admittedly ethnocentric) anthropologists, archaeologists, and history expects have pushed the opinion that these fearsome warships really weren’t all that big; that the ships described in the old Norse sagas were greatly exaggerated and only existed at the bottom of several large tankards of mead. After all, look at the pictures on the Bayeaux Tapestry, a linen and wool history book made at the peak of the Viking Age.

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Even allowing for some artistic license, the longships shown are not all that big. A dozen oars per side. We’re talking a crew of maybe 40-50 at most. Not several hundred. No way close to the great ships of the sagas that held 1000 men. Flights of fancy. And in over a century of digging them up, the largest one ever found was about 98 feet long. The Oseberg, one of the best preserved examples, a mere 78 feet. (This was a woman’s burial. Those barbaric horrid Vikings had better Equal Rights than most of the world at that time. And since this was a funerary ship, I should say they had pretty good Equal Rites as well.) The Gokstad, a more seaworthy design, just 85 feet.

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The Oseberg and the Gokstad

Although both of these ships were built in the 800s, Early Viking Age, both are pretty much the same size as the ships shown in the Bayeaux Tapestry, Late Viking Age. And the Saxon burial ship from 700, the “pre-Viking” era, the Sutton Hoo, was 89 feet long. The Sutton Hoo ship was loaded with treasure, but the ship itself was never found. It rotted away in the clay after being buried, but left such a fantastic imprint in the soil that every last plank and nail can be seen, right down to the grain of the wood. The design of the Sutton Hoo was very very close to that of later Viking ships.

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punchline dyslexia: “Knock knock! Who’s there? Sutton. Sutton who? Third base!”

No one questions that these ships could sail. No one questions that they could sail for really long distances either. In 1893, a reconstruction of the Gokstad ship sailed from Scandinavia to the World Fair in Chicago:

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The Vikings had many different styles of ships, from dinghys to fishing vessels to traders, but none were so large as the longships. And the longest of those ever found or drawn was under 100 feet. So it was “settled science”, even though translated documents recorded a mustering agreement - that in emergencies, to defend the realm, more than 370 naval longships could be called up read to fight, plus privateers - perhaps 1000 total - and the average size of those ships was 25 sesse, which meant 50 oars, which was a bigger ship than anyone now alive was willing to believe in. These academic guys are so rigorous. Almost snobs. It’s all a lie until they can stub their toes on one. Bloody Vikings? Phooey. Bloody professors. Even the “Viking Age” is snobbishly ethnocentric: it begins in June 8, 793 when the first attacks happened in England. As if the Vikings hadn’t figured things out before that, and gone around beating up their neighbors right across the Baltic. Hella no, it wasn’t official until they came after the UK. After that it was a scourge.

So for more than 100 years after the first real live Viking longship was found, 90-100 feet was the accepted upper size limit, and the old Sagas were all pish and tosh. It was “proven” that they couldn’t be any bigger because the lightly built longships would break in two from loading and wave bending. Primitive barbarian giant canoes really, what what.

The toe stubbing happened in 1997, and it happened in a way that could make you believe old “Lucky” Leif Eriksson was smiling down from Valhalla.

Denmark’s Viking Ship Museum sits on the edge of the sea at the end of the Roskilde fjord, a few dozen miles northwest and the next isthmus over from Malmo. It was built there because 5 sunken Viking ships were found nearby in 1962. The ships had been scuttled 950 years ago to protect the town from attack by another bunch of Vikings.

The later years of the 11th century were tough and troubled times. The Vikings therefore established a series of blockades in Roskilde Fjord to protect Roskilde, the then capital of Denmark, against attack by sea.

The five ships on display in the Viking Ship Hall were scuttled to form a blockade in the Peberrende, a natural channel in Roskilde Fjord near Skuldelev, some 20 km north of Roskilde. That is why they are known as the Skuldelev ships.

They were excavated from the sea bed in 1962. The blockade was surrounded by iron sheet piling and the site then drained. In less than four months, the five ships were successfully excavated in thousands of pieces. There then remained the colossal task of conserving the timber fragments and, not least, of assembling all the pieces of the jigsaw to recreate five Viking ships.

The find contained five different ship types, which together provide a unique impression of Viking shipbuilding skills and craftsmanship.

The museum is a popular place, with about 200,000 visitors per year. They have several of the Skuldelev ships on display, quite a number of other Viking exhibits, and they have a boat yard where they build new wooden boats based on the original Viking designs. And then sail them. So popular a place that in the mid 90s they needed more room. When they started digging the foundations for their new building they came up with more than just dirt. They hit paydirt. Nine Viking ships buried under the soil, right in their own backyard.

Roskilde 6 was found – together with eight other ships from Viking times and the Middle Ages – during the construction of the Museum Harbour for the Viking Ship Museum in 1997. The ship had been hauled up into shallow water in Roskilde’s Viking harbour area and partially broken up. Therefore, only part of the bottom was preserved. Despite this it is one of the most remarkable Viking ship finds yet seen.

The ship they named Roskilde 6 was 36 meters long. Nearly 115 feet. 39 pairs of oars. 78 rowers plus crew; it probably carried 100 men. That’s assuming just one man per oar. Double that if they had two. It is by far and away the largest Viking ship ever found, though only the lower planks and ribs still exist. And it looks like those old barbarians had the “it’s too big, it will break instead of bend” thing all figured out, as the Roskilde 6 was built in sections, with the aft section attached to the center one with some rather impressive joinery ... that just might work like a hinge. The 6 was built at some point after 1025, during the reign of King Canute, towards the end of the Viking Age. 1025 was before the Norman Invasion of 1066, thus before the Bayeaux Tapestry was stitched. Canute was the Great Viking King, forming an empire of Norway, Sweden, northern England, and Denmark.

Now, you’re probably saying, gee whiz Drew, that’s just another 16 or so feet. Maybe 35 feet compared to the smaller ones. True. But it’s a volume thing; this ship was probably 1.4 times the mass of the smaller ones. Half again as big. And by the standards of the sagas, it wasn’t even close to large. It was only a little bit bigger than the standard medium sized ship. A big snekke (snake), but barely a real draken (dragon). If the sagas aren’t too overblown, there once were longships afloat in the 150-175 foot range. 100 oars, a crew of 500? That’s more than half the size of a WWII destroyer.

And that brings us back, finally, to the good ship Harold Fairhair. Named for the Viking king who unified the tribes and became the first king of Norway, around the year 890. Though famous in Norse sagas, Harold gets snubbed by the Ivory Tower Know It Alls too. By the most amazing coincidence, this new ship under construction is also 114 feet long. Exactly the same size as the Roskilde 6. The ship they said that couldn’t exist. Harold is being built with a bit blunter shape, less pointy at both ends and perhaps a bid broader in the middle. That will accommodate the double oarsmen. It is thought that the Roskilde 6 was actually very narrow, but they only recovered the lower planks and the keel so I have my doubts about that.

At a hundred and fourteen feet of crafted oak, twenty-seven feet on the beam, displacing seventy tons, and with a thirty-two hundred square foot sail of pure silk, this magnificent ship will indeed be worthy of a king.

The Dragon Harald Fairhair will have 25 pairs of oars. It is necessary to have at least two people on each oar to row the ship efficiently. That will give a crew of at least 100 persons, yet the craft should be able to be sailed by only twelve.

I’m really looking forward to this, to seeing a real Sea Dragon fly across the water.

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it bears the bad news: wood carving from the 12th century spreads the news: the Vikings are coming!




Latest news:  new tiny viking ship burial found in Scotland:  The grave of a single Viking found near the shore, in his little boat. The 16 foot ship had sailed from Norway to Ireland to Scotland with just 1-3 people aboard.


Lastly: If you want to go a-viking, the Harald is looking for a crew. But you’ve got to know your sailing, and you’ve got to be tough. Real tough; this is an open boat with no roof. And no bathroom. The shakedown cruises will start this summer, and a trans-Atlantic voyage is planned for next year. That will be a journey from somewhere in Vinland all the way to the Black Sea; from the coast of Canada across to Greenland and Iceland, then Europe down to the Straits of Gibraltar, across the Mediterranean to Istanbul, and up into the Black Sea. Then on to Sevastopol or up the Danube or the Dan? Who can say? But all these places have seen the Vikings before.

See More Below The Fold

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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 03/13/2012 at 11:37 AM   
Filed Under: • planes, trains, tanks, ships, machines, automobiles •  
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Oh, and here's some kind of visitor flag counter thingy. Hey, all the cool blogs have one, so I should too. The Visitors Online thingy up at the top doesn't count anything, but it looks neat. It had better, since I paid actual money for it.
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