Viking wreck (11th century AD)
viking wreck (11th century AD)
This page contained additional material and resources for Chapter 7 of my book A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks.
The 11th century AD Roskilde ship, the largest Viking longship ever excavated and the focus of my chapter, has gone on a voyage over the last decade probably longer than it ever travelled in its lifetime – from an exhibit in the National Museum of Denmark to the British Museum and Berlin, and then across the Atlantic to Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Edmonton. The British Museum exhibit in 2014 was accompanied by a 90 minute film entitled ‘Vikings Live’ that you can watch for free on the museum website. Hosted by Michael Wood and Bettany Hughes, it features interviews with the exhibit curator, Gareth Williams, the then-director of the museum, Neil MacGregor, and other experts, as they walk around and examine artefacts – including the ship – in the exhibit. I cannot recommend this too highly for anyone reading my chapter who wants more on the Vikings, with some of the most important and fascinating Norse artefacts on display.
My own Viking voyage of discovery took place as I was researching my novel Crusader Gold, which follows the Norwegian prince Harald Hardrada from being captain of the Emperor’s bodyguard in Constantinople to his fateful encounter with King Harold of England at Stamford Bridge in 1066 and then into uncharted fictional waters beyond. In Istanbul I saw the runic graffito scratched by a Viking named Halfdan into a marble balustrade in the great church of Hagia Sophia; in Kiev I went to the riverside district where the Norse coming down the Dnieper in their longships traded with the Rus and with Byzantine and Arab merchants who had come up from the Black Sea. I went to Stamford Bridge and to the sites of Norse raids in Scotland, including Iona, and then across to the Norse settlement of L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. I had already travelled by sea along the area of Norse settlement in Greenland and in northern Baffin Bay, an experience that kindled my fascination with Norse seafaring and the extent of their exploration in the Arctic and along the North American coast – still a matter of great debate.
You can find out about L’Anse Aux Meadows at the Parks Canada website here, about recent research on the Norse walrus trade on the University of Cambridge website here and about Norse artefacts at their most northerly known location in the Canadian Arctic here.
I am very grateful to Tilde Yding Abrahamsen of the National Museum of Denmark for giving permission to publish the image of the Roskilde ship in the book.
Click on the images to enlarge:
The 11th century AD Roskilde ship as reconstructed for the 2013 National Museum of Denmark exhibit, with the keel and surviving parts of the lower hull visible (CC BY-SA, John Lee, The National Museum of Denmark).
A page from the Parker Chronicle, the text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle held in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge - my college, where I was able to see and handle the Chronicle as a graduate student. In the entry for AD 787 mid-way down the second page you can see the first-ever reference to a Viking raid in British waters - ‘This year King Bertric took Edburga the daughter of Offa to wife. And in his days came first three ships of the Northmen from the land of robbers. The reve then rode thereto, and would drive them to the king's town; for he knew not what they were; and there was he slain. These were the first ships of the Danish men that sought the land of the English nation’ (as translated by James Ingram in his edition of 1823). In the extract at the bottom from that entry you can see the telling - and terrifying - words: scipu deniscra monna, ‘ships of the Danish men’ (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 173: The Parker Chronicle).
‘Sommernat under den Grønlandske Kyst circa Aar 1000’, Summer in the Greenland coast circa the year 1000, by Carl Rasmussen. This beautiful painting arose from personal experience - Rasmussen visited Greenland in 1870-1 and made sketches that he later turned into paintings, this one having been completed in 1875 and exhibited in Copenhagen the following year. It gives a vivid impression of the rough seas of the southern Denmark Strait and the Labrador Sea, with icebergs that would have been calved off the glaciers in western Greenland - conditions that would have been experienced by the first Greenlanders to sail west towards ‘Vinland’. Rasmussen died at sea while painting, after being swept off a boat in 1883 between Orkney and Shetland (private collection, image in public domain).
Illustration from the 19 August 1893 issue of Scientific American showing the Viking at the Chicago World’s Fair. Based on the Gokstad ship, the first great discovery of a ship burial in Norway - found in 1880, some 23 years before the Oseberg ship - the Viking sailed across the Atlantic and arrived to great acclaim at New York, before making her way via the Erie Canal and Great Lakes to Chicago (you can read a contemporary account in the 1893-4 issue of the Chautauquan here). Ironically, at a fair officially titled the ‘World Columbian Exposition’, designed to celebrate 500 years since Columbus ‘discovered’ North America, the Viking proved that Norse longships could have sailed across the Atlantic five hundred years before Columbus - something that was to be confirmed archaeologically with the discovery of the Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland in 1960.
Map showing the extent of Viking settlement and exploration at the time of the Roskilde ship, which lay beneath the red arrow that I have added to this map. To the north-west of Greenland, the furthest northerly Viking artefacts to be discovered lay beyond this map off Ellesmere Island at a Thule site - possibly brought there through trade or raiding or salvaged from a wreck. To the west, the land of ‘Hop’ described in the Vinland Sagas may be the coast of present-day New Brunswick on the west side of the Gulf of St Lawrence. Viking exploration along the eastern seaboard of the United States is a matter of speculation and has yet to be substantiated archaeologically (Simon Netchev, World History Encyclopedia, Creative Commons License).
The 9th century AD Oseberg Ship under excavation in Norway in 1904, with the carved prow clearly visible (UniMus: Kultur, Norway).
The reconstructed prow of the Oseberg ship, in the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo (Mårten Teigen, UniMus: Kultur, Norway).
My brother Alan Gibbins photographing the Norse rune in Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, showing its context on a marble balustrade overlooking the nave of the church - a place from which the Varangian Guard might have watched proceedings below (photo: David Gibbins).
The Norse rune being photographed by my brother Alan in the previous image. Roughly translated, it probably reads ‘Halfdan was here’, and may have been made by a member of the Emperor’s Varangian Guard about the 10th or 11th century (photo: Alan Gibbins).
I took this photo in 2004 off western Greenland looking towards Upernavik, part of the archipelago that includes the island of Kingittorsuaq (which we had passed earlier that morning while it was still dark) - site of the most northerly Norse artefact to be discovered in Greenland. This gives an idea of the conditions that the Norse would have experienced in the most northerly waters that they are known to have explored along this coast - and my visit was in August, when the sea was clear of sea-ice and relatively navigable.
The Kingittorsuaq runestone, found in 1824 on the island of that name near Upernavik, western Greenland. Translated into Old Norse, the runes can be read as ‘Erlingur the son of Sigvat and Bjarni Þorðar's son and Eindriði Oddr's son, the washingday (Saturday) before Rogation Day, raised this mound and rode...’ Rogation Day was 25 April, suggesting that the men must have overwintered in the islands as it would not have been possible to sail that far north from the Norse settlements in Greenland until summer. It is the furthest northerly evidence for the Norse in western Greenland and may date to around the early 14th century AD, by which time the walrus on which the hunters depended for ivory - for export to Scandinavia and Europe - may have become depleted by over-hunting, forcing the Norse to go further north to find them. Length 6.5 cm (National Museum of Denmark).