The Vikings: Their Life

If you want to learn about Viking life, not just the myth, then what's the best way to do it?

I'd argue not to see exhibitions like the one at the British Museum (as described earlier) but rather read this book.

Vinland by George Mackay Brown is a classic and sums up for me what life must have been like in Orkney around the time of the first millennium, of sailing with the Vikings to Iceland, Greenland, Vinland and Norway. Of the transition from fighters to farmers, from Norse gods to Christianity.

And the life story from boyhood to old age of Ranald Sigmundson.

I also got a glimpse of the Viking's beliefs when in Greenland. Surrounded by emptiness we were watched by a raven, and seeing that familiar bird so far from civilisation was rather spooky.

I really could understand how the Vikings could have believed they were sent by the gods, for what other reason could there be for seeing it in such a remote place?

The Vikings: their ships

In the previous post I mentioned a disappointing Viking exhibition at the British Museum. Ok, it might be that Viking navigation is a specialised subject, but their boats really are core to their identity. What did this exhibition do?

Alas, rather than having a real boat - or even a reconstruction - it had the framework of one made out of metal.

I remember seeing the Sea Stallion in Dublin a few years ago. It's a replica Viking boat that really sails, and in fact crossed the North Sea on a voyage around Scotland and down to Dublin.

Seeing a real boat was so much more than the shell in the British Museum, the smell and feel of its wooden planks, and hearing about the valuable experience of actually being out at sea. The sailors learnt it was faster to windward rowing than sailing, and that the steering mechanism could (and did) fail.

It was a story that would be familiar to W. Hodding Carter who wrote about a similar breakage of their steering oar in their reconstruction of the Vikings discovery of America in his book "Viking Voyage".

The physical presence of the boat together with these lessons are much more informative than a metal frame, however large.

But the biggest impression I have ever had from a Viking boat is when I was on-board the smaller Helge Ask which visited London in 2012. The experts showed me round and then shook the boat from side to side to show its flexibility.

It was really remarkable how the timbers flexed, waves travelling down the boat, alive completely unlike a rigid metal frame.

It would be even better actually to go out to sea on one: not sure how to arrange that but I spotted that the Viking Ship Museum in Copenhagen has that option.

One to add to the travel list...

The Vikings: Navigation

Recently Tillerman posted a comment asking how the Vikings navigated? It was a topic I had meant to address a couple of years ago when there was a British Museum exhibition about Vikings.

However the exhibition had been a major disappointment, and one of the reasons for that was it ignored topics like this one.

So how did the Vikings navigate?

One key tactic was to follow a line of latitude, which means head due east or west - and hence know where south and north are.

On a clear night the Vikings would have been able to see Polaris, but in the summer months that far north there was often no darkness, as we found when we sailed to the Arctic Circle.

During the day they could use the length of the sun's shadow if they had created a sun-dial for that latitude and month, but that didn't help on cloudy days.

So they must have had to rely on natural navigation methods, such as using glimpses of sun to measure the wave direction and use that to keep a constant course.

Other techniques were summed up in the phrase on how to reach Greenland from Norway:

From the west country sail west but keep far enough north of Shetland so that the islands are barely visible in clear weather. Stay far enough south of the Faroe Islands so that the steep, high mountains are just halfway up over the horizon. And stay far enough south of Iceland that you can't see land, but you can just about see coast-bound seabirds.

As we were to find out, that is an incredibly useful navigational instruction.

We too saw the Faroe islands from afar (see photo above) and that could indeed be used as a gauge of latitude.

What's more we spent time observing the birds, counting the numbers at the end of each hour of our watches, and we could determine the distance from the coast simply by the number and types of birds we saw.

It would be have been nice to read something about that in the British Museum exhibition, maybe see the writing quoted above or an example sundial but alas no, nothing....

Oslo: The Viking Ship Museum

The first museum went to in Oslo was the Viking Ship Museum. I chose to go here first as was afraid it would be over-run with tourists (or to be honest, other tourists) and indeed it was, with a car park full of big coaches from a visiting cruise-ship.

However it was pretty spectacular, with three Viking ships: Oseberg (above & below, built around 820 AD), Gokstad (built about 900 AD) and Tune (not so well preserved).

The Oseberg and Gokstad were buried as graves and a lot of objects found from those and other graves were on display, including these animal head posts from the Oseberg find:

It was all fascinating and there was also a interactive film of the Vikings life which was fun though it was weird to hear about the raids on Britain from the Norwegian side. We, after all, were remembering those that killed the innocent, burning homes and monasteries, looting and raping their way across the North Sea.

History as seen by the other side - how very topical!

There was also a film about Viking navigation, but it was one of two films and the audio alternated between English and Norwegian which meant would have to wait half an hour to hear it in full so left for the next maritime related museum...

The British Museum's disappointing Vikings Exhibition

What's the first thing you think about when someone says "Vikings"?

Long ships maybe? Axes or swords? Explorers? Traders? Discovering Vinland? Raiders of everywhere between Britain and Constantinople?

Well according to the British Museum what you should think of is broaches, for there're a lot of them in this extraordinarily boring and disappointing exhibition about Vikings.

Of course there's not just broaches, there are also clothing clasps, bangles, cups, combs and even horse stirrups.

I mean silly me, wanting to see one of those Viking navigation tools, the sunboards they used to cross the North Atlantic Ocean. What really mattered was their broaches.

Yes there is the great long ship (above) but its a metal shell for a few planks. Even the Evening Standard's Brian Sewell - not known as a sailor - had a long, long list of questions that were unanswered:

We cannot tell how it sat on the water, where the oarsmen were — were they aft, their weight keeping the prow high? Nor how many men there were, where they slept, where they kept their stores or stowed their booty. Was it in any way decked? Where could a Byzantine Emperor have dined? Could it be beached, or did it require a harbour? What were it colours? How big was its sail?

That could be why he called the exhibition a disaster. He wasn't alone in being disappointed - The Guardian felt equally let down.

I really can't find a reason to recommend you go apart from the fact that if you get a ticket to one of the late sessions you can wander round the Great Court nearly empty of people:

Even after being open for over a decade it still impresses.

Unlike this exhibition.

Book Review: Hodding Carter's A Viking Voyage

I took A Viking Voyage to Greenland and that turned out to be a very good choice.

Not only did it involve sailing in similar waters (actually west rather than east coast of Greenland) but also it was a fantastic read.

But to top it all their adventures seemed at times to be echoing ours:

• Bad weather forces them to shelter in a fjord - check
• Ice bergs scrape off hull - check
• Have to get a tow - check
• Spot a polar bear - check
• Have stewed whale - check

The book recounts how W. Hodding Carter, fascinated by the Vikings and intrigued by the story of how they "discovered" America decided to re-enact Leif Eriksson's voyage from Greenland to Newfoundland, in a replica boat.

The best thing is that he doesn't hold back and tells it warts and all, and the book is certainly the better for it. The trials and tribulations of building the boat are nothing to the problems they have when their rudder fails in the middle of the Davis Strait, causing an ignominious rescue by the Canadian Coast Guard.

It was certainly a tough voyage, not just weeks but months spent in an open boat (!) above the Arctic Circle where rains and winds are not gentle. It was an all male crew and there were times of beer and fart jokes, but maybe that make the reconstruction all the more accurate. The descriptions of the crew are well rounded, making them feel like real people.

All in all a rollicking good sailing yarn that sounds true in all senses of the word. I found myself rationing chapters and wishing it was longer.

So that's a hearty roar of approval with two Viking axes held up high.

The raven and the glacier

The next anchorage was D'Aunay Bugt, where the yacht felt insignificant against a landscape of glaciers and mountains (above, the boat is BR).

Here we stayed two nights, with two good hikes. The first was up to the ridge that was meant to overlook the other inlet marked on the chart. But it seemed to have been clogged with gravel, the bar high and dry, apart from a rushing river fed by another glacier.

We were inspected by a raven, which flew round us, squawking a greeting:

In the barren landscape this sign of life was startling and we could see why the Vikings considered them messengers of the gods.

The next day we hiked to a glacier. In the crisp, clear, Greenland air it seemed so close and yet it took all day to reach its base, scrambling over a rubbish tip of giant boulders:

We gingerly tried to walk on its surface but the edge was a mixture of mud and slush that dissolved like quick sand under foot, leading to many metres of mud slide slipping downwards.

Disturbed by these signs of instability and aware of the long trek back to the boat we went no further, but headed down again passing patches of beautiful purple flowers:

Here we found that Siggi had put out the net and caught something just right for our good appetites: fresh Arctic char.

The Viking ship Helge Ask

One of the highlights of Denmark's National House at the 2012 London Olympics was the lovely Viking ship called Helge Ask (coincidently the Denmark team is as I type entering the stadium for the opening ceremony of the Paralympic games).

She is based upon a ship that was scuttled along with four others in the Roskilde Fjord near Skuldelev in order to protect that market town of Roskilde from attack. Back in the sixties the boats were recovered and treated and now are on display at the Viking Ship Museum at Roskilde.

The Helge Ask was built using authentic tools, techniques and materials including pine, birch and oak wood, wool, flax, grease, tar, ochre, horse hair and walrus skin.

The wood was not sawn but split so that it kept the natural strength -it was also not dried so is much more flexible.

What was amazing was one of the two Viking experts over in London stood at the stern and shook the boat so that it oscillated from end to end. The amount of flex was astonishing, she really was able to move to an incredible extent and you could imagine her at sea bending as each wave went under.

The Helge Ask is not a full sized longship that could cross the North Sea, but rather one that could be used in the coastal waters of the Baltic.

One of the Viking experts had sailed such a larger longship, the Sea Stallion, all the way to Dublin where I had a chance to see her first hand (blog post here). I was very envious of his experience, but it did sound rather hard, given the lack of shelter. 

Those Vikings were certainly tough and also, as was shown by the Helge Ask, skilled boat builders too.

The museum sounds really interesting and worth visiting - especially as there're meant to be opportunities to go out sailing in one of their boats. 

Definitely on my list of things to do next time I'm in Denmark.

Book Review: Vinland

Where Ackroyd disappointed there was one book both of us really enjoyed and could relate to while sailing those northern waters.

Its author, George Mackay Brown, was not someone either of us had heard of but Tristan picked it up in the small bookshop in Kirkwall, Orkney.

I'm guessing he's deeply unfashionable with those that value the latest linguistic innovations, convention breaking style or paradigm changing literature, nor those that like twists and cliff-hangers.

It has a plain, straight-forward approach to story telling, where plot points are well sign-posted and language is used simply and cleanly, as in the opening two sentences:

There was a boy who lived in a hamlet in Orkney called Mannavoe. The boy's name was Ranald.

The book tells the story of Ranald from childhood to grave. Mostly he lived on Orkney but he travelled as a boy across the wide sea to Iceland, Greenland, Vinland and Norway, and in later years to the south.

It is set in the time when the Vikings were settling down, converting from their pagan gods to Christianity, when there was conflict as to who should control Orkney between three of the ruling Earl's sons, and between their allegiance to Scotland or Norway.

While there is politics and battle this is ultimately something else, the author's spiritual vision coming through, though not overpowering or distracting.

It felt right to be reading it while sailing those waters north of Orkney that the long ships roamed across a thousand years ago, written quietly yet capturing the spirit and tone of those sagas.

A gem.


Picture from: Amazon.

Book Review: To the Lands of the Vikings

This book describes Trevor and Lesley Hodgson's voyage across the Atlantic the hard way, the way the Vikings did it.

Starting at Hull they cross the North Sea to Norway before heading west, first to the Shetlands and the Faroes, then Iceland and Greenland to finally arrive at Canada and in particular Newfoundland.

As they go they keep an eye out for remains of Vikings travels and places they mentioned in the sagas, and in particular those relating to the early voyages of discovery to Vinland.

It was clearly an amazing voyage undertaken by an adventurous retired couple who clearly are experienced sailors and have a good boat, Symphony.

However if it were me I wouldn't have written it in the present tense, as that becomes disconcerting to the reader after a while. It could also use a bit of trimming and more photos - plus it would be useful to have some dates, just to get an idea of the time of year they reached each location.

But I certainly enjoyed learning about life on those cold dark northern seas, as Trevor and Lesley sailed in the wake of the norsemen.

Sunday Short 1: Vikings Go Home!

The Viking boat I saw in Dublin is heading home! It's meant to be stopping off in Portsmouth - but think am off sailing that weekend.

You can follow its progress via a Google Map mashup here.

Wreckers and Vikings

Couple of good programs on the BBC covering maritime history recently.

On the 5th January there was a 90 minute program covering the voyage of a reconstructed Viking ship, Sea Stallion, from Denmark across the North Sea, around the top of Scotland, then down the Inner Hebrides to Ireland. The destination was Dublin, a city founded by Vikings many centuries ago.

It was a very cold and wet crossing with very cramped conditions: about a square metre of deck space per crew. The boat wasn't great into the wind - nearest it could get was about 60 degrees - and in trials they found they could get 2 knots rowing into the wind against just 1 knot sailing. You can read about the Sea Stallion here and there's lots of clips from the BBC Timewatch documentary here.

Today there's just been another such program, this time about the history of wreckers around the coast of Britain. From the Scillies, to the Cornwall coast, to the Goodwins Sands, to far north of Scotland, wrecked boats have been plundered in their hundreds if not thousands over the centuries.

The law was often counterproductive: the boat was only considered wrecked if all were dead. Hence it was in the interest of the scavengers to kill - or at least not give much aide - to the survivors.

It was a rather grizzly story of poverty driving crime, completely lacking the gentle humour of Whisky Galore, but still fascinating. More here.