The Vikings

by Robert Wernick

  For all its fanciful detail, the spirited tale reflects the historical fact that sometime around 872 - almost a hundred years after the Lindisfarne raid - Harald Fairhair established the first centralized rule over the disparate settlements scattered throughout the hills and valleys of Norway, wresting from dozens of chieftains their lands and their time-honored independent authority over local provinces. In the near century that had elapsed since the plundering of Lindisfarne, the wide-ranging Viking ships had brought home more than booty from their expeditions abroad. Together with silver and gold came Christian fashions of cropped hair and centralized government.

  The saga does not end there. It only begins. Some of the nobles - too proud to bow to Harald and loving life too much to resort to the funeral mound - found another way of evading Harald’s unwelcome aspirations. They loaded their ships with their wives, children, followers, cattle, slaves, and household goods and sailed across the sea and settled on new land. And, indeed, archeologists can date the arrival of Viking colonies on the Shetlands, the Orkneys, and Iceland to the last third of the ninth century - the exact moment when Harald Fairhair was consolidating his power as king of Norway.

  Typical of the bondi who raided, invaded, and colonized abroad was one Egil Skallagrimsson, the tenth-century hero of a popular saga. His raiding expeditions were carried out pitilessly. The saga is a series of jubilant accounts of triumph over the weak and the gullible.

  Egil was “exceeding ugly and like his father, black of hair,” says the saga. Notwithstanding that disclaimer, the eye of the Viking beheld him as a thing of beauty. He was a fearless fighter, a loyal friend, a colossal toper, who could empty one ox horn full of ale after another without passing out, and a daredevil who could keep his wits about him in the worst of predicaments.

  Right from the beginning he showed promise. He learned to drink wine when he was three and committed manslaughter at seven. In a tiff over a ball game with a boy named Grim, “Egil became wroth and heaved up the bat and smote Grim,” killing his playmate, according to the saga. Servants and relatives came up with loud cries, and, before the altercation was over, seven men were dead. Egil’s mother, clearly the perfect helpmate for a Viking male, pronounced her son to be “of Viking stuff” and said that “as soon as he had age thereto,” the family should fit him out with “fleet keel and fair oars to fare abroad with Vikings” and “hew a man or twain.”

  He was only twelve when the desire of his mother’s heart was granted. In due course, he was to be found leading Viking expeditions across the far seas. Coming ashore with a dozen followers in a region known as Kurland in modern Latvia, Egil scoured the countryside, slaying people at will and filling his ships with spectacular hauls of treasure. But an adventure would be no adventure at all without narrow escapes, and Egil had plenty of those.

  In a clash one night with a Kurland farmer and a troop of followers, Egil and his comrades were overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers and taken prisoner. The farmer wanted to kill them all on the spot, but his son, a bloodthirsty lad, argued that it would be more pleasing to wait until morning when they could see the look on the faces of the men as they were being tortured. The farmer agreed, and the prisoners were fettered and thrown into an outbuilding while the Kurlanders went off to a victory feast.

  Egil’s massive hulk had impressed his captors, and they had bound him hand and foot to a sturdy, upright post. But as soon as he and his friends were left unguarded, he used his strength to twist and tug at the pole until he was able to yank it out of the ground and work his way free from it. He untied the ropes on his hands with his teeth, and then he unshackled his feet and freed his companions. They began to explore the property. In another building, they heard cries from under their feet, pried loose some boards, and discovered three Danish Vikings who had been taken prisoner during a raiding expedition the year before and had been kept as slaves on the farm. With these new recruits to guide them, Egil and his men found their way to the Kurlanders’ treasure room and stripped it bare.

  The men thought they had had enough adventure and profit for one day’s foray, but Egil objected that it was not warrior-like to slip away in the dark: “We have stolen the farmer’s property, and he does not know it. Let us return to the farmstead and tell people what has been going on.” The men ignored him and went back to their ship.

  Egil returned alone. Coming upon a fire, he picked up one of the logs, carried it to the hall where the Kurlanders were carousing, and thrust it under the eaves of the roof. The roof caught fire, and boards began falling on the banquet table. As the building burned, most of the befuddled Kurlanders died where they sat. Those who tried to push their way out the door fell under Egil’s axe. When they were all dead, Egil marched back to the ship and claimed and got the lion’s share of the booty.

  He then moved on, making additional and always profitable raids along the way on the coasts of Denmark, England, Holland, Norway, and Sweden. Finally, as the years passed, even Egil began to feel old and tired and returned to a farm in Iceland, where he took up the life of a wealthy bondi on his land.

  He lived on to be a feeble, crippled, blind old man, huddling by the fire, ignored by his family, scolded by cooks and servant girls for getting in their way. But the Viking fires burned on in Egil to the end. He went out riding one day with two slaves and his chests of silver. He came back alone and never said a word of what had become of the slaves or the silver: Probably he had buried them all.

  Later that year, Egil died and was buried with his weapons. Generations passed, and some outsized human bones were dug up and were widely believed to be Egil’s. The skull was remarkably large and heavy. It was set on a churchyard wall, and someone decided to test its hardness by swinging at it with the backside of an axe. “But the skull neither dented nor split,” relates the saga. “It only turned white, and from that anybody could guess that that skull would not have been easily injured by the blows of small fry when it still had skin and flesh on it.”

  Such was the stuff of the Vikings.

  Alongside the brooding forested slopes of Trondheim Fjord in the year 998, King Olaf Tryggvason ordered the construction of what he intended to be “the best and most costly ship ever made in Norway.” She was called the Long Serpent, and the name was aptly chosen. This greatest of dragon ships was to extend more than 160 feet from her curved, monster-headed prow to her identically curved and serpentine tail. She was designed to hold thirty-four oars on each side, and she could carry hundreds of Vikings into battle. The bow and the stern were to be elaborately carved and gilded. The sails would be richly dyed, and brightly painted shields would hang on her sides.

  Vast oak forests then covered much of southern Norway, but King Olaf’s men had to search far and wide to find a tree tall and straight enough to provide the trunk that would become the massive, 145-foot keel of this awesome ship. It took a small army of Viking shipwrights to procure the materials: splitting well-seasoned logs so that each plank was grained for maximum strength; searching out naturally formed oak and spruce elbows and arches for the ship’s ribs and struts; turning spruce roots into tough, naturally fibrous ropes to bind the shell and frame together; fashioning iron rivets and nails, wooden pegs or tree-nails, and walrus-hide thongs.

  With all in readiness, construction began on the hull, starting from the great keel up. The task of carving the beautifully curved stempost and sternpost was entrusted to a skilled prowwright called Thorberg. Once these were in place, the planks would be added, each one placed above the last. But before the process of planking got under way, Thorberg was called back to his farm on urgent personal business. When he returned to the shipbuilding weeks later, he saw that the planking had been completed. To his dismay, he discovered that the journeymen carpenters - awed by the magnificent dragon ship’s size - had planked her with boards so thick that the ship would be much too heavy and clumsy in the water: The whole project would be a disaster.

  King Olaf, unaware of this crucial flaw, was ad
miring the sleek, towering lines of the huge warship as she stood in the stocks. And everyone said that never was seen so large and so beautiful a ship of war. Thorberg said not a word. The next morning, the king came to take another look at his masterpiece and fell into one of the flaming rages for which he was so well known. During the night, someone had gone up and down one side of the ship, cutting deep notches in all the planks. The masterpiece was ruined, raged Olaf. “The man shall die who has thus destroyed the vessel out of envy,” he cried, “and I shall bestow a great reward on whoever finds him out.”

  Then up spoke Thorberg, the prowwright: “I will tell you, king, who did it. I did it myself.”

  “You must restore it all,” swore the king, “to the same condition as before, or your life shall pay for it.”

  As the king stormed off, Thorberg picked up his axe and began chipping away at all the thick planks. He trimmed them down until their surfaces were even with the deepest of his notches. When King Olaf and his men came back and examined the shaved side of the ship, they were amazed and delighted.

  As both Thorberg and Olaf well knew, the first principle of Viking ship building was lightness and flexibility. The thinner the planks, the lighter the boat; the lighter she was the less water she would draw so she could maneuver in shallow waters where heavier craft would most certainly run aground. Thinner planking also meant that a vessel’s sides could be built higher so that she could ride above taller seas - and so that Viking warriors aboard could hurl their spears down upon lower, more vulnerable vessels.

  There were other advantages to thin planking. With a lightweight but durable shell, a Viking ship could flex in the ocean waves like a slim leaf. The keel could bend up and down by as much as an inch, and the gunwales could twist as much as six inches out of true without doing any damage to the ship. This would enable the hull to bend to the waves and slide through them with the least amount of resistance, making the ship faster and more stable. In the most favorable wind, a typical Viking ship could reach speeds of well over ten knots. And clearly, the Long Serpent could do even better.

  For a man like King Olaf, who had led war bands most of his days, these were matters of life or death. He recognized the wisdom of Thorberg’s alterations and ordered the prowwright to cut down the other side of the ship, too. He then appointed him master builder for the entire project. Ever afterward, Thorberg proudly bore the nickname Scafhogg, or “Smoothing Stroke,” and the mighty Long Serpent became the most famous dragon ship of all.

  A terror to the outside world, the Viking longships - the biggest among them called dragons - were a source of justifiable pride to Norsemen. At a time when the majority of men and women in the West lived and died within walking distance of their birthplaces, when travel was slow and dangerous, Vikings seemed to skitter over the globe like water birds over a pond, appearing when they were least expected, disappearing when they chose. They could do this because, unlike the other peoples of Europe in the early Middle Ages, they understood the sea and the power that mastery of the sea could provide. Out of their primordial fjords and silent forests, endless waterways and wave-swept islands, they were born to the sea and were soon seaborne - amphibious by nature and destined to become the quintessential seafarers of their age.

  “The Danes,” observed an early medieval chronicler, “live in the sea.” It was hardly an exaggeration, and it applied as well to the Swedes and the Norwegians. Long before they developed ships that were capable of traversing oceans, the Scandinavians depended upon the sea for food - fishing for cod, haddock, mackerel, sardine, tuna, and whiting. They ventured out ever farther from shore in their dugouts and skin boats and wooden craft of strange new shapes. And eventually dominance of the sea was theirs because of the sheer brilliance of their ship designs - and because of their ingenuity in devising different navigational methods.

  The earliest Norse ships appear in rock carvings dating from about 1500 B.C. The usual high-curved stem and stern of Scandinavian double-enders are clearly visible in these carvings, the inevitable result of the Vikings’ having to negotiate the violent seas of the North. This form of double-ender, which was a uniquely Scandinavian design, permitted smooth handling of the ship even with a mountainous sea because the force of the waves was divided by the stern as easily as it was by the bow, and the stern then lifted - keeping the craft from being pooped and possibly overwhelmed.

  Although some of the earliest Bronze Age boats in northernmost Scandinavia were sewn together from skins stretched over oak frames, another building technique appears to have been in use at the time in southern Norway. This was a peculiarly Norse creation, with the shell made not of skins but of thin wooden planks lashed together by withies - finely drawn, sinewy spruce roots. At first, this wooden boat was constructed with no keel, because the added strength provided by a keel was not necessary when the ship was just being rowed through the comparatively sheltered waterways and fjords, on the vast lakes, or through the endless archipelagoes of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. This lightweight craft could be beached easily, or she could be taken far up shallow rivers. Because of her high stem and stern, she could also venture out through the surf and across vast bodies of water, such as the Baltic or the Skagerrak during the better summer months. But for hundreds of years, she could go no further. The Norsemen had not yet devised sails, and about two days were as long as the weather was expected to remain calm enough for rowing.

  This prototype of the longship exhibited several other shortcomings. She was too narrow, which gave her a dangerous roll, and the sides were not high enough to give her sufficient freeboard for heavy North Atlantic swells. Without a keel, she was difficult to control. In strong wind or a strong current, even the best oarsmen would be quickly exhausted trying to keep the ship from broaching in a storm. Thus, until the advent of the Viking Age, this ingenious vessel remained a powerful weapon for local blood feuds and a vehicle for coastal trade, but nothing more.

  It was only during the seventh century that the Norsemen learned how to build and sail a longship: to take the finely hewn, neatly wrought prototype, incorporate a keel into it to increase directional stability and thrust, set up a sturdy mast, raise a single full-breasted sail, and drive her forward beyond the horizon and into the vast expanse of the unknown ocean.

  The critical addition was the sail, and how the Vikings acquired it is a mystery. The Roman Empire, with its sophisticated square-rigged merchant ships, had collapsed centuries earlier as the Dark Ages fell upon Europe. But it is possible that Scandinavian coastal traders observed crude sailing vessels inherited by the Frisians from the Romans, whose empire once abutted theirs on the North Sea, or that Norse overland traders reaching the Black Sea admired the rigging of the Arab dhows that they observed there.

  But the Viking sail was so rare that it might well have been developed in isolation. For a typical ninety-foot longship, the mast measured a stubby thirty feet - short enough to be lowered easily into two or three crutches fixed amidships, well out of the way during a landing or a battle at sea. The sail, to make up for what it lacked in height, was cut in an exceptionally wide rectangle - up to forty or fifty feet across in a typical longship, perhaps more than seventy feet for the Long Serpent. It was hoisted aloft on a main yard and sometimes was footed to a secondary yard at its base. For efficiency when running before the wind, the sail would usually be spread by two whisker or spinnaker poles, spars fitted into sockets in a pair of blocks mounted on each bulwark just forward of the mast. When the ship was sailing across the wind or into it - and Viking longships, by all accounts, sailed well into the wind - only one of these whisker poles would be used.

  The sails themselves were woven of coarse wool and in two layers to add strength. Their color was predominantly red - sometimes solid, sometimes patterned in diamonds, squares, or stripes - the better to declare one’s existence to friends. Great power could be obtained from these sails. But when they were wet they became extremely heavy, and, in storms or in fluky winds,
they could be difficult to maneuver and actually deadly: Even a burly Viking chieftain could be knocked from his feet. The Norwegian King Eystein, for one, was toppled off his longship and drowned by a wildly swinging yard from another boat that was sailing alongside.

  At the same time that the Norsemen began stepping masts and rigging sails, they also began building oak keels into their ships for the additional strength required to take the stresses of ocean travel and the driving force of the mast under sail. The keel was T-shaped. Experience had shown that such a keel cut the water and helped the helmsman maintain a steady course through difficult seas. Because Vikings needed to beach their boats and to fight in shallow waters as well as to cross oceans, they kept their keels shallow, but made up for that by extending them from stem to stern.

  The Vikings also devised a remarkable rudder. A stubby, modified steering oar, it was fixed to the starboard quarter of the craft on a large block of wood pegged so the oar would turn as a lever turns on a fulcrum. The helmsman used a tiller bar. Since the Norse word for steering board was stjornbordi, the rudder lent its name to the starboard, or right, side of the boat.

  No longer confined to their own coasts, producing ever-larger, beamier, more weatherly longships - their sides planked higher to keep them dry while they crossed the storm-tossed North Sea - the Norsemen were at last loosed upon the world.

  So much were the ships a part of their self-image that the Vikings decorated and caparisoned each longship to manifest wealth, rank, and power - at once impressing their friends and allies and awing their enemies. When a fleet of longships commanded by King Sweyn Forkbeard prepared to set sail from Denmark to invade England in 1013, a chronicler fell into Homeric rhapsody over the sight of so many ornately carved and gilded vessels: “On one side lions moulded in gold were to be seen on the ships, on the other birds on the tops of the masts indicated by their movements the winds as they blew, or dragons of various kinds poured fire from their nostrils. Here, there were glittering men of solid gold or silver nearly comparable to live ones; there, bulls with necks raised high and legs outstretched were fashioned leaping and roaring like live ones. The sides of the ships were not only painted with ornate colors but were covered with gold and silver figures. The royal vessel excelled the others in beauty as much as the king preceded the soldiers in honor of his proper dignity. Placing their confidence in such a fleet, when the signal was suddenly given, the warriors set out gladly and, as they had been ordered, placed themselves round about the royal vessel with level prows, some in front and some behind. The blue water might be seen foaming far and wide, and the sunlight, cast back in the gleam of metal, spread double radiance in the air.”