CHAPTER ELEVEN

VIKING SHIPS AND THE SEA

Jan Bill

G

eography has made shipbuilding and seafaring essential for the Scandinavians
throughout history. In a landscape where the waterways offered much more ready
communication lines than most of the inland, boats and ships were fundamental tools
for survival and societal development. It was the presence of water – the many straits
and fjords, and the ready access to the coast almost everywhere – that distinguished
Denmark from the Continent and made it part of Scandinavia. State formation was
dependent on ships, as only with ships some degree of control could be exercised over
the populated, coastal stretches of Norway and Sweden, and over the archipelagic
Denmark.
At the same time, ships were easy to build in Scandinavia as the primary resources –
wood for hulls, iron for fasteners and wool for sails – were locally available or produced
within the region. Ships could be, and were, built almost everywhere. Scandinavia was
therefore well positioned to develop maritime power at an early point in history, because
ships and seafaring played such a large role in the everyday life of much of the popula-
tion. And southern Scandinavia, placed on the threshold between the Baltic and the
North Sea, was also compelled by geography to play a role, as east–west trade started to
emerge in the early Middle Ages.
Ships and seamanship are thus central issues to study if we want to learn about the
Vikings, both at home and abroad; but they are reflections of what happened, not the
reason for it. The changes that we see in shipbuilding during the Viking Age are not
revolutionary, they represent improvements and adaptations to new uses rather than
inventions. Still, or therefore, ships are valuable sources. They represent concrete
material responses to needs that were important enough to be met with massive invest-
ments. Experimental archaeology has shown that building a 30 m longship may have
taken as much as 40 , 000 working hours, including production of iron, ropes and sail,
but excluding transport costs (Damgård-Sørensen et al. 2004 : 44 ). Assuming a twelve-
hour working day and a surplus production rate of 10 per cent, this means that to build
such a ship one should command the surplus production of 100 persons for one year.
Manning and sailing the ship was an even larger challenge. Taking it to sea for four
months meant that 70 men were taken away from production and had to be fed.
Calculated as above, this would require one year’s surplus from 460 producers – which