4 - Ships and Sailing

Summary

And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea.

MELVILLE

Our image of the Viking Age is dominated by the viking ship. Some of the most spectacular archaeological finds of the period are of whole or partial ships, whether from burial mounds (Oseberg, Gokstad) or dredged out of harbours (Skuldelev, Hedeby). The archaeological finds symbolise the importance of ships to the viking project – Scandinavian success in raiding, trading and settlement depended on their skill in building and sailing ships. Research into the viking ship has gone beyond the recovery, preservation and reconstruction of the found ships into the recreation of viking ships using new materials but often the old methods, copying the surviving originals. Such artefactual and practical research has made use of knowledge gained from the later Scandinavian boat-building tradition, but has not neglected philological evidence. However, this philological evidence has been used eclectically, so that saga descriptions and modern terms from Icelandic or the mainland Scandinavian languages have been given equal weight (Foote 1978, 61). The post-Viking Age material is so rich, the Viking Age evidence so meagre, the continuity of boat-building traditions so strong, that it has seemed (and probably is) justified to use the evidence in this unchronological way. But to my knowledge there has not been a comprehensive study of nautical terminology closely focused on the Viking Age linguistic evidence. Falk's classic study (AnS) ranges more widely than that in its coverage, making extensive use of saga-evidence, limited use of skaldic evidence, and none at all of runic evidence. And since he wrote in 1912, there is a wealth of new archaeological evidence and experience to which this material can be linked.

This chapter will provide an exhaustive account of the linguistic evidence from skaldic poetry and, to a lesser extent, from runic inscriptions, relating to the construction and use of ships in the late Viking Age. The aim is not to deny the importance of later linguistic evidence, or evidence from other language groups, or indeed the evidence of the ships themselves over the last thousand or more years.