5 - The Crew, the Fleet and Battles at Sea

Summary

This song for mariners and all their ships.

whitman

The skaldic praise poems, with their focus on the leader and his often grandiose ambitions, frequently refer to the organisation of large fleets of warships, and this will be discussed below. For information about the crew and command of individual ships, we need to turn primarily to the evidence of runic inscriptions, which usefully commemorate a different class of person from the eleventh- century kings celebrated in skaldic poetry, with their great fleets and major battles, providing evidence of a range of vocabulary to do with the different roles and functions on board ship.

Manning a ship

The owner

Whether the types of people commemorated in late Viking Age runic inscriptions belonged to a class of ship-owners is difficult to say, as the evidence is minimal. Three runic inscriptions certainly refer to the owners of ships: two of these indicate that the ship was jointly owned, while one was owned by a single man. D 68 commemorates Qzurr saxi, a man who is said to have been the félagi of those remembering him (see discussion of this word in the next chapter), but the inscription states that he owned a ship with another man, who is not one of the commissioners. In D 335, on the other hand, the commissioner of the monument owned a ship together with the man he is commemorating. The same man commemorates his brother in D 334, who is said to have died in the north í víkingu (see ch. 2 on this word). Since both rune stones form part of a composite monument with a mound and five other (non-runic) stones, it is quite likely that all three men participated in a joint expedition. The fact that the brother is not mentioned as having been a part of the joint ownership arrangement is not conclusive: it is equally possible, either that he was, for instance, too young or poor to co-own the ship, and went along as crew, or that his joint ownership with his brother was such a normal thing that it was not considered necessary to mention it in the inscription.