Aina Margrethe Heen-Pettersen, a specialist in Viking Age archaeology, says a substantial social and economic investment was demanded to build and outfit a ship for expeditions. Estimates derived from experimental archaeology show that building a longship may have required the labour of 100 persons for a year, counting that necessary to produce the needed ropes, sails, and iron. Assuming 12-hour working days, as many as 40,000 work hours would be expended. Equipping, crewing, and feeding a fleet also needed considerable resources. A master shipwright called the "hofudsmidir" (
hǫfuðsmiðr) McGrail says building the ships required a large number of workers, with various skills and levels of expertise.
Long Serpent (
Ormr inn langi) was built for Olaf Tryggvason at
Trondheim in 998 or 999 by a team with these job descriptions: labourers, tree fellers, general carpenters or plank-cutters ("filungar"), and stem-and-stern wrights or "stafnasmidir" (
stafnasmiðr). who were paid twice the wages of plank cutters. The
stafnasmidir shaped the keel and the carved those stems that were decorated artistically, while the
filungr used axes and adzes to cleave the planks. In one scene of the Bayeux tapestry a man, almost certainly a
stafnasmidir, is depicted standing in front of the stem of a boat, inspecting the workmanship and checking that its lines are fair. The average speed of Viking ships varied from ship to ship, but lay in the range of and the maximum speed of a longship under favorable conditions was around . The
Viking Ship Museum in Oslo houses the remains of three such ships, the
Oseberg, the
Gokstad and the
Tune ship. Ole Crumlin-Pedersen writes that the Viking warship was differentiated from the merchant ship by its long continuous deck and the long line of oar ports, the deck being made of loose planks placed in grooves in the sides of the cross-beams. The fore and aft ends of the deck were raised slightly—the foreward end was called the
stafn-lok and the afterward was called the
lypting. This was not what would be considered a deck in modern times. It was little more than a raised floor, and it offered no shelter from foul weather. Although oak is a heavy timber, it can be easily worked by adze and axe when green (unseasoned). Generally large and prestigious ships were made from oak. Morten Ravn, a curator and researcher at the
Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, says the skaldic stanzas describe which wood species were used to craft a specific type ship or ship component. Pine (Old Norse:
fura) and
fir (
þella), maple (
hlynr),
ash (
askr), and
linden or lime (
lind), are noted, but especially oak (
eik).
Eik and
eikikjǫlr (a keel made of oak), are used in referring to well-made ships. The size of the mast,
vandlangt (long-masted), is also used to define a high-status ship. According to Angelo Forte, a maritime historian, Viking shipwrights used timber that had been recently cut, and may have immersed it in water to make it flexible enough to bend in the shape of the hull. They took advantage of the natural shapes of tree trunks, branches and roots to form those parts required for a ship's construction. These are very strong because they are aligned with the tree's fibres. Tall, straight trees were most suitable for working into masts, keels, and planking for the hull. The forestem and sternpost would be carved as single pieces from curved trunks. Forked branches were made into floor timbers, and curved ones were made into
frames. The natural bend where a trunk joined a root was optimal for fashioning into
knees, used as braces to stiffen the joint between two pieces of timber fastened at angles to each other. Boatbuilders chose a log with a branch that had the correct shape. Generally made from a straight piece of timber and fastened using a knee in each side of the hull,
biti were the cross beams that functioned as the rower's seat. They are an essential part of the frame—a bite with its floor timber, knee and
futtocks is the stiffest joinery in the boat. Timber was worked with iron
adzes and axes. Most of the smoothing was done with a
side axe. Other tools used in woodwork were hammers, wedges,
drawknives, and
planes.
Sail, mast, and rigging According to the archaeologist Ole Thirup Kastholm, curator of the Roskilde Museum, sails and rigging, for the most part, are not represented in the archaeological record. These primary components of a functional sailing ship are known only by negative impressions on hulls, contemporary representations of ships, and detached objects. The historian
F. Donald Logan says the sail of the Gokstad ship was rectangular in shape or nearly a square of possibly , and that it was made of
rough wool cloth (
vaðmál), probably striped or checked, and hung from a yard. Lines were attached from the bottom of the sail to points along the gunwale, allowing the ship to
reach (sail across the wind) and to
tack (sail towards the wind). Logan says that the mast of Gokstad ship, for example, has not survived in its original state, thus its height and the height to which the sail was raised are not certain. However long the mast was, apparently between , it was set into the
keelson, a heavy wooden housing on the keel amidship, from which it could be removed as necessary. The nautical archaeologists Cooke
et al describe how, with the aim of reconstructing sails to rig replicas of four of the Skuldeleve ships from Roskilde Fjord, the Viking Ship Museum initiated research in the archaeological record and in the literature to define its specifications for weaving the fabric. Because woollen square-sails had been used until the 20th century in Scandinavia and in the
Faroe Islands, a good deal of practical information about making them was still available, and a few sailmakers who worked in wool were still alive. The museum began its research into woollen sails in 1977, and in the years afterwards several reconstructions of Viking Age ships were outfitted with wool sails. According to the museum, it appears that three types of weave were used to produce wool sail cloth in Viking times, depending on the available resources and the local traditions of the area where it was made. The museum decided to use 2/1 twill (
tuskept) for the weaving of the wool sail for its reconstructed ships, basing this decision on the only available archaeological material, fragments of heavy woollen sailcloth dated to the mid-13th century found at
Trondenes church in Norway. Willow
withies, or
osiers, were also required for attaching rigging to the hull and securing the rudder to its frame. MacGrail says the consensus among modern scholars is that
cordage in Early Medieval times was made from the
bast of
linden trees or possibly from
hemp. In situations where extra strength was needed, ropes were made from seal, whale, or walrus walrus hides cut spirally. McGrail says the whale skin and seal skin ropes described by
Ohthere to
King Alfred were 60
ells, or 15
fathoms long. Jørgensen says ropes made of walrus hides were renowned for their strength.
Pine tar was used to preserve organic materials such as the wood of boats, ropes, sails and fishnets. File:Smiss I picture stone 2.jpg|Smiss I picture stone, showing the rigging of a longship File:Fornsalen - Bildstein - Schiff.jpg|
Hunninge Image Stone, showing the rigging of a longship File:Bildsten med skepp 800-1099 Tjängvide, Gotland.jpg|
Tjängvide image stone, showing the rigging of a longship
Rudder Viking ships were steered by a long rudder (
stýri) fastened to a cylindrical piece of oak wood that according to the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde was called a
rorvort. It was mounted on the outside of the hull on the starboard (steer-board, from Old Norse
styrbord) quarter of the vessel. Nicolaysen, the excavator of the Gokstad ship, gives the Old Icelandic terms for the rudder and its different parts mentioned in the Icelandic sagas. He says the rudder (stýri) on Scandinavian vessels had since ancient times a fixed position forward of the sternpost, on the right side of the vessel, thus the name "starboard" (
stjórnborði), while the opposite side to the left of the helmsman, was called the
bakborði. The helmsman had behind him an upright wooden
bulkhead (
hǫfða-fjǫl) made from a forked piece of oak standing across the beam. The tiller (
stýrisdrengr)
stýrisstöng (rudder-post),
hjalmunvǫlr (lit. helm-pin) was stuck in a square hole in the upper part of the neck. File:Skepp på bildsten Ardre, Gotland.jpg|
Ardre VIII picture stone, showing a longship with rudder File:Bildsten med skepp, Smiss, Gotland.jpg|GP 280 När Smiss I picture stone, showing a longship with rudder File:Picture stone from Stora Hammars, Lärbro, Gotland, Sweden (9142133248) (cropped).jpg|
Stora Hammars I picture stone, showing a longship with rudder
Anchors . The construction of this anchor—made of Norwegian iron— has several advantages when anchored in deep waters or in rough seas. The anchor and its cable were essential parts of a ship's equipment. As described by Crumlin-Pedersen, anchors could be made of wood weighted with stone (
stjóri) or of iron with a wooden stock (
akkeri). The anchor from the ship-grave at Ladby on the island of
Funen in Denmark was found well preserved in the bow of the ship. It is long and wide and attached to a chain which is estimated to originally have been ca. long. It was shaped like a modern-day anchor but had smaller
flukes. The anchor weighed only , but the length of iron linked chain attached between it and the anchor line provided a spring that helped damp out the snatch of the rope in a swell, and prevented its being abraded on the stones of the seafloor.
Ship builders' tools The
Mästermyr chest, a jointed Viking Age tool chest made of oak and found in Gotland in Sweden, contained blacksmithing and woodworking tools. Recent research suggests that it was lost during transportation in what was possibly a lakeshore environment at the time. A farmer found the chest in 1936 while plowing a field. Many tools from the Mästermyr find are part of an exhibit at the
Swedish History Museum. The wood-working tools have previously been interpreted as boat-building and fine carpentry tools, based on the fact that similar tools are used in traditional carpentry nowadays. The tools include
augers,
scrapers, draw knives, axes, adzes, wedges, sledge hammers, and planes, along with a rivet iron for forging ship's rivets. Christer Westerdahl, a field archaeologist and ethnologist, calls the unknown owner of the chest an "itinerant boatbuilder and smith" who may have lost or sacrificed his complete toolkit. Writing on the process of the working of wood in the period when Viking ships were built, Forte describes the contents of a 13th-century Norwegian treatise,
Konungs skuggsjá, which lists the tools used by
shipwrights of the time. These include broadaxes, augers, and gouges, but no saws. He notes that the
Bayeaux Tapestry contains a scene that shows the construction of a ship from the felling of trees for its timber to its
fitting out. The scene depicts men using axes to fell trees, cut branches, and cleave planking for the hull. An axe with a longer blade and a shorter handle is shown being used to shape the planking.
Adzes, a
router plane, and a bore are also shown, but again no saw is in evidence. Some of the planks of the Skuldelev vessels had distinct axe cuts, and possibly adze cuts as well. The smooth cutting marks and occasional gouges left by planes are visible in the wood worked during the ships' construction. The marks left by routers, drawknives, and scrapers are apparent. Drilled holes are also to be seen. Seán McGrail writes that woodworking tools excavated in a number of Viking Age burials demonstrate that Viking shipwrights used a wide variety of handtools. He says inspection of these tools, of toolmarks found on the wooden remains of Viking boats, and of boatbuilding scenes portrayed by artists of the early Middle Ages, such as on the Bayeux Tapestry, indicate that the premier Viking Age shipbuilder's tool was the axe. The craftsmen who used the tools were so skilled that they commonly performed the final dressing of oak planks with axes. The planks of the ships in the Skuldelev finds were finished with a
drawknife, and adzes apparently were used to shape some curved surfaces. Hammers and mallets, knives, gouges, wedges, and chisels were often employed, while holes were bored with a bit inserted in a T-shaped handle. == Legacy ==