Viking Ships: Longboats and the Sacred Sea
The Viking ship is simultaneously a technological achievement, an art object, and a sacred vessel. The longship ( langskip ) — clinker-built, shallow-drafted, symmetrical (capable of sailing in either direction), its prow often carved in the form of a dragon or serpent — was the instrument of the Norse world's radical expansion between approximately 790 and 1100 CE: to Iceland, Greenland, North America, the British Isles, France, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and Constantinople. But the ship was not merely a tool of movement. In Norse cosmology, the sea was a domain of chaos and power between the ordered worlds; to cross it was to pass through the realm of possibility, to risk the transformative encounter with the unknown. The greatest Norse leaders were buried in their ships — the Gokstad burial (c. 900 CE) and the Oseberg burial (c. 834 CE), discovered in Norway in the 19th and early 20th centuries, are two of the most extraordinary archaeological finds in Scandinavian histor...