Longship
Longships were long clinker-built warships propelled by oars, and later also by sail, used by the Norse and surrounding Germanic tribes from at least the 4th century AD and throughout the Viking Age, being part of the Nordic ship building tradition. As the name suggests, they were long slender ships, intended for speed, with the ability to carry a large crew of warriors. They are sometimes called "dragonships" due to a tradition of the fore and aft ends being decorated with a raised dragonhead and tail respectively, with the sail making up the "wing" of the dragon. The largest types were thus called "dragons", while smaller types had names such as [|karve], snekke, and [|skeid].
Archaeological finds have been made of longships from the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries in Denmark, Norway and Germany, with motifs on Gotlandic picture stones dating to the 8th century or earlier. It is thought that the Norse specifically invented the design for Viking usage, which included raiding and warfare, exploration and commerce. The longship is a rather distinctly Norse construction, with bronze age petroglyphs in Sweden indicating a long tradition of building long animal-headed naval ships in Scandinavia. Equivalent clinker-built naval ships by the Wends were much smaller and shorter in comparison.
The principles leading to the longship's design evolved over a long period of time. A big technological advancement came around 300 AD, when clinker-building was invented, as seen in the Danish Nydam boat and Swedish Björke boat, both from around 320 AD, with their features being subsequently adopted in the ships of other cultures, including those of the Anglo-Saxons, as seen in the 7th century Sutton Hoo ship. They continued to influence naval engineering for centuries, and the character and appearance of these ships have been reflected in Scandinavian boat building traditions to the present day. The particular skills and methods employed in making longships are still used worldwide, often with modern adaptations. They were all made out of wood, with cloth sails, and had various details and carvings on the hull.
History
The evolution of shipbuilding in Scandinavia was facilitated by development of the iron industry. There was a great increase in iron production in the later Viking Age with the exploitation of bog ore as a source of iron ore to smelt into metal for iron tools, including farm implements and weaponry, as well as shipbuilding tools. With this technology, and the ready availability of nearly unlimited timber in the vast forests of Norway, the Norsemen acquired a high degree of skill in boat construction. Scandinavians developed the shipbuilding, navigation, and seamanship capabilities needed to exploit the undefended ports and coastlines of continental Europe. They became its foremost maritime people and the Viking Age began with Norse overseas expansion.The archaeologists Julie Lund and Søren M. Sindbæk cite a dataset generated by a reconstruction of annual summer temperatures over the past 2,000 years that indicates a distinct warming trend in the 8th and 9th centuries, reviving earlier hypotheses that a milder climate was an impetus for the expansion of Norse maritime activity and colonization. Neil Price proposes that the maritime raiding practices which constitute what he calls the "Viking phenomenon" may have begun earlier than ordinarily believed, and beyond the environs of the North Sea. He argues that recent finds such as the Salme ship burials from c. 750 suggest that raiding might have originated in the Baltic region, especially in the east.
The Norse had a well-developed naval architecture, and during the early medieval period, their ship designs were advanced for their time. The ships were owned by coastal farmers, and under the leidang system, every section in the king's realm was required to build warships and to provide men to crew them, allowing the king to quickly assemble a large and powerful war fleet. The historians David Bachrach and Bernard Bachrach say that Viking longships were part of a long tradition of oared warships operating in the northern seas. The main purpose of their warships was to "land troops rather than to engage in combat at sea", and to swiftly carry as many warriors as possible to a scene of conflict. In the 10th century, longships would sometimes be tied together in offshore battles to form a steady platform for infantry warfare. However, examples of more traditional naval combat also exist, such as the Battle of Svolder, where various projectiles and bow and arrow were used, as well as naval boarding.
The Viking longships were powerful naval weapons in their time and were highly valued possessions. Archaeological finds show that the Viking ships were not standardized. Ships varied from designer to designer and place to place and often had regional characteristics. For example, the choice of material was mostly dictated by the regional forests, such as pine from Norway and Sweden, and oak from Denmark. Moreover, each Viking longship had particular features adjusted to the natural conditions under which it was sailed.
During the 9th-century peak of the Viking expansion, large fleets set out to attack the declining Frankish empire by attacking navigable rivers such as the Rhine, the Seine, the Loire and others. Rouen was sacked in 841, the year after the death of Louis the Pious, a son of Charlemagne. Quentovic, near modern Étaples, was attacked in 842 and 600 Danish ships attacked Hamburg in 845. In the same year, 129 ships returned to attack the Seine. They were called "dragonships" by enemies such as the English because some had a dragon-shaped decoration atop the bowstem.
On 1 October 844, when most of the Iberian peninsula was controlled by the Emirate of Córdoba and was known as al-Andalus, a flotilla of about 80 Viking ships, after attacking Asturias, Galicia and Lisbon, ascended the Guadalquivir to Seville, and after a brief siege and heavy fighting, took it by storm on 3 October. They inflicted many casualties and took numerous hostages with the intent to ransom them. Another group of Vikings had gone to Cádiz to plunder while those in Seville waited on Qubtil, an island in the river, for the ransom money to arrive. Meantime, the emir of Córdoba, Abd ar-Rahman II, prepared a military contingent to meet them, and on 11 November a pitched battle ensued on the grounds of Talayata. The Vikings held their ground, but the results were catastrophic for the invaders, who suffered a thousand casualties; four hundred were captured and executed, some thirty ships were destroyed. It was not a total victory for the emir's forces, but the Viking survivors had to negotiate a peace to leave the area, surrendering their plunder and the hostages they had taken to sell as slaves, in exchange for food and clothing.
In 859, a major long-distance Viking expedition set out for al-Andalus. They tried to land at Galicia and were driven off. Then they sailed down the west coast of the peninsula and burned the mosque at Išbīliya, but were repelled by a large Muslim force there before entering the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar and burning the mosque at al-Jazīrah, following which they headed south to the Emirate of Nekor in modern Morocco, plundered the city for eight days, and defeated a Muslim force that attempted to stop them.
The Vikings made several incursions into al-Andalus in the years 859, 966 and 971, but with intentions more diplomatic than bellicose, although an attempt at invasion in 971 was frustrated when the Viking fleet was totally annihilated.
Development
Pre-historic ships
The origin of the longship design can be traced back to the Nordic Bronze Age, as various ships of similar principle can be found on period petroglyphs around Sweden. Such show various features later found on longships, such as having raised stems fore and aft, sometimes decorated with what appear to be animal heads.The Hjortspring boat, a vessel designed as a large canoe, closely resembles the thousands of petroglyph images of Nordic Bronze Age ships found throughout Scandinavia. Dating to the 4th century BC, it was found in a bog in southern Denmark. About long and wide, the boat is the oldest find of a wooden plank-built ship in the Nordic countries. A large array of weaponry, including shields, spears, and swords, was found with the boat.
Rowed longships
The earliest rowed true longship that has been found is the Nydam ship, built in Denmark around 400 AD. It also had very rounded underwater sections but had more pronounced flare in the topsides, giving it more stability as well as keeping more water out of the boat at speed or in waves. It had no sail. It was of lapstrake construction fastened with iron nails. The bow and stern were slightly elevated. The keel was a flattened plank about twice as thick as a normal strake plank but still not strong enough to withstand the downwards thrust of a mast. The ribs were selected from timber that had grown to the specific shape, and were lashed to the planks with lime-bast rope through raised "cleats" on the inside that had been shaped from the solid timber.A later development of this style of ship is the Sutton Hoo ship, found in an Anglo-Saxon grave in Sutton Hoo, England, dating to around 620. The Anglo-Saxons were at this time very cognate to the Norse, and the finds in the grave shows a close relation between these cultures. Albeit completely rotted away, the remnant shape in the earth shows a low prow and stern like the Nydam ship, with a total length of.
The Kvalsund ship, one of two vessels found in a Danish bog, was built in the late 8th century. According to the dendrochronology research team led by Sæbjørg Walaker Nordeide, a specialist in Medieval archaeology, the Kvalsund ship is a link in the transition from the ship technology of the early Iron Age to that of the Viking Age. They say that based on dendrochronological dating of the wooden remains, the trees used to construct the two vessels are estimated to have been felled at the end of the 8th century, ca. 780–800, dating the vessels to "the threshold of the Viking Age". The ship, known as Kvalsund II to distinguish it from the boat that was found with it, is estimated to be long and wide, with 10 pairs of oars. A mast was found, but it is not known to which it belonged.