I didn’t have my password with me earlier, so didn’t post sooner, but I think that bondoman is probably along the right track - the Gokstad ship was found in a funerary context, so the shield arrangement could well have had funerary, religious, or other ritual significance.
I have decided to paint (decal) my shields in a yellow and black theme. I am taking it a step further by adding designs. For example, yellow with a black dot, black with yellow cross, quarters with yellow and black, etc. I think it will highlight the all brown boat and still add a bit of variety.
The shields were tied to the gunwales. My thought is the two shields protected the oarsman as they headed towards shore. Once there he would take one with him to battle.
I’ll have to look at my references, but my recollection is that there could easily have been two rowers per oar, which would make it one shield each.
Again, I would not generalize too much from the alternating colours on the Gokstad ship, especially given the funereal-ritual nature of its deposition.
Above all, it is important to recall that shields are not thought to have been a ship’s equipment, but the crew’s equipment, for use on land or sea.
Given Northern European military traditions that predated the Vikings by at least a thousand years, and the apparent lack of evidence that the Vikings were organized or drilled along anything comparable to Roman lines, there is a very good chance that the warrior-crew of a longship would have displayed their individuality with their shields.
Landstrom gives a good description of the size of longships in the Viking era. Each space between deck beams was called a room. Each room comprised a pair of oars. Each oar had one oarsman. He suggests that the crew sat either on loose benches or chests, neither of which are in the ship finds, in that position.
The “old law books” classify the ships as usually 20 rooms, but often twentyfive or 30. Beyond that the very largest Drakkar were 32 or in single instances each 34, 40 and 60! rooms. The distance between oars in the Gokstad ship was 38 1/2" (hats off to the carpenters for accuracy!). The Revell ship is 16 rooms, I believe because it is a second generation copy of the Gokstad ship.
So a ship of 20 rooms was about 100 feet long, and the supposed largest would have been 260 feet long! The Gokstad ship has 16 rooms. The Drakkar might have had 32.
I suspect a great deal of misinformation is involved in all of the actual recreations, except for the several found.
For certain a ship on a raid would not have sailed with shields outboard. These ships could sail and even beat to windward and had no thwarts,a low and working freeboard and would have been quite wet.
The sailors were not normally at the oars, most probably huddled on the higher side of the ship. The excavated ships are full of racks, tent frames and other temporary structures that seem to me to suggest a lot of spar and oar storage.
I cannot find reference at all to ship vs. ship battles. These were shore raids, and as such would probably have been in stealth, not against castles or fortified positions. I personally do not see the need for a shield row as protection. Even in 1066 the Normans landed and did battle on dry land.
I also think that while it is frustrating that we can’t find a picture of the Gokstad shields, in all probability they were in the same category as the dogs, horses, kitchen ware, etc. sent to meet Odin with the occupant; more ceremonial than useful.
Landstrom has a beautiful (surely) drawing of a ship under sail, with a wealth of detail. As I mentioned, the beitass is rigged on the lee side to the end of the yard, the sail is a billowy square with leather crosshatch, the lower corners of the sail are belayed fore/ aft, the yard has double rigging, there is a deep single rudder, there is a prominent strake on the stern, an iron anchor over the bow. She has one thwart board, no shields overboard, but also no crew so who can say where he drew the line with his knowledge.
Many of the eighth and ninth century Goteborg stone drawings of Norse ships show a hull with a right angle at the keel to stern and bow posts, at least in overall profile. Which would have been a more stable sailing ship, and I suspect that may have been an added strake feature at least at the stern for longer voyages.
Also he draws some very fine blocks which beggar verbal description but are certainly not what we are accustommed to.
I guess if I were to model a 16 room ship on a raid, I would expect either a ship before the wind at full sail, no prow figures mounted, and the crew taking protection from the weather in a tent at the stern; or, not under sail, under oar, no doubt muffled with sacking, sail struck and the yard stowed, with a raiding party assembled in the middle, armed, helmed and brandishing unlit torches and their shields. And dragon head fitted.
On pp.21-22 of his book Armies of the Dark Ages 600-1066, Ian Heath discusses Viking fleets, ships, and crews, and writes that there were 2 men per oar in Scandinavian vessels. He also suggests that typical raiding fleets numbered from 10-35 ships. In his book The Vikings, Heath clarifies on p.10 that there was normally one man per oar, but that rowers could be doubled-up when battle was likely.
On p.31 of The Vikings, Heath writes that the Vikings’ battles amongst themselves mostly took place at sea, e.g. Hafrs Fjord (872), Svoldr (1000), and Nissa (1062). In this sort of battle, they would seem to have tied several ships together, to make one large platform. Obviously, the crews would have picked the shields up and used them.
As for shore raids, I suspect that much of the North European coast was relatively undefended. Indeed, given the likely delays for militias to muster, etc., there is no obvious reason why the Vikings should need to have raided by night.
Good points- I’ll look for those books too. I was free associating a little there, but from experience half the year it’s day all the time and the other half night all the time.
Skol!
Hi Guys,
Sorry I’ve ben away for a few days, Gee I mis all the fun. Another BB member sent me some spare cleats so I have all the parts I need. I sent a request for the decal sheet to Revell Germany, So I would expect that in a few weeks. I’ll probally do my model in darker earth tones on the hull and a light shading on the deck/mast.
Jake
Here’s a relevant thread from another web forum, with some inspirational photos: http://modelshipworld.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3490&postdays=0&postorder=asc&&start=0
Regarding the number of oarsmen working each oar - I can’t recall having seen any reliable pictures of Norse vessels with more than one guy at each oar. But there’s no reason it couldn’t have been done. The ships didn’t have permanent benches; if another guy pulled up his sea chest, he could grab hold of the same oar his buddy was pulling. On the other hand, if we use the Gokstad Ship as an example (which, as we’ve established, is dangerous), doubling the number of men on the oars increases the crew to at least sixty-five men (assuming everybody on board is working an oar, plus one to work the tiller). Sixty-five guys in a ship with an overall length of seventy-six feet are going to get mighty well acquainted with each other. I’m not sure the ship could carry enough food and fresh water to keep them alive for a lengthy voyage. But I guess they could have tolerated a trip from, say, Norway to northwest Germany well enough.
A somewhat related point: Some time back I bought a DVD copy of the 1958 movie “The Vikings.” It contains some beautiful shots of full-size replica ships, clearly based on the Gokstad Ship, sailing and rowing in the Scandinavian fiords. The DVD edition features audio commentary by the director, Richard Fleischer. He notes that the movie company based the replicas on the real thing - including the spacing between the oars. But when the 20th-century extras got on board to practice rowing, they discovered the oar ports were so close together that the guys couldn’t swing the oars sufficiently. So they left alternate oar ports empty. (That, at least, is what Mr. Fleischer says; it’s not obvious in most of the shots.)
The movie is worth watching. The plot is pretty juvenile, but Kirk Douglas and Ernest Borgnine make wonderful Vikings - and Tony Curtis is suprisingly believable. And nobody wears a helmet with horns on it. (For a really juvenile version of the Vikings, take a look at the Robert Wagner movie “Prince Valiant.” Bring a barf bag. “The Long Ships,” with Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier - both of whom really should have had better things to do - isn’t much better.) The scene wherein Kirk Douglas’s ship comes back to the fiord, after having succeeded in kidnapping Janet Leigh off an English cog, is priceless. Kirk - who refused to use a stuntman for the scene - pulls the old, genuine Viking stunt of running along the looms of the oars, outside the gunwale. He makes it the full length of the ship once, then tries it again - and missteps and, with a truly memorable splash, falls in the water. That wasn’t in the script. According to Mr. Fleischer’s commentary, when they fished Kirk out the first words he said were, “did you get all that on film, or do I need to do it again?” Fun stuff.
Part of Heath’s estimate may have been based on some calculations that he did using the recorded numbers (and sizes) of vessels in a fleet vs. the recorded complement of that fleet. IIRC, it worked out to be more than two men per oar overall.
Note that most voyages were probably not of the epic crossing-of-the-Atlantic sort, and that they could well have put in to shore for water and/or to launch a strandhogg (a quick, impromptu raid) for supplies. Again, I would not be surprised if the Vikings followed something like the ancient Mediterranean sea tradition of coasting - sailing by day and putting into shore for the evening, even if they may have remained at sea for a few nights in a row. In fact, one small Viking fleet was found encamped on a river island in Carolingian territory, but there was not much that the Carolingians could do about it.
In a more sustained invasion rather than raid, the Vikings would draw their ships up onto shore and built banked ditches and palisades around them.
Despite the legendary (and, as the performance of the various replicas has established, very real) seaworthiness of the Viking long ships, it seems that they actually didn’t sail far out of sight of land for more than two or three days under normal circumstances. The epic Norse voyages to Iceland, Greenland, North America, and Constantinople almost certainly were made not by long ships like the Gokstad Ship, but by considerably more chubby, fully-decked vessels that were built for carrying cargo and people over long distances.
This thread has been so inspirational that yesterday I went through the family DVD collection seeking our copy of “The Vikings,” with the intention of spending a blissful evening watching Kirk Douglas falling into the fiord, getting his eye clawed out by a hawk, getting impaled on Tony Curtis’s sword - and finally, of course, getting immolated with his ship. (Some folks have all the fun. Incidentally - I don’t know where the legend about Viking chieftains getting burned up in their ships got started, but so far as I know it has little or nothing to do with reality.) Then I discovered that my wife had absquatulated with the movie in order to show it to her high school world history class. [BH] She’s promised to bring it home Monday.
A friend of mine married a young woman who brought to the marriage her beloved, 1970s-vintage Oldsmobile sedan. My friend kept trying to get rid of it, on the grounds that it was (a) a gas hog, and (b) falling apart. But his wife resisted all efforts to either sell or trade the thing. He eventually announced that he was going to give her the modern equivalent of a Viking funeral: lay her out on the back seat of the Olds and point it down I-64 with the cruise control set. At least that’s what he told me; I’m not sure she ever heard about the idea.
In another web forum I read about a ship modeler whose modeling friends, after his remains were cremated, dumped the ashes into a model of a Viking ship, shoved it out into the middle of the local pond, and touched a match to it. Now that’s the way to go, folks.
This thread is going downhill. I’d better shut up and go to bed.