research on viking ships

Viking ships

Viking ships are the most important symbol of the Viking Age. They once sailed the seas and rivers, bringing people and countries together.

Digitally reconstructed Viking ship from the film "The Vikings Alive", which is shown continuously in the Viking Ship Museum. Photo: Storm Studios.

The Viking Ship Museum on Bygdøy houses three of the world’s best preserved Viking ships. All three were found in large burial mounds from the Viking Age.

The ships were used on voyages before being reused as burial ships for very special members of society’s power elite.

The Viking Age started in around the year 750 CE and lasted until around 1050 CE. The Vikings’ homeland was today’s Scandinavia, a region where the sea was both an important resource and a highway.

The Vikings also established new trading places, where traders from around the world brought in goods. At the same time, they brought their own jewellery, weapons and customs out into the world. The voyages and the Viking ships were a favourite motif in both the Norse saga literature and in modern tales of the Viking society. But the Vikings' journeys and encounters with other cultures and societies, laid the foundation for the great changes in society during the period.

The Viking Age was a dynamic time. For more than 300 years, society underwent major changes and new opportunities arose for excursions, expansion, settlement, trade and looting. At the beginning of the Viking Age, small kings fought for power and the Nordic kingdoms did not yet exist. During the Viking era, the nation states arose, cities emerged, new trade routes were established and Christianity replaced the Norse religion. The journeys provided new perspectives and opened up to redefine the world.

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The Ages of Exploration

Viking ships.

Quick Facts:

The Viking ship was a strong durable ship that allowed the Norsemen of Scandinavia sail long distances and raid far away kingdoms.

Date : 700-1100AD

Floki Vilgerdarsson

Floki Vilgerdarsson Viking ship {{PD-Art}}

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Viking ships were very versatile. Both of their two main styles of ships fared well against the dangers of open sea travel as well as on the narrow rivers of the foreign lands they were raiding. This versatility allowed the Vikings to explore lands as far west as Canada, as far east as Russia, and as far south as Africa!

Legends about the Viking Age present Vikings as ruthless invaders, but their culture and history were far more complex. In the 6 th Century BCE the Vikings did begin to raid the monasteries on the coasts of England and, after finding their campaigns to be successful fundraisers, they continued their pillaging in France and Russia. In the 9 th century, the Vikings began to sail farther west, eventually coming to the land they named Vinland, which is now known as Newfoundland in Canada. There is even archaeological evidence of trade between the Vikings in Scandinavia and the inhabitants of Africa and Asia! The Vikings’ marine success was due, in large part, to the seaworthiness of their ships. These ships were very versatile, allowing the Vikings to sail on the open sea as well as the narrow rivers of the European mainland. The Vikings were the best ship designers of their time, and much like the Phoenicians they were master navigators and sailors.

The Vikings used two main types of ships for these expeditions. The first was known as a drakkar , or “longship,” designed for carrying raiding parties. The longship had a single sail and mast, which were removable for storage, and carried oars that the crew used to propel the ship forward. The hull also assisted in the smooth sailing of a drakkar . It was designed to be flexible, so that it would move with the waves instead of against them. The head of a dragon, horse, or swan was usually sculpted onto the bow. The Vikings also mounted their shields along the side of the vessel to have them ready in the event of an attack. These ships were likely the ones used in the raids in England and France.

The second kind of ship was known as the knörr , meaning “halfship”. The halfship was a merchant ship used for carrying cargo such as cattle, wool, timber and wheat. It was a bulkier vessel, with a wider and deeper hull than the longship, holding between 70 and 100 people. Ornate decorations signifying different aspects of Viking culture and the Norse religion and mythology were typically carved into the sides of these ships. Unlike the longship, the knörr carried fewer oars, and these were used for docking only. The mast on a knörr was a permanent part of the ship and could not be removed. These types of Viking ships were probably close to the ship on which Leif Eriksson traveled to North America.

Vikings used their ships with care. They followed the seasons, venturing out to sea in the spring and returning to the safety of home at the end of autumn. They put a lot into creating strong durable ships and became the masters of the Northern Atlantic.

Waldman, Carl, and Alan Wexler. Encyclopedia of Exploration, Vol. 1-2. New York: Facts On File, 2004.

Weaver, Stewart A. Exploration: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Sawyer, P.H. Kings and Vikings: Scandinavia and Europe AD 700-1100. London: Routledge, 1984.

Villiers, Capt. Alan. “Vikings and Longships, Scourge of Northern Seas,” in Men, SHips and the Sea. Washington DC: National Geographic Society, 1962.

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Crossing the Maelstrom: New Departures in Viking Archaeology

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• Published: 15 May 2021
• Volume 30 , pages 169–229, ( 2022 )

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• Søren M. Sindbæk 2  

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This paper reviews the achievements and challenges of archaeological research on Viking Age northern Europe and explores potential avenues for future research. We identify the reemergence of comparative and cross-cultural perspectives along with a turn toward studying mobility and maritime expansion, fueled by the introduction of biomolecular and isotopic data. The study of identity has seen a shift from a focus on collective beliefs and ritual to issues of personal identity and presentation, with a corresponding shift in attention to individual burials and the “animated objects.” Network ontologies have brought new perspectives on the emergence of sea trade and urban nodes and to the significance of outfield production and resources. Field archaeology has seen an emphasis on elite manors, feasting halls, and monuments, as well as military sites and thing assembly places, using new data from remote sensing, geophysical surveys, geoarchaeology, and metal detectors. Concerns over current climate change have placed the study of environment as a key priority, in particular in the ecologically vulnerable North Atlantic settlements. Discussing future directions, we call for alignment between societal/economic and individual/cultural perspectives, and for more ethically grounded research. We point to diaspora theory and intersectionality as frameworks with the potential to integrate genomics, identity, and society, and to ecology as a framework for integrating landscape, mobility, and political power.

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Introduction

Whether we think in terms of exchange and mobility, gender, violence, migration, political evolution, ethnicity, or cosmology, the Viking Age is a focus of recent debates in archaeology. Today, studies of this period are equally invigorated by a range of new conceptual explorations as well as scientific approaches. Viking Age research also attracts attention as a globally known topic in popular history and is claimed as a historical heritage by diverse groups—from nationalists to internationalists, capitalists to environmentalists, atheists to neo-pagans. Yet, this reception serves as much to distort recognition of a period that holds genuine importance as a transformative historical trajectory.

The cultural and political transformation of northern Iron Age societies in the centuries following the dissolution of the Roman Empire along with the consequences of maritime expansion following the widespread adoption of sailing vessels make the Viking Age a lynchpin of developments across much of northern Europe. From the first documented maritime raids and explorations in the North Sea and on the Baltic shores shortly before AD 800, seafaring Scandinavian armies were a prime political concern in western Europe by the mid-ninth century. The following century saw Scandinavian communities settle and maintain trading networks that stretched from England, Ireland, and Atlantic Scotland to Normandy and European Russia, along with settlements in Atlantic Scotland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. This process culminated in the establishment of colonies in Greenland and ventures into Newfoundland shortly before AD 1000. Meanwhile, societies in Scandinavia experienced profound changes, including the creation of larger and more powerful kingdoms and the adoption of Christianity, especially from the mid-10th century onward. While the military and political roles of Scandinavians waned after the mid-11th century, Scandinavian (or Norse) diasporas maintained a strong cultural presence in coastal areas into the high Middle Ages, and the Viking Age remained a cultural memory expressed by sources such as the Icelandic sagas and Skaldic poetry.

This paper explores changes during the last decade in the archaeological analyses of Scandinavia and the wider Viking world during the Viking Age (c. AD 750/800–1050). Our aim is to review trends and tendencies, not to make an exhaustive list of research on the period. Viking Age archaeology refers to Scandinavia, parts of northern Germany, and the North Atlantic islands, including Iceland and Greenland, as well as to diasporas in western Europe, Ireland, the British Isles, and even as far west as Newfoundland. Furthermore, the activities of settlers, traders, and travelers of Scandinavian origin have been studied in Polish, Finnish, Baltic, and Russian areas as part of Viking Age archaeology (Fig. 1 ). In this paper, we emphasize developments and challenges in Scandinavia, with the ambition to also cover the main achievements relating to diasporas in the west and east. While the study of the Viking world is a highly interdisciplinary field, the main focus here is on archaeology. Achievements within philology (i.e., Old Norse studies), place name studies, history, and history of religion—subjects that mainly refer to written sources—thus mostly remain beyond the scope of the present paper.

Map of the Viking world with sites discussed in the text. Map: Louise Hilmar

In research on the Viking Age, as in popular perception of the period, one can identify two competing views as to what defines the subject of interest. One may see the Viking Age as a pattern of trade, diaspora, and raiding—activities in which society engaged with the sea and the wider world in new, transformative ways. The other view identifies its focus as Old Norse culture, with pagan worldviews and mentality as the point of departure. While these two views are not mutually exclusive, they tend to divide research interests and communities with little cross-referencing. We argue that a lack of integration between these two largely tacit strains of research undermines the effort of the first to identify motivations and agency and limits the potential of the second to engage with social organization. We also notice that the transformation of interdisciplinarity inherent in these developments aligns archaeologists increasingly with biology, chemistry, or geology and decreases research integration with philology, history, and social sciences.

In the following, we examine some themes that have been explored within the last decade. In response, we call for changes toward more ethical research frameworks: first, focus on an alignment between societal/economic and individual/cultural perspectives, with diaspora theory, personhood, and other post-humanistic perspectives as frameworks with the potential to integrate genomics, identity, and society; and secondly, an environmental perspective that integrates landscape, mobility, and political power with a growing attention to ecology, environmental change, and societal resilience.

What Caused the Viking Age?

Mobility and interaction are integral to the concept of the Viking Age. Several developments work together to highlight these issues in recent research. Contemporary society’s confrontation with economic globalization and its consequences, from increased wealth and resource pressure to migration and conflicts, has directed focus to corresponding themes in global history. At the same time, the recent maturing of a range of isotopic and biomolecular methods for provenancing materials has greatly augmented our ability to trace mobility and exchange in the past.

An issue where this interdisciplinary dialog works productively is in the search of causes for the “beginning of the Viking Age.” At stake here is the trajectory of and dynamics behind the early raids by Scandinavians, recorded from the late eighth century onward in the British Isles and continental Europe, and the concomitant expansion of maritime contacts marked by archaeological finds in Scandinavia. The response of modern scholars is outlined in an important review by Barrett ( 2008 , 2010 ) in terms of various determinants: technological, environmental, demographic, economic, political, and ideological.

Barrett rejects monocausal models and takes care to dismiss the commerce associated with the emergence of trade in the eighth century as a cause for the raids. He observes that the earliest recorded Viking raids appear to have taken place between western Norway and northern Britain, regions, he maintains, that had little involvement in the emerging trading emporia (Barrett 2010 , p. 293). Instead, he proposes that the escalation in maritime activity was caused by a combination of new economic incentives combined with a “bulge” (Barrett 2010 , p. 293) of young men competing over a short supply of farmland, status roles, and marriage partners (see critique in Jesch 2015 , p. 107).

Barrett’s perceptive review has triggered a series of responses calling to attention the importance of urban networks ( Sindbæk 2011 ), ideologies (Carver 2015 ), personal reputation (Ashby 2015 ), and the availability of sex partners (Raffield et al. 2017 ; Wicker 2012 ; for critiques see Moen 2019 , pp. 258–260, 2020 ). In most cases, these models are either too generic to engage with the chronology (i.e., why the favored dynamic should set off maritime expansion at a particular point in time) or they do not agree on essential points of time and trajectory. On this crucial question, Viking Age archaeology remains split between the traditional “big bang” theory of a rapid transformation emerging in the late eighth century and various models claiming a protracted “long dawn” of processes unfolding over the course of the eighth century or earlier still.

Among the proponents of the latter, Price suggests that the patterns of maritime raiding that define the “Viking phenomenon” may be found earlier than commonly thought and outside the North Sea; he argues that such finds as the Salme ship burials (Fig. 2 ) from c. 750 imply “that the origins of raiding might well lie within the Baltic sphere, with a focus on the east” (N. Price 2018b , p. 13). The Salme ships and their crew were found buried in Estonia, but isotopic signatures trace their origin to Middle Sweden (Price et al. 2016 ). To claim Salme as the beginning of a new pattern is refreshing, but it may essentially be as arbitrary as the plunder of the monastery at Lindisfarne in 793, which traditionally has been used by historians as a mark of the beginning of the Viking Age.

The Salme II ship burial from c. 750, uncovered in 2010 on the Island of Saaremaa, Estonia. The ship contained the remains of over 40 males, many displaying physical trauma from battle, together with numerous weapons and other artifacts. Isotopic analyses and artifacts suggest that the group originated in central Sweden. After T. Price et al. 2016

Where the period around 800 clearly does mark a new pattern is in the arrival of continental and insular metal artifacts in western Scandinavia. A series of recent studies survey new finds, many produced by private metal detecting in Denmark (Baastrup 2014 ) and Norway ( Aannestad 2018 ; Heen-Pettersen 2014 , 2019 ; Heen-Pettersen and Murray 2018 ). Sweden does not have a comparable record, in part due to restrictive legislation on metal detecting (Dobat 2013a ) and also to real differences in distribution (Heen-Pettersen 2019 ). The new finds leave established chronology and geographical trends largely intact: few, if any, overseas imports can be shown to have arrived before c. 800, whereas they proliferated in the ninth century in coastal regions of western Norway and in maritime “gateway” regions in Denmark. This temporal and geographical distribution remains a fact to explain, regardless of recent suggestions to rethink the Norwegian involvement in early Viking Age raids (Griffiths 2019 ).

The ostentatious acquisition, display, exchange, and deposition of foreign objects seen in this period is still best explained as relating to the emergence of overseas raids around 800. The emergence of monumental ship graves in the same decades may similarly point to a new ideological emphasis on navigation (Bill 2020 ). If so, this puts the date of the most ostensible archaeological markers for the beginning of the Viking Age in line with the traditional date based on evidence from written sources.

New research lines, including biomolecular studies, have contributed decisively to the issue and provide templates for further research. Using molecular species identification on antler combs from Orkney, von Holstein et al. ( 2014 ) thus reject previous claims to the use of reindeer antler in pre-Viking contexts. Their results neutralize a key line of evidence claimed to support the existence of longstanding peaceful interaction between Norway and the Northern Isles prior to late eighth-century raids. This shifts the balance of evidence for a “long dawn” for North Sea navigation. In another study, Ashby et al. ( 2015 ) apply the same method to comb-making workshops in the emporium Ribe, Denmark, and demonstrate that the arrival of reindeer antler as a raw material in this site did indeed predate the beginning of North Sea raids. As reindeer must have been sourced from the Scandinavian Peninsula, this provides the missing link between Norway and North Sea emporia, which Barrett ( 2010 ) called for. A recent study by Rosvold et al. ( 2019 ) pursues this line of research further by applying DNA analysis to archaeological antler, demonstrating links to geographically specific reindeer populations.

Another key contribution is provided by Baug et al. ( 2019 ) through petrographic and geochemical studies of whetstones found in Ribe, Denmark. The authors show that the majority of whetstones from contexts from c. AD 760 onward probably originated from quarries in Eidsborg, Telemarken, and Mostadmarka near Trondheim, Norway. While speculating rather freely on the particular historical context of this import, the study provides the clearest evidence yet that the Viking Age raids were preceded by an extended period of long-distance voyages that linked emporia trade in the southern North Sea to central Scandinavia.

From Salme to Ribe to Mostadmarka, detailed biomolecular and geochemical studies thus provide valuable new pointers to the emergence of long-distance maritime connectivity at the beginning of the Viking Age. This debate and the discovery process are likely to continue in the coming years as new challenges arise and further data and methods are integrated.

The Viking Diaspora

A benchmark of Viking studies in the 2010s is Jesch, a philologist who calls us to study the Viking Age as the creation of a cultural diaspora (Jesch 2015 ). Jesch draws on contemporary cultural theory, in particular on Cohen (2008), a sociologist who studies globalization and migration, to suggest how the ambiguous identities, collective myths and memories, and the troubled intergroup interactions created by movement and resettlement are central to the study of the Viking Age. Her perspective has reinvigorated Viking studies by turning issues often seen as problems of definition into key interest points.

Jesch’s framework typifies a field that has witnessed a reemergence of cross-cultural and deliberately comparative perspectives. Following the culmination in the 2000s of a long-term trend toward interpretive foci aiming to unlock the culturally unique, researchers have in recent years explored psychology (Raffield et al. 2016 ), economic theory (Svendsen and Svendsen 2016 ; Svendsen 2019 ), or resurrected ethnographic analogy (Downham 2015 ; Melheim et al. 2016 ; N. Price 2018a ), in search for general themes and processes.

While themes of migration, diaspora, and transnational communities have readily engaged historians and philologists of the Viking Age, archaeologists have also attempted to pursue them. Some trace the movement of objects and materials or apply social network protocols to distribution studies (Sindbæk 2013a ). Others focus on the active use and manipulation of nonlocal objects and styles (e.g., Aannestad 2015 ; Burström 2014 ; Glørstad 2014 ; U. Pedersen 2015 , 2016a , b ; H. Williams 2014b ).

Meanwhile, studies focusing on the period’s signature technology of mobility—boats and ships—have been scarce. The last decade has seen the completion of important maritime research efforts begun decades ago (Crumlin-Pedersen 2010 ; Englert 2015 ) but less in the way of new departures for studies of ship technology. The most notable efforts have been made in the harbor of Birka, Sweden, where long-term marine archaeological investigations have led to an improved understanding of the harbor facilities of the site, albeit not to major new ship finds (Olsson 2017; Hansson et al. 2018 ). Instead, scholars have brought the ritual use of boats and ships in burials to the fore (Bill 2016 , 2017 , 2020 ; Bill and Daly 2012 ; Bonde and Stylegar 2016 ). While attention has thus been directed to older finds, this situation may be due to change, as two new finds of ship burials were recently reported from geophysical surveys of Gjellestad in southeastern Norway and Edøy in northern Norway. Both finds are as yet unpublished, except for news reports, but they promise a much-needed reinvigoration of ship archaeology.

For wider, comparative explorations of Viking diaspora, the archaeological record proves disturbingly erratic. In the North Atlantic islands, including Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands, where Scandinavian immigrants constituted the main human presence during the Viking Age, archaeologists can summon data to pursue broad themes like settlement history and colonization processes (Schmid et al. 2017 ; Vésteinsson and McGovern 2012 ) and cultural adaptation (Dugmore et al. 2012 ). In the southern North Sea, by contrast, researchers are confined to isolated detector finds or hoards (IJssennagger 2013 , 2015 ) and attempts to place these in wider patterns of cultural interaction (Croix and IJssennagger-Van Der Pluijm 2019 ; Hines and IJssennagger 2017 ).

In the Irish Sea region and Atlantic Scotland, apart from towns and military camps (see below), traces of the Viking diaspora are largely restricted to occasional graves, as at Cnoc nan Gall in the Inner Hebrides, Swordle Bay in western Scotland, or Cumwitton in Cumbria (Becket et al. 2013 ; Halstad-McGuire 2010 ; Harris et al. 2017 ; Harrison 2015 ; Paterson et al. 2014 ). Here, publication of the corpus of Viking graves and grave goods in Ireland is an outstanding achievement of the decade (Harrison and Ó Floinn 2014 ). Other studies emphasize the diasporic elements in settlement structures (Glørstad 2012 , 2014 ). The Isle of Man remains an exception, showing a more varied record, which invites synthetic studies (Steinforth 2015a , b , c ; Wilson 2018 ). Few major excavations have taken place, and these have been largely in rescue contexts, yet a group of recently published settlements provide a much-needed baseline: Cille Pheadair and Bornais in the Hebrides (Pearson et al. 2018 ; Sharples and Best 2020 ), and sites at Bay of Skaill, Orkney, and Unst, Shetland (Griffiths et al. 2019 ; Turner et al. 2013 ).

In Poland, the last two decades have seen steeply increased interest in Scandinavian contacts, although research remains hampered by the language barrier (Gardeła 2015 ). The publication of excavations from 1990–2002 in the Ogrody district of Wolin, as well as two remarkable volumes of synthesis on previous excavations, is a ground-breaking contribution to Viking Age studies in Poland (Rębkowski 2019a , b ; Stanisławski and Filipowiak 2013 , 2014 ). These and other results have been used to bolster the case for Wolin as the site of the fabled Jomsborg of saga fame, as well as to argue for a key role of Scandinavians in the early Polish state (Stanisławski 2013 ). The theory has sparked widespread debate among Polish researchers, as have the interpretation of the burials often previously discussed as Scandinavian chamber graves in Poland. New analyses, including isotopic and aDNA studies, point against the idea that these elite burials were typically for people of Scandinavian origin (Błaszczyk 2017 ; Błaszczyk and Stępniewska 2016 ; Janowski 2015 ). These debates have framed the emergence of a more balanced assessment of what is arguably a real but limited presence of Scandinavian influence in Poland (Gardeła 2015 ; Moździoch et al. 2013 ).

A potential for a more diverse view of the Viking Age can be gleaned in the Baltic Sea area, albeit recent research has seen only occasional efforts to bring mainland Finland (Ahola and Tolley 2014 ) and the Åland Islands (Frog et al. 2014 ) into the dialog. Attempts to bring the eastern Baltic into a similar dialogue remain on even fewer hands (Mägi 2011 , 2015 , 2018 , 2019 ), though with notable efforts directed to Linkuhnen, Wiskiauten, and other sites in the Kaliningrad region (Goßler and Jahn 2018 ; Ibsen and Frenzel 2010 ).

Meanwhile, Scandinavian exploration in Russia and eastern Europe continues to attract active interest, characteristically in the form of conference proceedings reviewing work originally published in many different languages (Androshchuk et al. 2016 ; Bauduin and Musin 2014 ; Bjerg et al. 2013 ; Callmer et al. 2017 ). Within Russian archaeology and historiography, questions concerning Scandinavian contacts and their role in the early Rus’ state continue to stir debates (Jackson 2019 ) and discussions of the archaeological sites where evidence of such contacts is focused, including Kiev, Novgorod and Staraya Ladoga, Izborsk, and Pskov (Makarov 2017 ). Research at these hotspots is complemented by artifact studies (Androshchuk 2013 , 2014 ; Androshchuk and Zotsenko 2012 ) and studies of graves and burial custom (Mikhaylov 2016 ). Yet, despite the fact that the past decade has also seen notable fieldwork and research on key trading sites, including Gnezdovo on the upper Dnepr (Puškina et al. 2017 ), Shestovitsa in the Ukraine (Kovalenko 2013 ; Skorokhod and Blaszczyk 2020 ), and Staraya Ladoga in northwestern Russia (Kirpichnikov 2018 ; Nosov 2018 ), the results are virtually not discussed outside Russia.

Some of the most transformative results in the search for Viking diaspora concern the Danelaw in northern England. They result above all from the rich evidence of private metal-detected finds and its systematic recording and research (Richards and Naylor 2012 ). This has allowed the identification of sites such as the AD 872–873 winter camp of the Viking Great Army in Torksey, Lincolnshire (Fig. 3 ), and, more generally, a revaluation of the scale and impact of Viking settlement (Hadley and Richards 2018 ; Raffield 2016 ; Richards and Haldenby 2018 ; G. Williams 2015 ). In particular, the program of surveys and excavations at Torksey have contributed to characterize the archaeological signature of a Viking army camp site (Hadley and Richards 2016 ). Also connected with this work are studies of army provisioning, including large-scale pottery production (Perry 2016 , 2019 ).

A selection of metal-detected finds from the AD 872–873 winter camp of the Viking Great Army in Torksey, Lincolnshire. The finds include numerous lead gaming pieces together with weight coins, hack-silver, and ornaments, including types more commonly found in Scandinavia. Photograph: © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

The most extensive exploration of the metal-detected evidence is Kershaw’s ( 2013 ) monograph on Scandinavian-type objects in England. Her study assembles long-missing archaeological material and matches it to the onomastic and linguistic evidence of mass settlement of Scandinavians. Kershaw notes a striking number of female ornaments among Scandinavian-style objects and suggests this to be evidence that the settlers included numerous Scandinavian women (e.g., McLeod 2011 ). Other researchers note adaptations to the design of many Scandinavian-type brooches, which may indicate that some were produced by Anglo-Saxon metalworkers, perhaps as likely to be worn by Anglo-Saxon as by Scandinavian women (Rogers 2020 , p. 268).

Debate on the Danelaw diaspora is also raised in the context of the study on the modern genetic structure of the British population, which claimed to show that the number of Scandinavian Viking Age migrants to England had been negligible (Leslie et al. 2015 ). In response, Kershaw and Røyrvik ( 2016 ) point out how the results are biased by a sampling strategy that was insufficiently informed by archaeological and historical knowledge and did not permit a distinction between the Migration-period Anglo-Saxon genetic component (argued to be substantial) and the Viking Age Scandinavian one.

The Viking diaspora is thus a difficult matter to pursue in archaeological research (Norstein 2020 ). Many studies still struggle with the task of even attesting the presence of Scandinavian populations and producing a timeline and scale to their occurrence. They rarely manage to proceed to in-depth examination of the nature of interactions. The sheer scale of activity revealed by metal detecting is changing perceptions, despite struggles to contextualize the material. The same goes for the detailed studies on burials, monuments, and material culture, which have more to reveal on attitudes and agency. Yet for a real understanding of movement and interactions, this material needs to be linked more specifically to the origin and displacement of individuals. This is what evidence emerging in the study of biological signatures now increasingly adds.

A Scientific Approach to Mobility

Isotopic signatures in human skeletal remains have engendered a major thrust of research in the Viking world. While isotopic studies a decade ago would typically concentrate on a single element (strontium being all the rage for archaeologists in the early 2010s), research is currently moving to consider the combination of multiple isotopic signals. The natural extension to this trend is the addition of aDNA and proteomics.

Many pioneering studies in this field have been essentially concerned with learning to interpret the evidence in geological and climatic settings as diverse as Denmark (Knudson et al. 2012 ; T. Price et al. 2011 , 2012 ), the North Atlantic (Montgomery et al. 2014 ; Price and Naumann 2014 ), and Middle Sweden (Hedenstierna-Jonson 2015 ). Some early studies, as yet with slim baseline data, were marked by a somewhat unbalanced synergy of scientists and archaeologists. Thus, the inference that warriors interred at the late 10th-century Trelleborg fortress in Denmark were largely recruited from outside Denmark (T. Price et al. 2011 ) was based on a stipulated local range that was more restricted than the variation subsequently seen in faunal samples from the same site (Frei and Price 2012 ). This raises questions as to how far signatures may vary within a region.

Even elements, which have long been studied, continue to reveal noteworthy results. By this means it has been possible to solve an enigma long surrounding the famous mass burial in Repton in the East Midlands, UK. Since its discovery in the 1970s, the site has been suspected to relate to the wintering of the Great Heathen Army that invaded England in 865–874. Longstanding dispute was raised by radiocarbon dates, which appeared to indicate a long period of use beginning before the Viking Age. New analysis has finally clarified the issue thanks to a full study of the isotopic signal, which revealed that the initial results had failed to consider the marine reservoir effect caused by a fish-rich diet (Jarman et al. 2018 ). Once recalibrated, the dates are consistent with the Great Army activities.

Strontium and light stable isotopes also suggest a Scandinavian origin of at least some of the c. 37 individuals, mostly young adult males, found in a mass burial at the grounds of St. John’s College, Oxford (Pollard et al. 2012 ). It has been suggested that the deceased represent an unsuccessful raiding party or possibly victims of the AD 1002 St. Brice Day’s massacre. A similar origin is suggested by oxygen and strontium signatures seen for some of the individuals from a burial pit discovered on Ridgeway Hill, Dorset (Fig. 4 ), containing an assemblage of at least 51 adult males, some arguably of Scandinavian and others of Baltic origin (Chenery et al. 2014 ; Loe et al. 2014 ). These studies showcase the power of isotopic analysis to turn otherwise enigmatic bioarchaeological finds into contextual evidence.

A burial pit discovered on Ridgeway Hill, Dorset, containing an assemblage of at least 51 decapitated adult males, buried in the 10th century. Several individuals show isotopic signatures that suggest a Scandinavian origin, and the burial is thought to represent an unsuccessful Viking raiding party. Photo: Oxford Archaeology

As more studies become available for comparison, researchers are increasingly able to assess the resulting patterns. It is now possible to compare the proportion of people of local versus nonlocal origin buried at the trading site Ridanäs, Gotland (Peschel et al. 2017 ), with the Viking Age towns Birka (T. Price et al. 2018 ) and Sigtuna (Krzewińska et al. 2018 ). The results point to a progressive biographical diversity, which in the urban sites is high even by comparison with modern-day data. This contributes real evidence to feed into the debate as to whether early towns in the Viking world were international “circulation societies” or more grounded in regional communities.

With an increasing use of multi-isotopic approaches, isotopic studies have begun to offer results of more historical and archaeological consequence. Among the high-profile results is the isotopic provenancing of individuals interred in the two ship burials at Salme, Estonia, as being almost certainly a party from Middle Sweden (T. Price et al. 2016 , 2020 ). With a date in the mid-eighth century, this attribution has made the Salme burials a focal point in debates on the beginning of the Viking Age (see above).

Ancient DNA studies, meanwhile, have as yet made only isolated contributions, despite great expectations (Buckberry et al. 2014 ; Pollard et al. 2012 ). The conclusions of the first few Viking Age aDNA studies are inevitably as cautious as the first flush of isotope studies (Krzewińska et al. 2015 , 2018 ). The study of mobility in the Viking Age is set for a paradigmatic shift with the arrival of population-level genomic studies currently in preparation. This may leave isotopic studies with a more limited but important role as a tool supplementing the far more information-packed aDNA in sourcing immigrants and their offspring.

In coming years, isotopic and biomolecular techniques will almost certainly continue to add new data to the study of the Viking Age. Yet, their potential to fuel historical research needs to be put in perspective. The incorporation of natural sciences into the Viking Age archaeology of the past decade has brought back streaks of an unhealthy positivism and a return to the concept of bounded cultural units that has long been explored and criticized in other contexts (see Furholt 2018 for a similar critique of the use of natural sciences in research on the Neolithic in Europe).

For these new data to become of more than passing interest in the study of the human past, they must be integrated with the causative and resulting cultural dynamics. Furthermore, they must be combined with theoretical models that build on a nuanced perspective on mobility and the constructions of social groups and social identities. While biologists, geologists, and chemists have entered the interdisciplinary dialogue for good, the eventual success of this line of research will depend on the character of the collaboration of philologists, historians, and archaeologists, who continue to hold key evidence for and, more importantly, insights into what remains interesting about the Viking Age.

Individuals and Multiple Identities

Social practice, communities, rituals, and aristocracies were major foci of Viking archaeology during the late 1990s and 2000s, followed by interests in cultural norms and change and in worldviews and religion. The work that has unfolded in the 2010s reflects a profoundly different generational experience. While a focus on structures, actors, and identity was previously framed by practice theory and post-structuralism, one may observe a shift in interest from large social groups toward a stronger focus on individuals, their appearance, and specificities. The change of emphasis may be linked to the experience of individuals in our contemporary world, as social media has become a fact of life. Accordingly, the previous interest in collective beliefs and action has seen declining attention, while work has turned to issues of personal identity and presentation, with an inclination toward nonnormative social roles and statements. If the quintessential attraction of the Viking archaeology of the 2000s was a ritual site or deposit (e.g., Dobat 2006 ; Jørgensen 2009 ; Larsson 2007 ; Lund 2008 ; N. Price 2002 ; Zachrisson 2004a , b ), that of the 2010s could be a grave with unique personal features and ritual objects (e.g., Gardeła 2013a ; Harris et al. 2017 ; Hedenstierna‐Jonson et al. 2017 ; Ulriksen 2018 ).

Societal context affects many aspects of research on the Viking period. “Viking” is used as a positive term in contemporary identity discourse; at the same time, it is presented as a primitive, aggressive, prestate construction (Croix 2016 ; Halewood and Hannam 2001 ; Sindbæk 2013b ; Svanberg 2003a ). Even within research, reflections of a nationalistic mindset can be identified, for example, by analyzing how scholars have used the pronouns “we” and “us” as terminology for describing people in Viking Age societies, in contrast to the use of “they” in descriptions of people in Sámi societies in the same time and regions (Jahnsen 2016 ).

Recent studies of social identities have focused principally, and often separately, on aspects of ethnicity and gender. Within Swedish and Norwegian archaeology, the former includes an interest in the interrelationships between Old Norse and Sámi societies, while the significant cultural other for archaeology in Denmark are the Slavs of the southern Baltic Sea. In areas of Viking settlement outside Scandinavia, questions of ethnic identity are brought to the fore in relation to interactions with previously settled populations (Hayeur Smith et al. 2018 ; Sutherland 2009 ).

Using anthropologists Barth ( 1969 ) and Eriksen ( 1994 ) as a foundation and approaching ethnic identity with a strong aspect of situationalism, scholars have identified social groups that may have possessed an in-between or creolized position between Old Norse and Sámi identities. Others, building on the scholarship of Said ( 1978 ) and Bhabha ( 1994 ) and in particular the work of archaeologist Siân Jones (e.g., Jones 1997 ), have approached this theme that emphasizes hybridity as a way of avoiding the latent essentialism suggested by creolization as a mixture of two entities (Amundsen 2017 ; Bergstøl 2004 , 2008 ; Mulk and Bayliss-Smith 2007 ; Nielsen and Wickler 2011 ; Spangen 2009 ). Similarly, cultural memory related to migration from Slavic areas into Scandinavia and the social setting of these groups within Scandinavian societies have been explored in relation to early urban as well as rural contexts. This field has also questioned the role of gender, including hybrid positions, in the creation of social identities (Gardeła 2018 ; Hillerdal 2009a , b ; Moen 2011 , 2019 ; Naum 2007 , 2008 ; Roslund 2007 ).

Studies of gender have mainly issued from interpreting burials (e.g., Arwill-Nordbladh 2008 ; Gardeła 2013a ; Hillerdal 2009a ; Moen 2011 , 2019 ), but even the use of space within the household and its relations to gender have been explored (Croix 2012 ; Eriksen 2019 ). Other aspects of identity are highlighted by individual studies. Hedenstierna-Jonson ( 2006 ) has explored warrior identities through grave finds and settlements. Raffield et al. ( 2018 ) have suggested the dominance of men over women through institutions of polygamy and concubinage, albeit based on a limited range of sources. Raffield ( 2019a ) and Ravn ( 2012 ) have separately examined childhood and the formation of hegemonic ideals, though also exclusively with a male focus. Furthermore, Eriksen ( 2017 ) has explored the ontological status of infants in the Viking Age in relation to objecthood. Other specific social roles that have been studied include thieves (Kalmring 2010a ), slaves (Naumann et al. 2014 ; Raffield 2019b ; Roslund 2013 ), disability (Arwill-Nordbladh 2012 ), ritual specialists (Karg et al. 2009 ), and smiths (Barndon 2005 ; Hed Jakobsson 2003 ; Hedeager 2011 ; Lund 2010 ; U. Pedersen 2009 ). These perspectives often imply the assumption that the grave goods were the possessions of the deceased, a position that has been justly questioned in other areas of archaeology (e.g., Odebäck 2018 ).

Compared to previous mortuary studies, which tended to focus on collective rituals (e.g., Svanberg 2003b ), increasing attention is now brought to the individual, to unique features, or to the specifics and variations within the burial rites. The research project focused on the “Birka girl” stands out as an example. Through a combination of isotope analyses and analyses of grave goods and burial custom, one infant grave from Birka is utilized to discuss mobility and social dynamics (Hedenstierna-Jonson 2015 ). The “Birka girl” study pioneers an attempt to combine biomolecular data and contextual archaeology, although it is inevitably limited by the lack of comparative context.

As part of the focus on individuals, variations, and diversity, burial studies have highlighted “deviant” burials (Gardeła 2013a ; Toplak 2015 , 2016 ). Some of these burials have been interpreted in light of gender theory, in particular with a foundation in Judith Butler’s work, and interpreted as the burials of persons with a queer or transgendered identity ( Gardeła 2014 ; Kastholm Hansen 2016 ; N. Price 2002 ; Ulriksen 2018 ). Considering that it may often be hard to determine in any region what a “typical” burial was (Lund 2013 ; N. Price 2008b ), it has turned out to be equally challenging to determine which burials differ so strongly as to be termed deviant. However, Gardeła ( 2013a ), in particular, demonstrates how the identification of burials in which the buried were treated differently than the majority may also give insights into ideas of the afterlife and the relationship between the living and the deceased. This also raises the question of how liminal some of these so-called deviantly buried individuals may have been within the Viking society, while they were at the same time provided with burials that could indicate that they were considered to be part of a social elite.

From this perspective, it is instructive to follow the reactions to the recent identification by aDNA of one warrior burial in Birka chamber grave Bj.581 (Fig. 5 ) as female and thus, potentially, a female military leader (Hedenstierna-Jonson et al. 2017 ; N. Price et al. 2019 ). This discovery gave rise to strong reactions from other scholars, in part, at least, because it did not match existing preconceptions of what a warrior was in term of gender (Androshchuk 2018 ; Edberg 2019 ; a volume of response was also expressed in media). While the authors acknowledge the complexities of funerary transformations, they find “better contextual evidence for the more literal and traditional interpretation” that Bj.581 was “the grave of a woman who lived as a professional warrior and was buried in a martial environment as an individual of rank” (N. Price et al. 2019 , p. 192). This pragmatic stance stands somewhat in contrast to what made Bj 581 an extraordinary discovery in the first place, that the biological sexing of the deceased crossed lines among what is otherwise a markedly gender-binary distribution of funerary objects in Birka’s mortuary traditions. As such, the find inevitably challenges wider preconceptions of the Viking Age.

Plan of Birka chamber grave Bj.581, a warrior grave excavated by H. Stolpe in 1878. The skeleton was confirmed as female by aDNA in 2017. The discovery demonstrates the impact biomolecular research now has on social archaeology. Drawing by H. Stolpe in 1889

Lately, instead of the identification of gender being framed by binary oppositions, an intersectional perspective has been advocated in which the co-existence of several vectors is seen to intersect in creating self-identity (Arwill-Nordbladh 2013b ; Lund and Moen 2019 ). The time is ripe to use these results further in more nuanced studies of how individuals were part of more than one social group in terms of kinship, gender, occupation, and lifestyle.

Simultaneously, we find increasing interest in what an individual is in terms of the study of personhood: what constituted being considered a person and what it meant to be a person in Viking Age Scandinavia. This has been explored in burials (Fahlander 2016 , 2018 ; Lund 2013 , 2017 ) and, with a focus on the relationship between personhood and objecthood, in hoards (Lund 2015 , 2017 ; Myrberg 2009a , b ). The perspective of personhood holds the potential to challenge the preconception of grave goods as being directly and intimately linked with the deceased individual in the grave as the possessions of the deceased.

As instruments in the transformation of the deceased from biological to social dead and in the incorporation of the bereaved into society, the grave objects also reflect these actions. For instance, in several graves at the burial field Bikjholberget at the early urban site or emporium of Kaupang, Norway, the final ritual action of the burial consisted of chopping grave goods to pieces and leaving the axe stuck in the ground (Lia 2004 ; Lund 2013 ). Similarly, N. Price ( 2002 ) and Wickholm ( 2006 ) have demonstrated how spears were sometimes thrown into a grave as part of the burial. In some instances, these objects were antiquities removed or robbed from older graves (Wickholm 2006 ). Thus, in future studies of graves, we need to be open to the complexity of creating identity, while understanding the burials as potentially part of personhood transformation and thus not identifying all grave goods as the possessions of the deceased.

To fully grasp the complexity of identities as well as rituals, we may call for future analyses that further explore the relationship between objects that represent the identity of the deceased and artifacts related to the bereaved and to the performative burial rites. Furthermore, there is potential to utilize insights into the performance of ritual aspects of the burials in order to grasp the complexities of how identities were created, maintained, and transformed in Viking Age societies. The aDNA of Bj. 581 has been valuable in putting gender back on center stage in Viking Age archaeology. Hopefully, future mortuary archaeology will further emphasize the complexity of the relationship between the deceased, grave goods, identity, and personhood.

From Cult and Belief to Worldviews, Viking Ways, and Ontologies

Through the 2000s, Viking Age archaeology moved from studying Old Norse paganism exclusively as a religion to examining it as worldviews, minds, and aspects of the cognitive landscape, thus including and incorporating social and cultural perspectives and consequences (e.g., Andrén et al. 2006 ; Hedeager 2011 ), or what Price ( 2002 ) has termed “the Viking way.” Following this line of thought, new studies have broadened these issues into a study of Viking Age ontology (Back Danielsson 2007 , 2016 ; Eriksen 2019 ; Fahlander 2018 ; Lund 2013 , 2017 ).

As Andrén ( 2013a ) points out, a characteristic feature of Viking Age rituals is that they took place at many different locations in the landscape. In addition to the depositions in relation to magnate’s halls, a number of studies have explored the ritual actions of depositions that took place in wetlands (Androshchuk 2010 ; Gotfredsen et al. 2014 ; Hedeager 2003 ; Lund 2008 , 2010 ; Zachrisson 2004b ) and others the ritual actions at trees and groves (Andersson 2004 ; Magnell and Iregren 2010 ). The similarities between ritual activities within an Old Norse ontological framework and those of the Sámi ritual places have also been highlighted (Lund 2015 ; N. Price 2000 ; Spangen 2009 ).

Studies of the Scandinavian conversions to Christianity, a focus of research in the 1980s and 1990s, have been fewer in the last decade (but see, e.g., Andrén 2013a ; Kristjánsdóttir 2015 ; Lund 2013 ; Vésteinsson 2016 ). In the early 2000s, a group of studies pioneered new ways of incorporating written sources and archaeology in studies of pre-Christian or Old Norse worldviews. Most significant were the studies by Hedeager ( 2003 , 2004 ), Solli ( 2002 ), and N. Price ( 2002 ). They shared a renewed trust in evidence from the Old Norse written sources and used these to challenge and deepen the understanding of the Viking Age way of life, rituals, cognition, and belief system. These studies did not abandon source criticism but sought to identify analogies between phenomena expressed in material culture and those preserved in texts, including material metaphors as analogies to the kenninger from the written (though originally oral tradition of) Old Norse poetry (Andrén 2000 ; Domeij Lundborg 2006 ). Rereadings of Old Norse sources have now been combined with advances in ritual studies to highlight the performative elements of rituals and of ritualization as actions (Eriksen 2016 ; Gardeła 2008 ; Lund 2013 ; N. Price 2005 , 2008a , 2010 , 2014 ). Additionally, mortuary studies have highlighted the memorial actions of the burial rites and the relationship between the bereaved and the deceased (Back Danielsson 2016 ; Bill 2016 ; Lund 2013 ; Nordeide 2016 ; A. Pedersen 2014 ; H. Williams 2016 ).

In the 2000s, the focus in studies of rituals in the Viking Age was on the cognitive landscape and the spatial aspects of rituals in particular (Andrén 2002 ; Hedeager 2003 ; Ljungkvist 2006 ; Lund 2005 , 2006 , 2010 ; N. Price 2002 , 2005 ; Raffield 2014 ; Söderberg 2005 ; Zachrisson 2004a , 2014 ). The starting point for examinations of spatiality was the archaeological material, mainly acts of deposition, and from there finding counterparts, similarities, and differences in Old Norse written sources—an interdisciplinary approach combining archaeology with toponyms, in particular sacral place names, philology (not always without interdisciplinary frictions), history of religion, and cognitive research. Acts of depositions within the settlement were also in focus, in particular in relation to the magnate halls (Lucas and McGovern 2007 ) and later in more regular buildings (Eriksen 2017 ).

In the last five years, attention has shifted from the landscape to artifacts through an exploration of what Lund has termed “the animated objects of the Viking Age” ( Aannestad 2018 ; Burström 2015 ; Eriksen 2017 ; Lund 2015 , 2017 ). The renewed focus on artifacts has also gained impetus from new analytical capacities such as material analysis or the use of 3D scanning (Åhfeldt 2013 ; Neiß et al. 2016 ; Oehrl 2017 , 2019 ; Wärmländer et al. 2015 ).

A case in point are pendants and other ornamental metalwork, the number of which has increased significantly, mainly due to metal detecting. Many of these finds are categorized as amulets for personal protection or as part of ritual actions (Graham-Campbell 2013 ; Gräslund 2007 ; Jensen 2010 ; A. Pedersen 2009 ; Zachrisson 2018 ). Methodologically, the finds at the core of the debate on what characterizes the Viking Age mentality are thus mainly stray finds. To a noticeable extent, the interpretations of the amulet finds have been worked to fit into the existing discourse on Old Norse religion, rituals, and the Viking way, as laid out in archaeology in the early 2000s.

Pendants with potential mythological connotations, such as those interpreted as valkyries, have thus received generous attention (Gardeła 2013b , 2018 ; Gardeła and Odebäck 2018 ; Helmbrecht 2011 ; see also Domeij Lundborg et al. 2012 for a discussion of the use of Old Norse sources in interpretations of metalwork). In addition to these and other objects interpreted as depicting artifacts associated with potential Old Norse pagan rituals, such as staffs, chair pendants, Thor’s hammers, and miniature weapons, a group of objects potentially show Christian references, such as the so-called “bag” pendants interpreted as miniature books, the 11 th -century Agnus Dei amulets, or the so-called Hiddensee crosses (Armbruster and Eilbracht 2010 ; A. Pedersen 2009 ).

A notable element is the intense discussion on the gender of some of the anthropomorphic amulets, such as the “Óðinn” figurine from Lejre (Christensen 2013 ). Scholars have strived to determine whether this small, exquisitely detailed silver figurine, found in 2009, is a configuration of the god Oðinn or, for example, the goddess Freya (Fig. 6 ). However, just as belief systems may have been ambiguous in the late Viking Age, with pagan and Christian elements being partly interwoven, it may be relevant to search for deliberate ambiguity in terms of gender (Arwill-Nordbladh 2013b ; Mannering 2013 ), especially considering the openness to associations and metaphoric expressions argued to be essential to Viking Age mentality (Andrén et al. 2006 ; Domeij Lundborg 2006 ).

Silver figurine found at Lejre, Denmark, in 2009. The figure is identified by some as the god Óðinn, enthroned and with two ravens, but the clear attributes of female dress raise questions. This and other new finds of figurative pendants and amulets throw new light and questions on Viking Age cult and iconography. Photo: Ole Malling and Roskilde Museum

A biographical study of objects marks a new approach to material culture as an active force in social relations. Furthermore, a focus on the chaînes opératoires of the period has been reinforced in the studies of production, inspired by theoretical formulations such as actor–network theory. These methods form a welcome addition to traditional typological studies, much as these remain useful (e.g., Androshchuk 2014 ). Weapons, in particular swords and pieces of jewelry, including penannular brooches, as well as imported and transformed objects such as trefoil brooches and pendants produced from artifacts with completely different social spheres, have been studied with an emphasis on the changing social connections and links to production, trade or gift giving, potential heirlooms, and finally the deposition of the artifact that took them out of circulation (Aannestad 2015 ; Ashby 2014 ; Burström 2014 ; Glørstad 2012 ; Lund 2008 , 2009 , 2015 ; Myrberg 2009a , b).

The growing focus on personhood has also affected the study of beliefs and worldviews, such as in the exploration of human–animal relationships (Hedeager 2010 ; Jennbert 2015 ; Pluskowski 2010 ). A focus on ontology has also pointed Viking Age research in this direction. These perspectives have been influential, particularly in the studies of animal style on artifacts, where human beings and other beings are expressed as entangled. Methodologically, these studies have benefited from and built upon an exploration of the material culture juxtaposed with the Old Norse written (though originally oral) sources (Domeij Lundborg 2006 ; Hedeager 2004 , 2010 ; Pluskowski 2010 ).

The Use of the Past in the Viking Age

A new attention is devoted to the role, use, and effects of cultural memory and the creation of links to the past in the Viking Age. The focus here is on collective identities and the multiple temporalities of burial sites, memorial aspects in runestone inscriptions, or the use of antiques, possibly heirlooms, as a means of creating links to pasts, whether real or constructed (in particular Andrén 2013b ; see also Artelius 2004 , 2013 ; Artelius and Lindqvist 2005 , 2007 , Arwill-Nordbladh 1998 , 2007 , 2008 , 2013a ; Glørstad and Røstad 2015 ; Hållans Stenholm 2012 ; Leonard 2011 ; Lund 2020 ; Lund and Arwill-Nordbladh 2016 ; Naum 2008 ; A. Pedersen 2006 , 2014 ; Thäte 2007 ; G. Williams 2014 ).

Pre-Viking Age disc-on-bow brooches found in a number of female graves from the Viking Age may indeed be examples of such heirlooms. Judging from their cloisonné work, they must have had an ancient appearance in the Viking Age, and, as pointed out by Glørstad and Røstad ( 2015 ), they may have functioned as memory props, linking people to the past and to ancestors. Strikingly, the Aska grave explored by Arwill-Nordbladh contained reinvented berlock pendants—elsewhere only known from 700-year-old Roman-period graves. In the same grave, a small figurine pendant wearing such a disc-on-bow brooch displays references to different pasts and temporalities (Arwill-Nordbladh 2008 , 2013a ). These links to the past thus appear to work on material (antiquities) as well as on a referential (typological) level (Lund and Arwill-Nordbladh 2016 ). Furthermore, these various types of reuse are not shared by all within society but are articulated differently materially within different social groups, as these disc-on-bow brooches are only found in specific graves of females of the social elite.

Memory clearly played a role in Viking Age society, as also expressed in the raising of rune stones (Andrén 2013b ; Staecker 2004 ; see also Imer 2014 ). Cultural memory has also been enhanced in relation to migration (Naum 2008 ; Roslund 2007 ). These perspectives have potential beyond the use of memory in relation to the deceased. How, for instance, is a form or a typology kept and maintained? These issues have been central in research on coins (Burström 2014 ) as well as on pendants, where some object forms reappear and make reference to object types that are 600 years older (Arwill-Nordbladh 2008 ).

So far, the use of the past in the Viking Age has mainly been interpreted from a power perspective, in which authority over the past is seen as a means of social control (e.g., A. Pedersen 2006 ). However, as with studies of social identities, the use of the past in Viking Age society may also be utilized to explore how pasts play a role in people’s self-perception, not only in how they navigated in terms of power. The perception of time and temporality plays a role in any society’s worldview, and therefore a deeper insight into how pasts were actively used in the Viking Age will provide us with an increased knowledge of Viking Age ontology.

Global Villages: The Urban Nodes

As well as displaying cultural, religious, and political changes, the Viking Age marks an economic transformation in the growth of an incipient urban and commercial network of exchange. The starting point of this trajectory is generally taken to be the emergence in the eighth century of emporia—maritime nodes of exchange and crafts production. By the 11th century, the familiar trappings of medieval trade were fully established: market towns, trade law, regulated coinage, slow bulk-carrying cargo ships, and exchange in high-bulk, low-value staples such as dried fish, cured meat, timber, or grain (Englert 2015 ; Sindbæk 2017 ).

Excavations in emporia and towns are a longstanding research focus of Viking Age archaeology. The past decade has seen the publication of long-term excavation projects at Kaupang (U. Pedersen 2016a ; Skre 2011c ), Wolin (Stanisławski and Filipowiak 2013 , 2014 ), York (Hall et al. 2014 ), and Dublin (Wallace 2016 ). On the southern Baltic coasts, the trading sites Truso and Gross Strömkendorf—practically unknown until the 1990s—are now firmly recognized as key localities (Bogucki and Jagodziński 2012 ; Brather and Jagodziński 2013 ; Gerds and Wolf 2015 ; Jagodziński 2014 ; Tummuscheit 2011 ), while additional sites along the Baltic and North Sea have received attention (e.g., Kleingärtner 2013 ; Majchczack et al. 2018 ). This intense research focus has transformed our understanding of some nodes, and a wider range of activities is now acknowledged prior to what was previously seen as a concerted foundation by Viking armies in York (in the 860s) or Dublin (in the 900s). Conversely, Skre’s (2011b) reassessment of the rise of Kaupang has substituted what tended to be viewed as a regional “start-up” beach market in Vestfold for a concerted Danish political initiative, staged in a bid for control of the emerging Irish Sea route around 800.

Hedeby, the key trading hub of the Viking Age Baltic Sea has seen a concerted publication effort, with monographs on the settlement structures (Schultze 2008 ), harbor facilities (Kalmring 2010b ), cemeteries (Arents and Eisenschmidt 2010 ), and a much-needed overview (Schietzel 2014 ). Expansive 3D GIS archives have caught up with a century of large research excavations. Together with pioneering geophysical surveys in the early 2000s, this has paved the way for new explorations, now set to test and detail Hedeby’s townscape and settlement history through detector surveys and targeted excavations (Hilberg 2016 , 2018 ). More than ever, this impressive baseline now calls for contextual studies of Hedeby’s society and its way of life as a priority for future research (von Carnap-Bornheim et al. 2014 ).

More detailed research and excavation strategies are beginning to emerge as a means of exploring living spaces and exploiting the potential for chronology on a finer scale. The latter is needed for results to become pertinent to debates where detailed time scales are increasingly critical to historical interpretation (Croix et al. 2019a ). A growing interest in global history raises questions that call for a close correlation of activities in the emporia with long-distance economic events and processes. Meanwhile, analytical techniques increasingly allow such questions to be addressed through “high-definition” protocols of excavation and sampling (Raja and Sindbæk 2018 ). The issues once raised by diffusionist researchers as to how Viking trade may have responded to changes in the Carolingian world, or even the Mediterranean or the Middle Eastern, have thus found new pertinence in the age of networks and globalization (e.g., Hodges 2012 ).

What a contextual approach to Viking Age towns may look like can be gleaned from recent research in Kaupang and Ribe. The Kaupang excavation project introduced a household-level focus, combining open-area excavation with consistent stratigraphic excavation and microsieving. The resulting group portrait of the town’s inhabitants was a pioneering effort (Skre 2011a , b). Geoarchaeological analyses have demonstrated the potential of micromorphology to add decisive data (and controversy) regarding activities and the use of space (Wouters et al. 2016 ). Excavations in Ribe also pioneered high-definition strategies in the 1990s, albeit constrained to small surfaces, which proved difficult to interpret (Croix 2015 ; Feveile 2012 ). The recent excavations of the Northern Emporium project (Fig. 7 ) have provided an opportunity to pursue a contextual excavation of an eighth- and ninth-century streetscape with articulated building remains (Croix et al. 2019a ; Sindbæk 2018 ). Alongside active research on Ribe’s Viking Age cemeteries (Croix 2020 ; Søvsø 2014 ), the results hold the potential to shed light onto the community and networks of a Viking Age town at a smaller scale.

Excavating a workshop floor with metalworking debris from the ninth-century emporium Ribe, Denmark. The Northern Emporium project has explored high-definition field methods including geomicromorphology and 3D laser scanning. Photo: S. M. Sindbæk and Museum of Southwest Jutland

At Birka strong research, efforts have been directed in the past decade at cemeteries and at the harbor area (see above). Meanwhile, notable achievements of research on the town’s famous “Black Earth” settlement area are the publication of parts of the 1990s excavations (Ambrosiani 2013 ) and, after a 140-year scramble, the finds from Stolpe’s 1870s excavations in the same area (Gräslund et al. 2018 ). A series of conference volumes chart the course to define and orchestrate the next phase of investigation (Hedenstierna-Jonson 2012 ; Holmquist et al. 2016 ; Kalmring 2012 ). Several test excavations have been undertaken, but only few results are yet published (Andersson et al. 2016 ; Kalmring and Holmquist 2018 ). As at Hedeby, geophysical prospection offers important new starting points (Trinks et al. 2014 ), but they have yet to be followed up by detailed analysis and excavations.

Part of Birka’s predicament is the ambiguous legacy left by the 1990–1995 “Black Earth” excavations. These produced striking results relating to nonferrous metal workshops and living quarters (Ambrosiani 2013 ; Ambrosiani and Gustin 2015 ). Subsequent analysis has suggested links with named dynasties and missionaries and proposed a remarkably detailed chronology that claims to backdate Birka’s foundation and to tie it to events in the town’s principal written source, the Life of Anskar. This is a lot to ask from an excavation with few absolute dates and for which the excavation matrix required extensive post-excavation rationalization (Ambrosiani 2013 , pp. 205–207). New research will be needed to either vindicate or critically assess these results.

In many respects, research in Viking Age towns reflects similar priorities as those seen in other fields. In economic perspectives, there is a deliberate shift away from the focus on political organization and social evolution toward an exploration of wider social communities and their networks (Hillerdal 2010 ; Kalmring 2010a ; Kalmring et al. 2016 ; Sindbæk 2007a , b ; Skre 2008 ). At the same time, the focus on urbanity as an expression of social choice is concerned with individuals, agency, and lifestyle choices, as well as social identity more generally (Boyd 2013 ; Hadley and ten Harkel 2013 ; Skre 2011a , b).

The focus on mobility and interaction has contributed a willingness to see people other than kings and magnates as active in urban centers. Yet, despite the recognition of a wider range of social dynamics, groups, and agents, the construction of traders, travelers, craftspeople, and consumers often remains stereotypical and detached from the diversity of biographies and incentives that would have made for real-life dynamics in Viking Age towns. A better understanding of these will come from analyses that integrate urban centers with the movements, displacements, and transfers of knowledge that created them—in short, their networks—as well as by exploring the meetings and ways of interlinking social identities within the Viking Age towns.

A Maritime Network Economy

Well into the 2000s, Viking Age trade continued to be widely dismissed as little but a manifestation of a politically controlled distribution of prestige goods without scope for economic agency, diversification, or regional impact (e.g., Wickham 2005 , pp. 818f). Since then, a series of analyses have brought out new evidence bearing on the scale and impact of exchange and the way in which maritime communication made an impact on large numbers of individuals across regions. “Trade” is recognized, in this light, not merely as an instrument of political elites but as a dynamic issuing from and transforming the pursuits of wider communities (Skre 2017a ).

The motivation for trade and exchange could be as simple as the wish to impress peers with dress and ornaments ( Aannestad 2018 ; Glørstad 2012 ; Øye 2014 , Vedeler 2014 ), or to treat guests to new tastes such as hoppy beer and leavened bread or rarities such as grapes and raisins (Henriksen et al. 2017 ; Rohde Sloth et al. 2012 ; Zachrisson 2014 ). Exotic raw material or the knowledge and know-how of craftspeople from other regions might hold value in their association with distant places (Ashby 2015 ). One particular commodity, slaves, were certainly indispensable in Viking Age exchange. Their importance as valuable objects of long-distance exchange cycles probably only increased over time (Fontaine 2017 ; Raffield 2019b ; Zachrisson 2014 ).

What marks out Viking Age trade in particular, however, is increasing cycles of maritime exchange, which afforded long-distance movement of bulk materials, and the reliance of rural populations on distantly sourced products to maintain their way of life (e.g., Hilberg and Kalmring 2014 ). A factor that has inadvertedly contributed to highlighting these patterns is the expansion of private metal detecting, which has increased the number and knowledge of late Iron Age sites in particular, including the Viking Age (see Borake 2018 ; Christiansen 2019 ). This activity has caused both academic interest (Dobat 2013a ) and criticism among heritage management and museums (Rasmussen 2014 ). Through their mere numbers and distribution, however, these finds have changed perceptions of centers and peripheries. Artifact types that were once believed to be rare, imported luxuries have been found in numbers that imply widespread use among rural populations (Christiansen 2019 ; Feveile 2011 , 2017 ; Kershaw 2013 ). This recognition challenges notions of trade as a prerogative of the elite.

The study of silver as a key commodity and means of exchange in the Viking world benefited greatly from concerted rapprochements in the 2000s between numismatists, archaeologists, and archaeometallurgists. As a distinctive subfield, it is unified by the focus on hoard finds, which often provide a great diversity of material culture, and by contextual associations (e.g., Graham-Campbell and Ager 2011 ; Gruszczyński 2018 ; Ingvardson 2012 ). It presents a model of well-integrated interdisciplinary research, bridging archaeological studies (e.g., Hårdh 2016 ; Jankowiak 2018 ; Roslund 2015 ), numismatics (e.g., Moesgaard 2015 ; Myrberg 2009a ; G. Williams 2014 ), and economic history (Gullbekk 2011 ; Skre 2017a ) within a joint research discourse (e.g., Graham-Campbell et al. 2011 ; Kershaw et al. 2019 ).

New results also issue from advances in biomolecular and isotopic approaches. Scientific methods of material analysis have started to reveal a scale and chronology of exchange that link trading centers more directly to a distributed network of production than was imagined ten years ago. Lead-isotope analysis has proven to be for metal circulation what strontium is for human movement. This is witnessed by studies on lead (U. Pedersen et al. 2016 ) and silver (Merkel 2016 ), with the further analytical projects now in progress (Hrnjic 2018 ; Kershaw et al. 2019 ).

Several isotopic systems, including lead, sulfur, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, may also characterize the provenance of key animal products such as deer antler (Becker and Grupe 2012 ) or wool (von Holstein and Makarewicz 2016 ). While much baseline data and studies into trophic webs and metabolic and taphonomic processes remain to be completed, multi-isotope analysis—sometimes in combination with proteomics and aDNA—has demonstrated the potential to trace the movement of previously undetectable movables including cod (Star et al. 2017 ) or, indeed, possible slaves (Naumann et al. 2014 ).

New analyses combining archaeological and scientific approaches are beginning to detail the procurement of resources such as beeswax (Gustafsson 2016 ), quernstones ( Baug 2015 ), fur (Lindholm and Ljungkvist 2016 ), soapstone vessels (Baug 2017 ; Forster and Turner 2009 ; Hansen and Storemyr 2017 ), iron (Loftsgarden 2019 ; Rundberget 2017 ; Tveiten and Loftsgarden 2017 ), tar (Hennius 2018 ), and whale bone (Hennius et al. 2018 ). These explorations have gone together with a broadening appreciation of the outfield economy—hunting, fishing, or the collection or extraction of animal and mineral products (Øye 2013 ). Complex chains of extraction, manufacture, and transport were required to produce these and other everyday objects and materials (Ashby and Sindbæk 2019 ; Mehler et al. 2015 ).

Instead of indicating a lingering primitive subsistence strategy in Viking Age economy, the provision of these and other products presented economic opportunities for (and the drive to) colonizing new landscape niches, or altogether new landscapes. Thus, the hunt for Arctic products, including walrus ivory, may thus have contributed to the exploration and initial settlement in Iceland and Greenland (Frei et al. 2015 ). Insights into the extraction of diverse products enable a new appreciation of the links between different economies and of what it meant to be an inhabitant of a farm in forest or mountain areas, where shielings, iron production, or hunting may have been as important as farming (see Svensson et al. 2009 ; Svensson 2018 ). This may move focus to the way of life and economy, in ways that may, among other things, liberate a somewhat fixed view of identifying actors either as Norse, Sámi, or creolized.

With these new insights into production, lifeways, and their links to trade and consumption, we also see the emergence of a more nuanced understanding of economy, a change in regional perspectives from consumers to producers, and an appreciation of the connections between producers across regions. This opens up questions concerning the social organization of production and motivates an interpretational framework in which not only kings and magnates take the spotlight. The obtainment of, for instance, reindeer antlers in the mountainous parts of present-day Norway or the production of tar deep in the forest of present-day Sweden must have been performed by inhabitants of the region who may not have been directly connected with the craftspeople using the products or the consumers obtaining them. The growing energy expended by rural communities in activities such as fishing, drying cod, extracting iron blooms, producing tar, or manufacturing soapstone vessels or molds correlates with the growing capacity to transport and exchange such products over long distances by sea. Charting the chronological and geographical development of outfield exploitation may therefore provide an opportunity for future research to follow the detailed impact of the Viking Age maritime expansion.

An even closer affinity between outfield resources and urban networks is revealed by the conjunction of materials, skills, and demands in craft production in towns. A number of recent studies into Viking Age crafts, many inspired by actor-network theory, resume interest in technology as an aspect of social relations. Studies have charted how the practice of nonferrous metalworking required access to multiple materials from different sources, including a range of alloys and specific clays for crucibles and molds, and involved long-term collaboration of masters and apprentices ( Gustafsson 2011 ; U. Pedersen 2015 , 2016a , b , 2017 ). The activities of craftworkers in towns were thus linked across long distances to rural populations, who were not only customers but also suppliers of essential materials.

The focus on networks of materials and people holds promising new perspectives for the study of relations within towns. A recent study highlights how the seemingly unassuming task of making a chest might involve a combination of advanced blacksmith skills to produce a lock and equally advanced nonferrous metalworking skills to produce a key, in addition to skillful carpentry, which again relied on tools provided and maintained by a blacksmith (Croix et al. 2019b ). If pursued at any significant scale, such a production—or equally those of horse harnesses, ornaments, and weapon sets—would have demanded continuous cross-craft collaborations, which might have provided an important stimulus for craftspeople to convene and thus contribute to the rise of early towns as nodes of special importance (Ashby and Sindbæk 2019 ).

Viking Age trade and urbanism appear increasingly distributed in ways that defy the once-accepted models of a “great transformation,” per Polanyi’s once overwhelmingly influential scheme (see Skre 2008 ). Although research continues to draw a line between Viking Age emporia like Ribe or Birka as economic centers and earlier Iron Age sites such as Sorte Muld, Helgö, and Uppåkra (Clarke and Lamm 2017 ; Fischer and Victor 2011 ; Hårdh 2010 ; Stidsing et al. 2014 ) as ritual and political ones, the validity of this distinction may increasingly be questioned. New research is needed to compare the long-term trajectory of what became the urban networks of the Viking Age in a way less bound by evolutionary assumptions. The same need for comparison exists between Viking Age and medieval towns. From the 11th century on, secular and ecclesiastic land owning increasingly influenced the course of urbanism in Scandinavia; however, the change is incoherently charted and conceptualized (Andersson et al. 2008 ).

Exchange networks and craft production relate to cultural preferences and inform on their operations as much as they tell about economic agency and power. While burials, hoards, ornaments, and even settlements are habitually analyzed in term of cultural meaning, the perceptions and preferences invested in exchange remain inadequately explored, often lost from sight when approached as economic practices and concerns. The permeable boundary between culture and economy is in need of intellectual trespassing from the point of view of the latter as much as the former.

Settlement and Social Power

While many discoveries in the past decade have emerged in laboratories or among museum collections, fieldwork remains a prime vehicle for research for a wide range of settlement studies and questions focused on power relations. Comparatively little attention has been paid to the highly varied rural settlement of Viking Age Scandinavia (Fallgren 2008 ). The presumption that ownership and inheritance of land was already established in the late Roman period in Jutland (Holst 2010 ) has had consequences for the interpretation of inherence. The right to inherited land was a turning point in Viking Age Scandinavia in particular, as also expressed in a number of rune stones (Zachrisson 2017 ). A break with the interpretation scheme of settlement is found in Norwegian archaeology, where the idea that Norwegian material followed the Jutlandic pattern has been challenged by new explorations of the eastern Norwegian settlement material that, in many instances, show a lack of continuity from the previous periods in the Viking Age settlement (Gjerpe 2017 ). Methodologically, this breaks with the Norwegian preconception of the Urgården (Pilø 2005 ), and it follows the rejection of the retrogressive method in Norwegian archaeology in recent years (Fredriksen and Amundsen 2014 ).

Beach sites and ship-handling sites, another group of locations of seminal importance in a maritime society, have similarly attracted few bodies of dedicated work (Madsen et al. 2010 ; Ulriksen 2019 ). Fortified ship encampments, or longphorts, one of the major discoveries of Irish archaeology in the 2000s, have seen continuing attention (Kelly 2015 ), in particular with the impressive publication of the Viking river camp Woodstown in County Waterford (Russel and Hurley 2014 ). Metal detecting has brought archaeological substance to army camps and wintering sites in England (Hadley and Richards 2016 ; G. Williams 2020 ). As yet, neither army camps nor longphorts have any clear Scandinavian counterparts, although naval activity and military campaigns must have occurred here as well. Tracing lesser-known site types and activities such as these should be a future priority.

A key focus of research in the past decade are assembly sites and, more specifically, sites for thing moots (Sanmark and Semple 2008 ; Sanmark et al. 2013 , Semple and Sanmark 2013 ). Scholars have identified circular courtyard sites in northern Norway as potential assembly sites (Brink et al. 2011 ; Iversen 2015 ; Storli 2010 ). The examinations of the assembly sites have profited methodologically from the juxtaposition of material and written sources (Sanmark 2017 ; Sanmark and Semple 2008 ). In Sweden, runestone inscriptions have been correlated to the physical structures in the surroundings. The construction of new mounds and the establishment of assembly sites in relation to older mounds has been proposed as a means of giving credibility and creating an atmosphere of belonging while simultaneously negotiating power relations by linking the assembly site to the past (Sanmark and Semple 2008 ; Semple and Sanmark 2013 ). These analyses demonstrate that assembly sites may be an umbrella for a multitude of types of places. Variation also clearly characterizes the material. Just as in the discussions of central places and metal-detector sites, the reassessment of assembly sites has shown that a strict and formalized one-fits-all model is a poor match for these locations.

The outstanding focus of settlement research, however, has been on high-status sites and monuments, a clear contrast to previous efforts to trace the life and settlements of “ordinary people.” This emphasis has arisen in part because high-status sites lend themselves well to popular narratives and to a new pattern of funding structure. Scandinavian archaeology today is increasingly sponsored by public or private bodies through competitive, project-based donations. Meanwhile, developer-led archaeology often remains unpublished and thus detached from further research (though not always; e.g., the Norwegian report series Varia such as Gjerpe 2008 ). The project-based funding structure invites a focus on recognized sites and safe returns. While high-profile research excavations in the 1980s and 1990s often turned to sites and phenomena that had not figured strongly in previous research, revealing what has now become well-known locations such as the power centers and/or market sites in Tissø, Sebbersund, Borg, Åhus, Fröjel, and Uppåkra, part of the focus has now returned to famous locations.

Projects anchored in well-known sites, typically places known through written sources, entail a risk of embracing existing narratives rather than challenging the equilibrium of research. This tendency is exacerbated by the perennial temptation for archaeologists (Danish ones openly, Norwegian and Swedish researchers often with more caution) to conflate modern states with the namesake medieval kingdoms and to link finds with kings and kingdoms. Thus, the fame of sites such as Jelling, Borre, and Gamla Uppsala, and the research conducted in these places, tend to easily reinforce inherited images in the public domain, a tendency that sometimes reflect back on research priorities.

Big projects tend to involve a long fermentation period. Thus, two of the major monographs of the decade, on the well-known centers Borre in Norway and Lejre in Denmark, report on projects essentially conducted in the 1980s and 1990s (Christensen 2015 ; Myhre 2015 ). This is even more true for the famous Danish ring fortress and settlement site Aggersborg, excavated in the 1940s–1950s but not published until recently (Roesdahl et al. 2014 ). Similarly resurrected by publication is the Swedish Valsgärde cemetery, mainly excavated in the 1920s and 1930s (Nordahl 2018 ). While it is positive to find engagement with old excavations and to see the materials made available, the long delay to publication remains an impediment for research. Some of the projects that drew attention during the 2000s, such as Tissø, have yet to be published beyond outlines (Jørgensen 2010 ).

Meanwhile, new excavations and surveys at Gamla Uppsala in Sweden have situated the three monumental mounds and a previously excavated hall building into a wider landscape of burial grounds and settlements, including what is believed to be a giant ritual palisade or rows of raised timber pillars along the road leading into the center (Beronius Jörpeland et al. 2018 ; Eriksson 2018 ; Ljungkvist and Frölund 2015 ; Ljungkvist et al. 2011 ). More recently, small-scale excavations have revealed a complex stratigraphy with several phases of hall buildings and fire events, handing enticing points for a future biography of the place (Ljungkvist 2018 ).

Other new fieldwork projects increasingly involve remote sensing and geophysics: at Borre in Norway, ground penetrating radar (GPR) and LiDAR surveys have revealed the shoreline and jetties (Draganits et al. 2015 ), as well as the outline of several large hall buildings (Tonning et al. 2020 ). At nearby Gokstad, GPR and LiDAR mapping were similarly used to reveal traces of settlement once connected with the famous ship grave (Bill and Rødsrud 2017 ) and its landscape context (Schneidhofer et al. 2017 ). Heimdalsjordet, the newly found production and trading site at Gokstad, has sparked discussion, suggesting to some a smaller version of emporia sites like Kaupang or Ribe (Bill and Rødsrud 2017 ) (Fig. 8 ).

Plan of settlement traces discovered by ground penetrating radar surveys at Heimdalsjordet, Norway, close to the famous Gokstad ship burial. The row of building foundations resembles settlements at emporia such as Hedeby or Dublin. After Bill and Rødsrud ( 2017 )

The Avaldsnes project in western Norway has taken a different approach, in part because the complex medieval history of the site did not allow large-scale excavations. Instead, the project has aimed to reconstruct the long-term settlement history of a site believed to have been a key residence of early Norwegian kings (Skre 2017b , 2019 ). The project owes more than any other recent project in Scandinavia to the tradition of landscape archaeology, with excavations and surveys flanked on one side by onomastics, written sources, and retrospective map studies, and on the other side by environmental archaeology. It bears conceptual kinship to the Mosfell archaeological project in Iceland, which centered on the Hrísbrú farm, the supposed home of the skald Egill Skallagrimsson (Zori and Byock 2014 ), and the Quoygrew project in Orkney, although the latter is deliberately focused on commonors’ production and identity rather than aristocracy (Barrett 2012 ).

As in Sweden and Norway, the most sustained fieldwork efforts in Denmark and northern Germany have been directed at supposedly royal monuments. At Danevirke, a multiyear excavation targeted the only gate known in the ~10-km-long main rampart, almost certainly the guarded entry mentioned in a ninth-century peace treaty (Tummuscheit and Witte 2019 ). The excavations have added to the complexity of the monument, detailing constructions over several centuries and pushing the date of its earliest phase further back, possibly into the fifth or sixth century AD, although the publications remain cautious about these dates.

At the famous burial mounds and rune stones in Jelling, excavations have revealed an entirely new context (Holst et al. 2013 ) yet reinforced the impression of a short-lived site, its monumental investments all dating to the second half of the 10th century. This is a marked contrast to, for example, Avaldsnes or Gamla Uppsala. The findings include a huge wooden enclosure, which is dated to around 968, during the reign of King Harald Bluetooth and is laid out to a strict geometric plan (Jessen et al. 2014 ). This ties the monuments closely to the carefully planned architecture known from the contemporary Trelleborg-type ring fortresses, which are ascribed to the same ruler.

The latter fortresses have seen no shortage of attention. Major work has been undertaken to establish their landscape context (Dobat 2013b ). In addition to the final publication of Aggersborg (Roesdahl et al. 2014 ), excavations at the least-studied site, Nonnebakken in Fyn, have revealed the first plausible traces of gateways and buildings (Runge and Henriksen 2018 ). Radiocarbon dates are argued to put an early phase of this ring fortress back into the eighth century, but whether these dates relate to the fortress itself or to earlier activity in the site remains to be proven.

A recent addition to this group of monuments was discovered at Borgring, south of Copenhagen, where an almost obliterated earthwork has now been confirmed as the remains of a 10th-century ring fortress (Goodchild et al. 2017 ). Borgring is a rare example of a hitherto virtually unknown site becoming the target of a major research project (Christensen et al. 2018 ). Although the attention of the project has deliberately been aimed at questioning established narratives about the ring fortresses, many details of the findings—and certainly of their reception—have confirmed the image of concerted royal agency, thus inadvertently contributing further to the popular myth of Harald Bluetooth as a founding figure in Danish history.

Other notable projects have tended to reiterate the focus on high-status settlement (Dobat 2014 ; Jessen and Terkildsen 2016 ; Lemm 2014 ; A. Pedersen et al. 2019 ). In Aska, Östergötland, the outline of a 50-m-long hall building has been established by GPR and is now targeted for further investigation (Rundkvist and Viberg 2015 ). A similar hall building reported from Birka is less clearly indicated by the GPR data and awaits further confirmation (Kalmring et al. 2017 ). If nothing else, the resulting discoveries have shown that aristocratic settlements were frequent and present in all landscapes; they were not merely a regional characteristic (see also Holst 2014 ).

This continuing focus on aristocracy and lordship reflects widespread conceptions of social power, which have developed little since the 1980s (Poulsen and Sindbæk 2011 ). Major studies continue to be explicitly framed by evolutionary state-formation theory and hierarchical, top-down models of power (e.g., Christensen 2015 , p. 257; Iversen 2013 ; Skre 2019 ). In a similar vein as settlement sites, elite graves have been studied as expressions of power strategies based on claiming ancestry (Bill and Daly 2012 ; Opedal 2010 ; A. Pedersen 2006 ; Thäte 2007 ). Rather than simply control and manipulation, the sites may give insight into the conceptualization of temporality, group identity, and self-perception (Beck 2017 ).

A more explorative use of the different types of data may be a first step toward different perspectives. For Borgring and Gokstad, the critical factor in pointing to unexpected spots for excavation were remote sensing and geophysical surveys, which helped bridge the gap between landscape studies and excavations. Artificial intelligence techniques such as automatic landscape classification and feature detection may further enhance the use of these data (Stott et al. 2019 ). In a similar way, geoarchaeology may refocus attention to hitherto neglected activities (Macphail et al. 2013 ; Milek 2012 ; Milek and Roberts 2013 ) and site history (Cannell et al. 2016 ; Devos et al. 2013 ; Macphail and Linderholm 2016 ; Wouters et al. 2016 ). Zooarchaeology equally has the potential to explore practices such as communal feasting (Mainland and Batey 2018 ; Zori et al. 2013 ).

On the whole, research excavations have been less successful in complementing the targeted focus on high-status settlements and monuments with characterizations of locations and activities on the landscape. A wider focus is needed to integrate settlement archaeology with the increasingly acknowledged network of outfield activities—shielings husbandry, hunting, quarrying, iron production, etc. It will also be key to address what will certainly be one of the priorities for the coming years: the study of environmental change.

New conceptual frames for the power base of high-status settlements are equally needed. As a theoretical framework, some scholars point to assemblage theory, arguing how approaching one village, house, or even one posthole as an assemblage enables a perspective in which this assemblage acts on humans (Beck 2018 ; Eriksen 2019 ). Anarchistic theory provides another possible alternative to narratives built on a traditional “top-down” power focus (Borake 2019 ). These new perspectives include alternative paths in settlement archaeology that move away from traditional power perspectives and center-periphery models.

Environment and Climate: Vikings and the Anthropocene

Concerns over current climate change have placed the study of environmental change and its effects on human societies in the past as a key priority across historical sciences. Only 12 years ago, Barrett ( 2008 , p. 673) could justly dismiss speculation on climatic determinants for the Viking Age settlement expansion with reference to an almost complete lack of adequate data. Since then, research on paleoclimate has advanced decisively by high-resolution studies (e.g., Anchukaitis et al. 2017 ; Helama et al. 2017 ). Archaeologists now call for a response to the condition of what is considered the Anthropocene era of significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems and for an exploration of the deep-time ramifications of this concept (Brewer and Riede 2018 ; Solli et al. 2011 ).

A reconstruction of annual summer temperatures through the past two millennia confirm a marked warming trend in the eighth and ninth centuries (Büntgen et al. 2016 ), which calls renewed attention to earlier suggestions that a climate amelioration was an incentive for the Viking Age expansion of maritime connectivity and of settlement (e.g., Dugmore et al. 2007 ). Another new set of data lends unexpected support for this suggestion. Over the past decade, global warming has led to significantly accelerated melting from high-altitude ice patches in the Scandinavian mountains (Fig. 9 ). Systematic fieldwork has revealed thousands of artifacts emerging from the retreating ice patches, including many related to the hunting and trapping of reindeer. The ice-patch finds are still in an early stage of exploration, and their evidence is currently hard to interpret due to complex cycles of warming (leading to ice-patch melting and possibly also increased activity) and cooling (leading to ice-patch growth, thus fossilization). Yet, so far, the chronology of dated artifacts suggests a marked peak in the abundance of hunting and all ice-patch activities in the eighth to 10th centuries (Pilø et al. 2018 , 2020 ).

Viking Age finds from melting high-altitude ice patches in Scandinavia reveal intensive exploitation, including reindeer hunting. This and other outfield activities provided valuable resources for subsistence and exchange economies. Photo: Secrets of the Ice Project

Hunting and other organized resource exploitation in wooded and mountainous outfield areas formed an essential part of the economy in premodern Scandinavia (Solli 2018 ; Stene and Wangen 2017 ). It remains to be determined to what extent the high-altitude hunting activities relate to a general demographic expansion and thus an increase in the human footprint on the landscape, or more specifically to expanding trade cycles, which caused rising demands for products such as reindeer antler (Ashby et al. 2015 ). To relate these and other patterns of exploitation in sensitive and sometimes highly volatile outfield environments to the networks of exchange presents a prime research challenge for the coming decade.

The impact of the debate on environmental change is also visible in research on Viking Age colonization in the North Atlantic. This has featured as a prominent example in international debates on climate and human-induced environmental change (Diamond 2005 ). Environmental studies in Iceland have shown that, despite the massive environmental impact, Norse settlers were well aware of the limitations of the landscape and took rational and largely successful measures to secure long-term sustainability for their society (Catlin 2016 ; Hartman et al. 2017 ; Vésteinsson et al. 2014 ). In Greenland, researchers have similarly stressed that Norse colonists managed to establish a sustainable presence for centuries in a fragile Arctic landscape until the balance was upset by rapid cooling in the late medieval Little Ice Age, together with the upheavals in European societies caused by the Black Death (Dugmore et al. 2007 , 2012 ). Thus, the exploitation of marine resources in Greenland may also point to the ability of the Norse population to adjust to the environment (Arneborg et al. 2012 ; Keller and Perdikaris 2016 ).

These examples set a precedent for the ways in which attention to climate and environmental change may alter our understanding of the Viking Age and how archaeology may contribute to enhancing the historical framing of current debates. As it is increasingly recognized in contemporary discourse, climate will need to be approached as a vector in a broader environmental perspective. This is where archaeological research may find a new position of strength in years to come, in a paradigm with the potential to integrate scientific data and cultural interpretation with historical trajectories, landscape settings, and environmental interactions.

Research in the last decade has transformed Viking Age archaeology into a field where diaspora and other cross-cultural, comparative themes have gained prominence. A strong focus on mobility and interaction has grown in reflection of modern globalization and its consequences and through interdisciplinary dialogue with new archaeoscience. Isotopic signatures in human skeletal remains have begun to offer results of real historical and archaeological consequence, while aDNA studies look poised to do the same in the next few years.

In the interpretive field, previous interests in collective beliefs and action have waned in favor of issues concerned with personal identity, personhood, and the nonnormative, spurred by interests in ethnicity, gender, and intersectionality. This has created a new focus in mortuary archaeology, with strong attention to themes such as transgression and nonconformity, including of gender. Studies of cult and ritual have shifted away from landscapes to artifacts with a biographical approach and “animated objects” being explored, accompanied by new attention to the role, use, and effects of cultural memory and links to the past in artifacts and monuments.

Interests in urban communities and their networks have inspired more detailed, “high-definition” strategies in research and excavation, and geoarchaeology has emerged as a decisive toolbox within this program. Meanwhile, a new appreciation of the agency of wider communities, especially through the outfield economy, is prompted by studies issuing from isotopic analysis, which, together with a massive influx of materials recorded from private metal detecting, highlight the scale and impact of exchange.

Field archaeology has seen an emphasis on elite settlements and monuments and, to some extent, military sites and political assemblies. Paleoclimate research, such as ice-core studies and tree-ring chronologies, has produced high-resolution data that, along with concerns over present climate change, has begun to place environment and climate fluctuations more centrally in Viking research.

Many of these developments can be recognized across other fields of archaeology. Viking research has taken a lead on some, such as mobility and interaction, while being comparatively less engaged in others, such as environment and climate. The field remains a regional specialization with a notably international profile, bringing together researchers from across northern Europe, eastern Europe, and North America. Yet, it is also a field of many divides: Scandinavian researchers, influenced by a national self-perspective, continue to pursue themes of emerging kingdoms, social power, and cultural sophistication. To archaeologists in the English-speaking world, by contrast, the Vikings chiefly stand out as agents of change in studies of migration, identity, and interaction.

In particular, one may identify a persistent divide between two research tendencies (e.g., Lund and Arwill-Nordbladh 2016 , pp. 415–416). The first approaches the Viking Age as a pattern of societal change, marked by transformative developments of military and political centralization, maritime trade, war, and piracy. For this paradigm, the past decade of research has been fueled by new methods for tracing the movement of humans and materials, framed by questions concerning globalization, social networks, and environmental change. This is typically framed by a social archaeology framework and assumes an economic, technological, or sociological focus. Within this strand of thinking, the prime movers are often perceived as political and military leaders—kings and magnates—and the focus of attention is predominantly male, as is the balance of the research community. In a related strain, the focus is on migrants, colonizers, or town dwellers—favorite protagonists, one might note, for middle-class academics.

The second perspective sees the period in terms of changes in culture, identities, and worldviews. This line of research has worked with biographical approaches to objects and assemblages and from theoretical frameworks grounded in social anthropological thinking and post-humanist theory, mostly aligned with historical archaeology or with interpretive and cognitive archaeologies. This type of scholarship displays a more balanced gender profile.

The authors of the present paper see their own research as being largely divided along these different strands. The persistence of two diverging research perspectives may be no particular problem in itself, but the continuing lack of mutual interest and cross-referencing is. Both perspectives have too much to offer the other in terms of calibration and expanded vision.

If we combine these perspectives in future archaeological research, we may enhance depths and nuances in our understanding of the Viking Age. If many factors caused the Viking Age, how do we understand and analytically approach the totality of constituent parts? We may use the concept of entanglement or meshwork to begin to grasp the social consequences of, say, launching just one ship. The sail for a large ship alone might consume the wool of 200 sheep and the equivalent of 10 years’ work to process (Bender Jørgensen 2009 ). What was the environmental impact of those sheep? Who owned them? Who organized the cutting, spinning, and weaving of the wool? Who ordered the sail, and what was the power relation between the owner of all or some of the sheep and the producer of the sail? We may expand these perspectives to the shipbuilding and the farmers who produced a surplus of goods to bring as food supplies for the journey. Did the iron nails originate from iron production in the uplands of present-day Norway, even if the ship was built in present-day Denmark? We may examine the chaînes opératoires and know-how used for the production of ropes: who taught it, and who mastered it? Were the passengers only human, or were there animals onboard, and if so, were they separated or seated side by side? And if we include the insights gained from the studies of social identities and cognitive studies, we may ask who were the people onboard the ship, and to what degree was their identity fluid, hybrid, or fixed? Who raised, trained, and educated them? Did the sailors include more than one gender and more than one social role? How and by whom were decisions made, and how was leadership organized? To understand what got the ship across the sea, we must develop models that will enable us to grasp the power relations involved in the production of the ship, the launching, the sailing, the actions conducted by the sailors once ashore (be it trade or plundering), and the return to the homelands. Furthermore, these processes may integrate new models for understanding power, acceptance, and negotiations if they utilize the many new insights into social identities in the Viking Age. If warrior women existed (be they many or few); if ritual experts were not simply liminal but were potentially part of a high social strata and could be of male or female sex; and if the producers of craft were also entangled in long-distance trade network, then all decisions can hardly be reduced to the will of a king or magnate. In other words, what and who put the ship to sea? These are examples of questions that may be approached by further pursuing the theories and methodologies that have been included into Viking Age archaeology over the past decade.

Conclusion: Aims, Goals, and Challenges of Viking Age Archaeology of the 2020s and Beyond

This overview allows us to identify at least some of the aims, goals, and challenges of Viking Age archaeology. Interpretations of the Viking Age are often marked by the preconceptions of the researchers. Present (and hopefully future) studies see an active effort to challenge such preconceptions. We call for a Viking Age archaeology that engages with critical heritage studies to explore how this time period may be studied today in ways that resist glorifying narratives, be they nationalistic, paganistic, or simply violent. In other words, we call for studies that take postcolonial and decolonizing perspectives seriously in order to counter the loaded cultural heritage of the Viking Age.

A call for an ethically founded Viking Age archaeology also includes challenges to the essentialistic notions of societies as closed units, toward an archaeology in which migration and diasporas are perceived as a typical rather than an atypical process in a human lifespan. These issues are even more strongly at stake as methods such as aDNA are brought to the fore. The introduction of aDNA into research on other parts of prehistory has been argued to cause a return to a concept of culture as a limited, bound unit (Frieman and Hofman 2019 ; Furholt 2019 ), reintroducing essentialist notions of “us” and “them.” In the highly contested field of Viking Age archaeology, we strongly hope for the incorporation of archaeosciences in a theoretically reflected and reflexive archaeology. Thus, we call for a Viking Age archaeology in which the humanistic approaches strike back. Through these approaches, we may arrive at studies of social identities that take into account the complexity and diversity of past societies more than they currently do.

As interpretations are used in the creation of identities and self-perceptions within contemporary society, we envisage an archaeology that is open to multiple social roles and identities of past societies and how they cooperated or conflicted in Viking Age Scandinavia. Simultaneously, there is a need to increase insight into the schemes within which identities were created, changed, or maintained in this period of the past. Approaches to identity need to be balanced with the study of personhood and post-humanistic theory. In addition, by exploring the active use of the past in Viking Age society, we may gain insight into not only who controlled or owned the past but how the past, time, and temporality were integrated into self-perception and Viking Age ontology and thereby expanded the understanding of identities to also explore how humans perceived the world in which they lived.

Similar considerations have consequences for how we approach and perceive power relations. There is a need to move from the static focus on elites to research that engages with the dynamics of agency and power toward a reconsideration of the complexity of entanglements of gender, identity, and status that took place in relation to the elite and other social groups. In spite of the abundance of new insights and the intersectional perspective that highlight the layeredness of social identities, we are still stuck with analyses of Viking Age society that reduce most agency and power to kings and magnates. We call for a move beyond monuments and elite residences to a concern with the sites and landscapes where people interacted in other ways than the power affirmations and rituals of the hall. This will be a movement away from predisposed narratives that cannot be considered ethically sustainable. It includes a critical reconsideration of the terminology and understanding of relations and character of ownership in relation to enslavers and enslaved in Viking Age society. It feeds into a reengagement of Viking Age archaeology within critical cultural heritage research perspectives. We can therefore utilize critical and ethically reflective studies of Viking Age archaeology to address the misuse of archaeology within ethnic, nationalistic, or other politicized movements.

This also opens up conflicting interests even within a single individual. It may pave the way for studies that examine how diverging social groups, including slaves, were given and obtained social value. It includes a perspective for the lives of the socially deviant within a society; but more importantly, these new insights influence our comprehension of the ways in which power was constructed. We claim that this change of perspective is also an ethical obligation.

Thus, the nuances in the perceptions of social identities must have consequences for how we conduct research on social processes of change. These perspectives may provide us with a Viking Age archaeology that moves beyond the divide of focusing either on social organization or on social identity, personhood, and ontology. We believe that merging these two research strands can enrich the field. We foresee perspectives that incorporate social theory of other types of organization, moving beyond traditional, violence-based power notions.

In the past years, new ways of organizing and perceiving economy have grown out of changes in society today. The widespread adoption of “share economy” (to take one example) in present-day society has demonstrated how the social organizational aspect of economy may change rapidly in a society. This might also enable us to be perceptive to different aspects of Viking Age economy and how it is linked to social organization in ways different from those explored when focus was on globalization and new alignments between national states and larger economic units such as the Eurepean Union.

As current climate debates place the study of environmental change as a key priority for historical and archaeological study, a broader exploration of societal–environmental interaction is needed to bring Viking research into the Anthropocene. One way of moving ahead in combining social and cultural dimensions is to reengage a spatial framework and return to the landscape with new environmental perspectives. In this respect, we see a need for studies that more effectively integrate urban centers and exchange with movement and landscape.

We call for a Viking Age archaeology that challenges concepts such as hinterlands and outfields in order to grasp the complexity of codependency; an archaeology that moves beyond center-periphery models in order to understand dynamics between settlements or urban contexts and the so-called “outfields”—heathlands, mountains, and forests. The solution may not simply be to include the outfield but to integrate the diverse outfield studies into a common effort, rather than studying, for example, iron, stone products, and hunting separately, thereby working toward an understanding of these economies and the relationships between the various activities. We therefore call for spatial analyses that include all the resources moving from and to the “outfields,” linking them to the lives of humans in other regions and to other resources, all the way into the grave. In this sense, resources are also perceived as ecology. Thus, we challenge Viking Age archaeology to become a sustainable archaeology, ethically as well as in terms of exploring the dynamics between ecology, resources, and relationality in complex societies with long-distance trade. The study of production and exchange also needs to be more fully integrated with the social practices and cultural meaning that made particular activities, things, and achievements desirable and preferable.

We ask for a Viking Age archaeology in which economy is approached as a way of life and in which the connections between economy and ecology are examined in depth. Thus, we call for new landscape approaches built on the incorporation of geoarchaeology, biomolecular archaeology, and other archaeosciences to establish a Viking Age archaeology within environmental humanities.

The achievements of Viking Age archaeology in the 2020s will rest on its ability to align and combine what is currently too often approached separately as societal versus individual or economic versus cultural perspectives (Table 1 ). In this way, we may integrate the new frontiers of genomics, identity, and society into an ethical framework guided by critical humanistic perspectives. And we may unite concern for the environment and change with the human dynamics of mobility, with new models of the distribution of power in social networks, and with ecology and landscape as integrative frameworks.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Steven P. Ashby, Unn Pedersen, Neil Price, the five anonymous peer reviewers, and Editor Gary Feinman and the editorial board for valuable comments on the draft manuscript. In addition to giving our manuscript important clarifications and additions, these comments made us wish to expand our paper far beyond what was feasible. Julie Lund’s contribution is supported by “Using the Past in the Past. Viking Age Scandinavia as a Renaissance,” financed by the Research Council of Norway, project no 250590. Søren M. Sindbæk’s contribution is supported by the Danish National Research Foundation under the grant DNRF119 – Centre of Excellence for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet). Thanks to Jan Bill, Dawn Hadley, Jesper Langkilde, Jüri Peets, Lars Pilø, Julian D. Richards, and David Score for permission to reproduce images.

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Lund, J., Sindbæk, S.M. Crossing the Maelstrom: New Departures in Viking Archaeology. J Archaeol Res 30 , 169–229 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-021-09163-3

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Features of a Viking Ship

The Hull of Havhingsten (c) TBirkett. CC BY NC

Clinker Construction

One of the defining features of Viking ships are their clinker-built construction, with overlapping side planks (or strakes) fixed together with iron clinker nails. This gives the ship hulls a distinctive 'stepped' appearance, and also allows for quite a bit of flexibility: rather than resisting the force of the waves like a modern boat with a completely rigid hull, Viking ships flex and bend with the waves.

The overlapping planks were caulked with a mix of wool fabric and tar, but some leaking is inevitable, and bailing out the bilge is an important job! Photo is of a clinker nail from Dublin in the National Museum of Ireland.

The Steering Oar on the Tune Ship. (c) RDale

Steering Oar

Viking ships did not have a rudder at the back of the ship (a medieval innovation in Scandinavia), but instead had a large 'steering' oar attached to the starboard (or 'steering-side') of the ship. The steering oar is held to the side of the ship  by a fastening that passes through the side of the ship and is wrapped tightly around the frame of the ship (a wicker-band) - the hole for this fastening can be seen on this example of a steering oar from the Tune Ship in the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, whilst the photo on the right of the Oseberg ship shows the oar with attachments, including the large rudder boss through which the fastening is passed. 

The Gokstad Ship. (c) RDale.

Sail and Mast

Whilst only fragments of Viking Age sails have survived, a large portion of the mast and keelson was preserved in the Gokstad ship burial, as well as the places where the rigging was attached to the hull. Using this information, along with knowledge of tradition square-sailed ships, and supporting evidence from depictions of ships from the period, we can get a good idea of the size and set-up of the sail, which could be well over 100 square meters on a larger Viking ship. The sail was made of densely woven wool or flax and treated with horse mane fat, and was a very valuable item.

When the yard was raised and lowered a parrel such as the one pictured here (found in Dublin) helped to hold the yard to the mast. Raising and lowering a heavy sail on a larger Viking ship requires many hands. 

The Reconstructed ship 'Havhingsten' with lowered sail. (c) TBirkett. CC BY NC

Fragments of Rope from the Oseberg Ship (c) RDale.

Whilst pieces of cordage have survived in finds such as the Oseberg Ship, the rigging has to be reconstructed based on attachment points on the hull and from understanding square-sailed ships. The rigging set up probably varied between ships, and could be adjusted during the lifetime of the ship. Shrouds on either side of the mast help support it from the side, whilst the stays support it in a lengthwise direction. The braces help to turn the yard and the sheet controls the bottom edge of the sail. In all, thousands of meters of rope are required to rig a larger Viking ship. Rope was made from lime bast, and also from animal skin and horse-tail.

The beitass on Havhingsten. (c) TBirkett

The ' beitass' (stretching pole)

To help with sailing by (or against) the wind, some Viking ships made use of a beitass (a tacking or stretching pole). On a larger ship this was a heavy wooden pole which was slotted into the ship's hull on one side, and attached to the formost corner of the sail on the other, helping to stretch and accurately position the sail when sailing by the wind.  The beitass on a ship like the Sea Stallion reconstruction (pictured here) requires at least four crew members to maneuver and to fix the lower corner of the sail  when turning (or tacking) with the ship. 

Ships from an earlier period of Scandianvian history relied solely on oars for propulsion, and all Viking ships could be rowed as well as sailed. On smaller boats, oar locks such as these from the faroes are common, whilst oar holes through which the oars could be deployed are the norm on larger ships such as Gokstad (pictured below). 

These holes could be closed when not rowing in order to limit the volume of water coming through the sides of the ship. The largest Viking ship discovered (Roskilde 6) has up to 80 rowing positions.

(c) RDale. CC BY NC

On high-status ships, the wood was often carved and decorated, as is the case with the Oseberg ship. Even floor timbers out of sight beneath the deck were sometimes ornamented! The stems may have been elaborately carved as on the Oseberg ship, or removable figureheads attached for the purposes of identification and possibly intimidation! We know from the Bayeux Tapestry that ships could be painted, and the sails dyed.

Decorated oar-lock from Gokstad and the sail of the reconstructed Ship 'Havhingsten fra Glendalough' dyed with yellow and red ochre.

All you need to know about Viking ships

Not only were these Viking ships unique in design, structure and decoration, but they also helped propel Viking warriors across rivers, seas and oceans with lightning speed. 

These ships were the perfect tool to allow Viking warriors to strike fear into communities from modern-day Canada to Constantinople.

Surrounded by the sea

The Scandinavian Peninsula – as the name suggests – is surrounded by water. For millennia before the first Viking set foot on a ship, peoples and communities in this region had developed an economical, religious, and military function for ships. 

As forests and mountain ranges dominate the Scandinavian Peninsula, shipping was often seen as the most efficient and easiest method to facilitate communication and trade.

Aside from its more pragmatic purposes, the ship had also developed ceremonial and religious functions for people living on the Scandinavia Peninsula. 

Archaeologists have discovered stone engravings of ships from as far back as the Nordic Stone Age (115,000 – 11,700 BCE), whilst the Nydam and Hjortspring boats, discovered in Denmark, were believed to have been buried as part of an elaborate ritual ceremony.

The importance of ships only grew during the Viking Age (793 – 1066 CE) . They were not only a sign of power or wealth – desirable by local political rulers and elites but also helped population growth. 

Once small communities, like Ribe (Denmark), Oslo (Norway), or Birka (Sweden), soon grew in size and stature to become important hubs of commerce thanks to goods and people ferried by Viking ships.

Unique method of boatbuilding

Perhaps the most important design aspect of any Viking-era boat was how it was constructed. As Scandinavia was never incorporated into the Roman Empire, a separate and distinct boatbuilding method was allowed to foster without any Mediterranean influence.  

Clinker-built boats (sometimes known as lapstrake) were a method of boat construction that originated in Scandinavia that has been traced back to boats constructed as far as the 4th century BCE.

This technique sees the edges of planks that form the hull overlap, making the boat not only more hydrodynamically efficient – and thus smoother, able to glide through the water faster – but also more robust and more flexible than other boat designs. 

Furthermore, this greater flexibility allowed a small overall displacement that was an advantage when crossing the often dangerous and choppy waters in the North Atlantic Ocean and its tributary seas.

The boat's planks were fastened together with copper or iron rivets and iron nails bent to form a hook or screws.

Though made famous by Viking era Scandinavia sailors, traders and pirates, this boatbuilding method was also employed by peoples in Anglo-Saxon and Frisian societies.

The burial mound of the Oseberg ship. Photo: Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo / Olaf Væring

Viking ships - more than just the longboat

So this unique construction method allowed Vikings to have a comparative advantage over many of the societies they raided, especially in Northern and Southern Europe. 

Though the longship is perhaps the best-known symbol of Viking-era maritime skill , engineering and technology, it was not the only type of vessel used by people in Viking societies. Some of the more common types were:

Færing – this was perhaps the most common – and smallest – type of boat used during the Viking Era. It is an open rowing boat with two pairs of oars hence the name, færing , which is Old Norse for "four oars." These can also carry a small sail and stern-mounted rudder. Some of the small boats uncovered with the Gokstad ship resemble a færing .

Knarr – was a type of ship built to ferry people and goods across long oceanic distances. The Viking's cargo ship, it had a long, deep and wide hull with a length of about 16 meters / 53 feet and a beam of 5 meters / 15 feet. Cargoes of up to 21 tonnes / 24 tons could be carried.

It was primarily used to carry commodities like wool, timber and wheat, but more exotic fares like walrus ivory, honey and even slaves were loaded onto this ship too. 

They were also responsible for ferrying livestock between Norse settlements in the Scandinavian homeland to more periphery settlements (e.g. on Greenland or Iceland). 

The best-known example found was in the Roskilde fjord in 1962 amongst the Skuldelev ships that are today on display at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde .

Longships – the longship is one of the most widely known and celebrated symbols of Viking military prowess, maritime skill and engineering ingenuity. Broadly speaking, these were long, narrow and light ships with a shallow hull, allowing navigation in shallow waters (for example, rivers) or landing warriors on a beach, a sort of an early medieval personnel carrier.

Longships were also double-ended, with oars down the length of the ship, allowing reversal to be achieved quickly and efficiently. Longships built later in the so-called "Viking Age" also had a single sail, which could propel the ship to speeds of up to 15 knots, but most sailed between 5 – 10 knots. To put this into context, a journey from Western Norway to the British Isles could take as fast as a few days.

Academics and historians have classified the longship into four similar but distinct types. These are:

1) Karvi – The smallest type of longship. As defined by the 10th century CE Gulating Law , a ship with 13 rowing benches was the smallest available for military expeditions. These were mostly used for trade and fishing but could be augmented to meet military needs. The most famous example of a k arvi is the Gokstad Ship, which will take pride of place in the new Viking Ship Museum being constructed in Oslo.

2) Snejkk a – the smallest type of longship strictly used for military warfare. This had a minimum of 20 rowing benches, a length of 17 meters / 56 feet and could carry 40 oarsmen. These were apparently so light they could be simply pulled and stored ashore. These were the most common type of longships during the early medieval period.

3) Skeid - these were the largest form of known longships with more than 30 benches for rowing. During harbour excavations in Roskilde in 1962, Danish archaeologists uncovered a group of these ships. One of these boats, named the Skuldelev 2, spans a length of just under 30 meters and could carry a crew of 70 – 80 men. A more modern construction, Draken Harald Hårfagre, was built in 2012 and sailed to the British Isles, including stops in Liverpool, the Isle of Man, and the Orkney and Shetland islands.

There is another type of longship – Drakkar (Old Norse for "dragon") that has been the source of widespread speculation. Said to be larger than a skeid , the only evidence we have of these is found in sagas. 

These were said to be elaborately decorated with a dragon or a snake on the ship's masthead. There has been no archaeological discovery of a dragon ship yet, but the city seal of Bergen (designed in the late 13th century CE) depicts one.

The Gokstad ship was buried in the ground for almost a thousand years. Photo: Museum of Cultural History / University of Oslo

The legacy of Viking ships

The structure and design of the boat made the longship a deadly weapon utilized so effectively by Viking warriors throughout the early medieval period. 

The lightweight and shallow hull allowed the ships to sail in a variety of different environments – from the North Atlantic Ocean to the various river systems that snake through Eastern Europe and the Russian steppe. 

Unlike other contemporary ships, this gave Viking warriors a far superior range of mobility. This enabled them to bypass coastal defences and strike at lightning speed, often at the rear of an army or at a strategic weak point.

Though devastatingly lethal at first, by the 11th and 12th centuries CE, the cultures and societies that the Vikings raided, traded and colonized soon began to adopt Viking shipbuilding technology.  In fact, they remained popular amongst the newly emerging kingdoms of Norway and Denmark until at least the early 15th century CE.

Though they once dominated the North Atlantic world, only a fraction of Viking ships has been uncovered by archaeologists and scientists. 

The Nydam ship, discovered in the mid-19th century CE, in Sundeved, Denmark, is believed to be the oldest constructed longship, dating from between 310 – 320 CE. Its discovery was vital for the understanding of the evolution of the design and construction of later Viking longships. 

The Oseberg and Gokstad ships in Norway are perhaps the most magnificent examples of later Viking-era shipbuilding design and technology. Finally, the Gjellestad ship, uncovered in Halden, Norway, in 2018, is still currently being excavated and analyzed.

In the latest meeting of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, in December 2021, the "Nordic clinker boat traditions" – the construction method for many Viking era ships – was placed on a worldwide list of "intangible cultural heritage."

To follow the latest news on the Gjellestad ship excavations, visit the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research website here (in Norwegian).

For a UNESCO press release on the recognition of 'Nordic clinker boat traditions', click here.  

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Jonathan Williamson

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 Reviewed Article

Roar ege: the lifecycle of a reconstructed viking ship.

1 Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Vindeboder 12, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark.

Tríona Sørensen. Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Vindeboder 12, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark. [email protected]

In 1962, the remains of five late Viking Age ships were excavated from Roskilde Fjord, near Skuldelev on the Danish island of Zealand (See Figure 1: Crumlin-Pedersen and Olsen, 2002). Twenty years later, the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde began the process of building its first full-scale Viking ship reconstruction, the 14 m long coastal transport and trading vessel, Skuldelev 3. Over the next two years,  Roar Ege  was built at the Museum boatyard and the  Roar Ege   Project marked the start of a process that would form the core of the Museum’s research endeavours: the experimental archaeological reconstruction of ship and boat finds. 

Roar Ege  was launched in 1984, and after more than 30 years on the water, has many sea miles under its keel. The years have, however, taken their toll on the ship.  Roar Ege  has undergone several major phases of repair – most recently in 2014. It was hoped this repair would keep  Roar Ege  afloat for several more years but by spring 2016, the ship had deteriorated to such an extent that it was clear that  Roar Ege ’ s sailing days were over.

With  Roar Ege ’ s retirement on land, its contribution to maritime experimental archaeological research has entered a new and vital phase. For the first time, we have a comprehensive data set over the lifespan of a reconstructed Viking ship, from the first axe cuts into oak logs in 1982 to the last moments on the water in 2016.

This paper presents an object biography of  Roar Ege , from the perspective of both the boatbuilder and archaeologist, focusing on the manner in which the hull has deteriorated and the components that are involved in its decline. This biography is compared to the evidence of repair on the original ship-find, exploring the potential these data have for developing an understanding of the prospective lifespan of Viking Age ships, and the materials and resources entailed in maintaining and repairing them throughout their active use.

The recovery of the Skuldelev Ships

The excavation and analysis of the Skuldelev ships has been published in depth elsewhere but warrants a brief summary here (Crumlin-Pedersen and Olsen, 2002). There had long been a local tradition that there was a shipwreck on Roskilde Fjord, off the coast at Skuldelev. Following two underwater surveys to determine the extent of the site in the late 1950’s, a coffer dam of sheet pilings was erected out on the fjord, in the summer of 1962 (See Figure 2). This allowed the water to be pumped out, giving the archaeologists access to the fjord bed. The layers of sand and silt were then removed, revealing five late Viking Age ships (Crumlin-Pedersen and Olsen, 2002, p.29).

These were no shipwrecks, however. They hadn’t been lost in a storm or run aground. Rather, the five ships proved to have been intentionally scuttled during the late 11th century, as part of an extensive system of barriers on the fjord, built to protect the town of Roskilde from seaborne attack (Crumlin-Pedersen and Olsen, 2002, p.331). Over the course of the summer, the excavation team successfully uncovered and raised all five ships – an enormous jigsaw puzzle of over 50,000 ships parts, all of which were then documented prior to being conserved (Crumlin-Pedersen and Olsen, 2002, p.54).

The Skuldelev ships were – and still are – an exceptional find in terms of Danish maritime archaeology. The five ships also present a unique snapshot of the specialisation of late Viking Age maritime technology, which in turn reflects the multifaceted nature of late 11th century society:

Table 1: General information concerning the five Skuldelev ships. * During excavation, the timbers belonging to Skuldelev 2 were originally thought to belong to two separate ships and were therefore named Skuldelev 2 and Skuldelev 4. Once the excavators realised that it was in fact one exceptionally long ship, the find had some years where it was referred to as Skuldelev 2 + 4, but is now most commonly referred to as Skuldelev 2.

The best-preserved of the five ships is Skuldelev 3: a 14 m long cargo and transport vessel built of oak in Denmark around 1040 AD (See Figure 3; Crumlin-Pedersen and Olsen, 2002, p.239). Roughly 75% of the hull had survived the many centuries on the bottom of the fjord, making it the most complete Viking ship found in Denmark to date (Crumlin-Pedersen and Olsen, 2002, p.240).

The idea of reconstructing the ships in full-scale had emerged very early on in the process of excavating and analysing the Skuldelev ships. As the most intact of the five, Skuldelev 3 was the obvious choice to start with. Twenty years after the initial excavation, the Museum embarked upon its first full-scale experimental archaeological reconstruction.

Roar Ege: Skuldelev 3 as an archaeological experiment

The Roar Ege Project ran from 1982 – 84, under the direction of a steering committee led by Ole Crumlin-Pedersen (Crumlin-Pedersen, 1986a; 1986b; Andersen, et al ., 1997, p.11). This was the project that would mark the start of the Viking Ship Museum’s experimental archaeological endeavours and as such, much thought was given to the project’s framework prior to its commencement. As with all archaeological experiments, the Roar Ege Project also had a clear set of goals, defining the overall scope of the project:

• The project would provide the opportunity to conduct scientific investigations into Viking Age ship-building and seafaring
• Through photos and film documentation, the project would provide a unique insight into Vikings ships and how they were handled
• The project would create a direct link between the original ship-find as exhibited in the Ship Hall and the full-scale reconstruction for visitors to the Museum
• The project would also allow visitors to the Museum to try their hand at various craftwork processes.

From the beginning, the steering committee had a clear ambition that the research-based elements of the project should always take precedence over the education and outreach aspects of the build (Andersen, et al ., 1997, p.10).  As such, they laid out the following rules, which provided the basis for the archaeological experiment:

• The build should be led by a group of specialists within the fields of Viking ship research, ship-building, rigging and sailing, with Ole Crumlin-Pedersen (archaeologist), Morten Gøthche (architect and secretary), Søren Vadstrup (leader of the building project), Erik Andersen (rig master and responsible for reconstruction of the form) and Max Vinner (responsible for the sailing trials).
• The ship should be built using the same materials and techniques as can be seen on the original find.
• The ship should be built as an exact reconstruction of the original ship, as it would have appeared when newly built.
• The entire process should be documented in text and photographs.
• A programme of test-sailing must be undertaken after the launch to establish the ship’s sailing capabilities, cargo capacity etc.
• The work would be concluded with the publication of the project and its results. (Andersen, et al ., 1997, p.11)

They had one further specification in terms of the execution of the actual building process: the work of constructing the ship would primarily be carried out by a group of young people with experience from previous ship-reconstruction projects but without formal boatbuilder educations (See Figure 4). This decision was based on the idea that modern boatbuilders – even those versed in traditional methods – would be unable to leave their inherent learning and understanding of tools, techniques and materials ‘at the door’. That they would inevitably, consciously or otherwise, apply a twentieth century craftsman’s mindset to the task at hand, which could have an impact on the process of re-discovering Viking Age boatbuilding techniques (Andersen, et al ., 1997, p.80).

This is perhaps one of the primary differences in terms of how the Museum approached experimental archaeology 30 years ago and how we approach it today. With Roar Ege , much emphasis was placed on the ‘clean slate’ approach whereas now, the professional traditional boatbuilder’s understanding of materials, tools use, form and function is something that is valued and prioritised, and which has become an integral part of experimental archaeological practice at the Museum boatyard.

Interestingly, two of the non-professional participants in the Roar Ege Project - Søren Nielsen and Tom Nicolajsen - went on to train as professional boatbuilders and have established careers working with the building of experimental archaeological ship reconstructions. Another of the team, Vibeke Bischoff, has specialised in the process of reconstructing the hull form of archaeological ship-finds, under the tutelage of Erik Andersen. All three are still working at the Viking Ship Museum today, and their combined experience is a well-spring that we continue to draw from in the work at the boatyard.

Back in 1982 however, the Roar Ege team had to ‘re-learn’ the various techniques associated with Viking Age boatbuilding.  During the course of the construction of Roar Ege , they became proficient in the use of reconstructed Viking Age woodworking tools and techniques (See Figure 5). The skill-set and understanding of materials that they developed during this project has been passed on to subsequent boatbuilding teams, essentially becoming the foundation for all proceeding experimental archaeological reconstruction projects at the Museum boatyard.

The construction of Roar Ege took two years, with some of the team working full-time on the build while others were involved seasonally. The quantities of materials used in constructing the hull were recorded in the ‘Roar Noter’ , a series of notes that were written during the course of the build (Roar Ege Byggedagbog, section 15). Unfortunately, the exact dimensions of the logs used were not written down. Rather, they recorded the amount of material in cubic meters. Likewise, apart from the quantities involved in making the keel, stems and radially cleaved planking, the other amounts are rather generally recorded, with different components listed under the same numerical total. Table 2 below gives an overview of the materials necessary for building a reconstruction of Skuldelev 3’s hull:

Table 2: Summary of the quantities of wood and metal required to construct Roar Ege’s hull. (Roar Ege Byggedagbog, Section 15).

A total of 54.21 m3 green timber was required to build Roar Ege. In layman’s terms that equates to roughly:

• 10 oaks, varying in diameter from 0.45 m – 1 m and in length from 4.4 m – 12 m
• Two pine logs, with diameters of 0.3 m and lengths of 10.5 m
• Two willow logs, with diameters of 0.4 m and lengths of 4 m
• 60 pieces of crooked oak for knees
• 25 pieces of crooked oak for floor timbers

Upon completion, the hull weighed in at 2000 kg. The amount of timber incorporated in Roar Ege’s hull therefore represents ca. 4.85 % of the volume of raw timber acquired. While a good proportion of the remaining ca. 95 % of timber was hewn and chipped away, and ended on the ground surrounding the building site, other larger sections were reused for other purposes outside the project. It should also be borne in mind, that there was likely little to no waste at boatbuilding sites in the Viking Age, as leftover wood could be used for any number of purposes and failing all else, burned as fuel for fires.

It lies beyond the remit of this article, but it should be stated that a final tally of materials would of course include a far broader range of materials and resources. Tar and oil for treating the hull, charcoal for producing the iron fastenings, the various wooden elements of the rigging, rope, sail, oars and anchor, and so on.

For the purpose of this article and the examination of the processes involved in Roar Ege’s decline, the focus will remain on the hull itself.

Roar Ege’s active service begins

Roar Ege was launched on August 25th, 1984 and the waterborne part of the archaeological experiment could begin (See Figure 6; Crumlin-Pedersen, 1986b; Andersen, et al ., 1997). A volunteer boat guild was established, largely composed of the same group that had built Roar Ege , and they were given responsibility for the general maintenance of the ship, as well as for sailing the vessel. Roar Ege and its crew were highly active both in terms of sailing regularly in their home waters on Roskilde Fjord and in promoting the Museum and experimental archaeology by participating in regattas and other events abroad (See Figure 7). Some of these events were travelled to under their own steam. In 1986, for example, they undertook a voyage to Gotland in Sweden, which took two months in all. Other events such as the renowned wooden ship regatta at Douarnenez in France (1988) and the Viking festival at Hafnarfjördur in Iceland (1995) involved transporting the ship by freight. Roar Ege has also been exhibited on land several times, including a stint on display outside the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin from 1998-99.

All of these actions – both the everyday stresses incurred while sailing in all kinds of wind and weather and the more occasional extended periods on dry land – have an impact on the hull, requiring maintenance and repair on both minor and major scales.

Maintenance, repair and documentation of archaeological ship-reconstructions

As with all of the reconstructions in the Museum’s collection, there is a division of labour in terms of the maintenance and repair of vessels. Boat guilds are responsible for the general maintenance – tarring, painting, small repairs to the sail and rig and so on – while any repairs demanding a more experienced hand are carried out by the Museum’s professional boatbuilders.

Each reconstructed ship is documented in what has become affectionately known at the boatyard as a ‘Service Book’. Here, record is made of the repair work carried out on the ship, as well as any changes that are made to the construction or components of the sail and rigging which are replaced and renewed.

The service books are an invaluable resource for us as a Museum in our work with experimental archaeology. In the case of Roar Ege , the service book represents an archive going back over three decades. It is also the collective output of many different people over the course of these years, and an indirect repository of the way in which our approach to experimental archaeology has developed over time. This kind of long-term perspective is a great asset to us as a research institution and one that we’re deeply appreciative of. Being able to look back at how other boatbuilders have dealt with the problems that inevitably arise with wooden boats and ships is a great resource for our current boatbuilding team, and one that means that we can avoid constantly having to reinvent the wheel when finding solutions for repairs.  

Rot, rust and clinker-built complications

Various small running repairs were carried out during the first two decades in which Roar Ege was in use. The first major repair came in 2003, when the mast, the two uppermost strakes, stringers, and several knees and futtocks had to be replaced due to rot.

This repair encapsulates one of the major challenges associated with maintaining clinker-built boats. Clinker-built boats are constructed using a technique where boards and other components overlap each other (See Figure 8). Even with regular care, maintenance and cleaning, these overlaps can create ideal conditions for rot. Of particular note here are the longitudinal reinforcing timbers – the stringers. Clinker-built ships are designed to have a degree of flexibility – this is one of the advantages of the method as it allows for light constructions which can take a considerable beating when at sea. The downside of this flexibility is that components – such as the stringers – which are only fastened using treenails, can work themselves loose over time. This creates gaps between components, trapping moisture and organic matter between the contact surfaces of the stringers and the boards they are fastened to, facilitating the growth and spread of rot. The outer shell of the hull, which is comprised of overlapping boards is not affected by rot in the same way. The land, or overlap, between the boards is caulked using tar and wool, and this helps to exclude moisture from the joint. Where planking material has become subject to damage from rot, it has generally been because it started in the internal stringers and then spread to the surrounding planking material.

The other significant problem our reconstructions face is the rate at which the iron rivets corrode. They expand as they rust and this leads to cracks occurring in the planking material around the rivets (See Figure 9). The iron fastenings used in the construction of Roar Ege are perhaps the main element that deviates from the project’s ambitions about using the same materials as would have been used in the Viking Age. In the early 1980’s, very little archaeometallurgical analysis of ship’s fastenings had been carried out. The project team therefore relied on the limited information that was available, drawing heavily on the work of Olfert Voss and Vagn Fabricius Buchwald 1 (Voss, 1962: Andersen, et al ., 1997, p.42).  

Siemens-Martin steel, produced using the open-hearth method in Daval, France, was chosen for the production of rivets and roves (Andersen, et al ., 1997, p.44). Siemens-Martin steel is a very homogenous material, and with the benefit of hindsight, it could be argued, that it bears very little resemblance to the heterogenous bog iron the majority of Viking Age ship’s nails were produced from (Lyngstrøm, 2008, p.9). However, at the time, the team felt that Viking Age boatbuilders would have sought the best-quality material they could source for fastening their ships and that the purity of Siemens-Martin steel, coupled with its low carbon-content, would make it a good match for this hypothetical material (Andersen, et al ., 1997, p.44; Buchwald, 2005).

Our experiences with the rapid rate of corrosion and rust of the rivets in Roar Ege – and with the other subsequent Skuldelev reconstructions – would seem to suggest otherwise. Rivets tend to need to be replaced after ca. 15 years (rivets below the waterline degrade at a faster rate than those above) and the majority of our reconstructions have seen several phases of rivet replacement through the years. While rivets that have been removed from ships are a common enough find in the archaeological record - especially at ship-breaking sites such as Fribrødre Å here in Denmark - there is limited evidence for a double-imprint of the accompanying rove on surviving ship’s components (Skamby Madsen and Klassen, 2010). This is something you would expect to see on the archaeological timbers if the original ships had also been subject to repairs as extensive as our reconstructions.

In recent years, the theory that the relatively higher phosphor content in the bog ores used to produce Viking Age iron may have made the material more corrosion-resistant than modern day iron has gained traction (Buchwald, 2005, p.173). This is an issue that the Museum will be setting an increasing focus on in the future, as it is of significance both in terms of furthering our understanding of Viking Age metallurgy and potentially prolonging the lifespan of our full-scale reconstructions.

Sequence of repairs: Roar Ege’s Service Book

The sequence of maintenance and repair that was carried out on Roar Ege since the launch in 1984, has been documented, both in text and photos, and represents a unique data set in terms of the experimental archaeological reconstruction of ship-finds. Many archaeological finds are reconstructed in full-scale and used in a manner similar to that in which the original find was employed, but to have this kind of detailed documentation over a time period spanning more than three decades is quite rare, and therefore of some significance in terms of furthering our understanding of Viking Age ship-building and seafaring. 

That said, it must also be acknowledged that we often ‘use’ our ship reconstructions in ways in which they were never intended to be used: extended periods of exhibition on land, being lifted by crane when under transport by cargo ship and so on. For example, some of the earliest repairs that were carried out on Roar Ege were undertaken to remedy damage that occurred when lifting the ship by crane. In other words, we occasionally inflict stresses on the hulls of our reconstructions, which they were never designed to take, and this caveat must also be held in mind when analysing Roar Ege’s sequence of maintenance and repair.

Roar Ege’s service book is an extensive one. The list below summarises the primary phases of repair carried out on the hull, during the period from 1984 – 2014:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the frequency of the repairs increased as Roar Ege got older. Once the first decade on the water was over, repairs – both minor and major – became a fairly regular fixture.

It’s stating the obvious perhaps, but the degree of difficulty – and time and materials - involved in a repair varies greatly depending on which part of the hull is affected. Boards can be repaired and replaced without too much difficulty from the keel up to the fourth strake. From here on up, it gets more complex as you have to remove more of the internal components in order to carry out the work.

Each repair is therefore assessed in terms of its feasibility – is it worth carrying out the repair and is it something that we can defend within the framework of an experimental archaeological reconstruction project?

The last major repair to Roar Ege was carried out in 2014 and saw the replacement of the fifth and sixth strakes as well as several major internal components (See Figure 10). It had been hoped that this repair would keep Roar Ege on the water for another five to ten years but unfortunately, this was not to be the case. By 2015, the state of the hull had deteriorated significantly below the waterline. Considerable leaks appeared where rusting rivets began to crack the surrounding planking materials. When the ship was hauled up that autumn, a phase of discussion began as the boatyard team had to plan their course of action.

Should Roar Ege be repaired again in the hopes of keeping the ship afloat for another few years or should we accept that the investment of time and materials it would take to render the ship seaworthy again was simply beyond what was realistic within an experimental archaeological framework?

After much thought, it was decided in the spring of 2016 that Roar Ege’s sailing days were over. The ship was 32 years old at this point and the first of our Skuldelev ship reconstructions to be retired from service (See Figure 11).

When is an archaeological experiment over?

Roar Ege’s retirement at 32 years of age gives us a benchmark against which to assess the hypothetical lifespan of the other Skuldelev ship reconstructions (See Figure 12). It also raises a number of issues concerning how and when to ‘end’ an experiment. With the benefit of hindsight, the authors would contend that the work carried out in 2014 could be seen as one repair too many. It’s difficult to imagine that Viking Age boatbuilders – or boat owners, for that matter – would have invested so much time and so many resources in repairing such an aging vessel. They would most likely have split the hull apart, reused what they could and scrapped the rest.

This problem does however highlight some of the difficulties of working with experimental archaeology in a museum context, where reconstructions are not just the preserve of researchers but also play a large role in dissemination to museum guests. There is perhaps a tendency towards wanting to prolong the life of a reconstruction, and the limitations set by museum budgets also create a set framework within which we must operate.

Some might also argue that the experiment isn’t over yet – that’s its natural conclusion would be to strip the ship of all loose components, patch it up so it could make the journey and tow it out to be scuttled in the fjord, just as Skuldelev 3 was. This process would give us better insight into the manner in which the original ships deteriorated under water and perhaps provide a more precise understanding of the damage we see on the original hulls – were the various cracks and splits present when they were scuttled or are they something that occur as the hull falls apart on the sea floor?

However, the dissemination value Roar Ege has acquired for us as a museum means that the ship will end its days on exhibit rather than on the bottom of Roskilde fjord. As a ship-reconstruction, Roar Ege has also assumed almost mythical status within the field of maritime experimental archaeology. It was the first reconstruction built here at the Viking Ship Museum and after retirement, has essentially become an artefact in its own right - and one that features prominently in the Museum’s current plans for future exhibitions, where Roar Ege is expected to stand centre stage.

The ship is also still an important reference object for us in terms of further research. As is the way of long-term archaeological experiments, new questions continue to arise – patterns of wear and tear on Roar Ege’s hull can contribute to future research into rigging, boat-handling and more. So for now, the experiment continues – albeit, on land.

Repair work carried out on Skuldelev 3 and Roar Ege

Skuldelev 3 is estimated to have been between twenty to thirty years old when it was scuttled at the barrier at Skuldelev (Crumlin-Pedersen and Olsen, 2002, p.333). This total tallies well with the 31 years Roar Ege had in active service. Skuldelev 3 had been repaired several times during its lifetime, with short sections of planking being replaced below the waterline (See Figure 13; Crumlin-Pedersen and Olsen, 2002, p.230). Strikingly, the situation with the sequence of repairs on Roar Ege can be seen as quite the opposite. Apart from the sheathing added in 2012 and the general deterioration of the lands in 2016, the majority of the repairs have been located above the waterline.

It is difficult to say exactly what has given rise to this disparity, and it’s a result that leaves more questions than answers in its wake – questions that will shape the form and focus for maritime experimental archaeological research at the Museum for some years to come.

Below, is a short summary of just some of the issues that have been up for discussion at the boatyard since Roar Ege’s retirement:

• Bog iron’s potential resistance to corrosion: Would iron fastenings produced from bog iron have greater resistance to corrosion, reducing the frequency of the need for replacement of planking? This is an issue of pressing importance for us with the knowledge we now have in hand concerning Roar Ege’s lifespan and one that we intend to explore in much greater depth in coming years. Currently, it is hoped that we can build a small rowing boat in 2021/22, which will be entirely fastened with rivets and roves of bog iron, allowing us to explore this issue more fully.
• Treatment of the ship when not in use: Our Viking ship reconstructions live a very seasonal existence. They are launched in late spring and spend the summer months either on Roskilde Fjord or further afield when undertaking longer voyages. When not in use, they lie moored in the Museum harbour. At the end of the sailing season in late October, they’re hauled up on land and ‘put to bed’ for the winter. The boatbuilders carry out any major repairs that need to be done and come the following spring, the tarpaulins and covers are removed and the crews begin tarring, painting and generally readying the ships for launch again. And so the cycle continues, no doubt in many ways parallel to what ship owners and users were also doing in the Viking Age. One part of this cycle which may deviate however, is the way that our ships lie moored in harbour. Skuldelev 3’s keel is quite worn, suggesting that the original ship may have been more regularly hauled out of the water when not in use and hereby more often removed from the damp conditions at sea – might this slow both the onset of rot and decay in the timbers and the rate of corrosion of the iron fastenings?
• Saltwater v. freshwater: The brackish waters of Roskilde Fjord have a relatively low salinity of just 11 psu (practical salinity unit, a measurement equivalent to parts per thousand) in comparison with the more saline waters of the North Sea, which average over 30 psu (Erichsen, et al ., 2017, p.134). Could a higher salinity potentially help to hinder the development of rot in the ship’s timbers?

The materials involved in the repairs carried out on Roar Ege also present an interesting picture of the resources required in keeping the ship seaworthy over the course of its use. Table 3 below illustrates the quantities of material involved in repairing Roar Ege’s hull from 1984 – 2014:

Table 3: Materials utilised in repair and maintenance of Roar Ege’s hull from 1984 – 2014.

A total of 54.21 m3 of oak was used in the initial construction of Roar Ege’s hull and a further 13.8 m3 were involved in the various phases of maintenance and repair. This seems a striking amount of material but one that is difficult to draw concrete conclusions from as it is the only tally of its kind that we have to date. Comparison with the subsequent Skuldelev ship reconstructions will no doubt prove a fruitful exercise in the future.

Preliminary conclusions – and questions for future research

Roar Ege’s retirement in 2016 marked the end of the life-cycle of the first full-scale, sailing reconstruction of the five Skuldelev ships. However, Roar Ege’s contribution to maritime experimental archaeological research is far from over. The collation of Roar Ege’s ‘Service Book’ is the first step in the research programme of a new reconstruction project at the Viking Ship Museum’s boatyard - ‘Skuldelev 3 Revisited’ . The project began in 2017 with Vibeke Bischoff undertaking a reinterpretation of the original ship-find, which resulted in a new 1:10 reconstruction of the hull form. Construction of the full-scale reconstruction of the reinterpreted form of Skuldelev 3 began in May 2017 and the ship is expected to be launched in late summer 2021 (See Figure 14).  

The data represented in Roar Ege’s hull, and in the documentation of the many repairs conducted over the years, is now the subject of further study, as we seek to extract as much information as we can concerning the materials and resources required in sailing and maintaining Viking Age ships.

However, some preliminary conclusions can already be drawn:

• Life span of the hull: Roar Ege was retired after 32 years and would appear to have had approximately the same life span as Skuldelev 3. Yet Roar Ege’s hull displays far more wear and tear than that of Skuldelev 3 – the potential reasons for this have been outlined above and are still under investigation.
• Life span of the sail: Roar Ege was initially equipped with the linen pilot sail, which was then replaced by a wool sail in 1985, handwoven by a team of weavers at Fosen Folkehøjskole in Norway, under the direction of Solfrid Aune, Yngvild Andersen and Kirsti Godal (Andersen, et al .,1997, p.213). This sail has also had running minor repairs over the years but is otherwise still in perfect condition. The sail has therefore outlived the ship. The wool sail is currently in storage and we plan to continue using the same sail on the new full-scale reconstruction of Skuldelev 3, allowing us to continue monitoring the life span of the sail and see this aspect of the archaeological experiment through.
• Material use: A total of 54.21 m3 of timber was required to construct Roar Ege’s hull. A further 13.8 m3 were required to maintain the hull over a thirty-year period. These totals can now be used to explore issues concerning the control and management of raw materials for ship-building in the Viking Age.
• Maintenance of other Viking ship reconstructions: The collation of Roar Ege’s service book has led to the identification of several weak points on the ship, such as the contact surfaces between the stringers and the board material. While we can’t be sure that extra vigilance in terms of keeping this area of the ship free from organic debris would have helped inhibit, or perhaps even negate, the development of rot, it is still a detail worth paying attention to. It’s important that we relate the insights gained into the process of deterioration of Roar Ege’s hull to our volunteer boat guilds who sail and maintain the other Skuldelev ship reconstructions, so they are more informed as to where and how potential problems can arise.

Roar Ege’s retirement and the preliminary conclusions that can be drawn from this first phase of the archaeological experiment raise a great many questions, some of which can be addressed promptly while others will require more long-term experimental archaeological analysis.

Roar Ege was built on a foundation of the shared expertise of craft specialists, archaeologists and sailors: concluding the research aspects of the ‘Roar Ege Project’ will also require the skills and knowledge of each of these groups. The documentation carried out during Roar Ege’s construction and during the three decades in which the ship was in use provides a solid foundation for this work. It also creates a framework of materials and resources within which we can begin to plot the other Skuldelev ship reconstructions as they gradually move towards retirement, ensuring the continuation and development of maritime experimental archaeological practice at the Viking Ship Museum.

• 1 Andersen et al states that Buchwald was consulted on the process. The majority of his publications on the subject, however, came after the completion of the Roar Ege Project.

Bibliography

Andersen, E., Crumlin-Pedersen, O., Vadstrup, S. and Vinner, M., 1997. Roar Ege: Skuldelev 3 skibet som arkæologisk eksperiment. Roskilde: Vikingeskibshallen.

Buchwald, V.F., 2005. Iron and steel in ancient times. Historiske-filosofiske Skrifter 29. København: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab.

Crumlin-Pedersen, O., 1986a. The ‘Roar’ Project.  In: O. Crumlin-Pedersen and M. Vinner, eds. Sailing into the Past. Proceedings of the International Seminar on Replicas of Ancient and Medieval Vessels, Roskilde 1984. Roskilde: Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde. pp.94-103.

Crumlin-Pedersen, O., 1986b.            Aspects of Viking-Age Ship-Building in the Light of the Construction and Trials of the Skuldelev Ship-Replicas Saga Siglar and Roar Ege . Journal of Danish Archaeology, 5, pp. 209-228.

Crumlin-Pedersen, O. and Olsen, O., 2002. The Skuldelev Ships I. Ships and Boats of the North, Vol. 4.1. Roskilde: Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde.

Erichsen, A.C., Timmermann, K., Christensen, J.P.A., Kaas, H., Markager, S. and Møhlenberg, F., 2017. Development of models and methods to support the Danish River Basin Management Plans. Scientific documentation . Aarhus: Aarhus University, Department of Bioscience and DHI.

Lyngstrøm, H., 2008.  Dansk jern. En kulturhistorisk analyse af fremstilling, fordeling og forbrug. Nordiske Fortidsminder, Serie 3, bind 5. København: Det Kongelige Nordiske Oldskriftselskab.

Roar Eges Byggedagbog. Unpublished Internal Report. Roskilde: Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde.

Skamby Madsen, J. and Klassen, L., 2010. Fribrødre Å: A late 11th century ship-handling site on Falster. Moesgaard: The Viking Ship Museum.

Voss, O., 1962. Jernudvinding i Danmark i Forhistorisk Tid. KUML, 12(12), pp.7-32.

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'100-year find’: Enormous Viking ship holds surprising clues on burial rituals

The 1,200-year-old vessel, discovered in a norwegian potato field, is revealing an extraordinary picture of how ancient scandinavian warlords were sent into the afterlife..

In the south of Scandinavia, it’s not uncommon to see low, rounded hills appear here and there across expanses of flat farmland: These are often the remains of Viking-era burial mounds, many plundered centuries ago and plowed under by 19th-century farmers. In 2018, local officials asked the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Research to investigate the area around such a burial mound in Gjellestad , a site just north of the Swedish border. Ground-penetrating radar revealed the outlines of ten more mounds, plowed under in the last 150 years—and the ghostly outline of a wooden ship just six inches below the surface of a potato field.

The ship was likely from the Viking era and its apparent size, more than 60 feet long, would make it one of the largest yet discovered. It was the first intact Viking ship discovered in decades and declared a “hundred-year find” by archaeologists.

The Gjellestad ship also wasn’t supposed to be dug up—at least not anytime soon—but the effects of climate change and increased agriculture have forced the archaeologists’ hand. Their five-year study—the first Viking ship grave excavation of its size in more than 100 years—not only provides an unprecedented treasure trove of information on the ships and burials of the formidable ancient seafarers, but also serves as an experimental testbed for what even the tiniest artefacts can tell us.

Not buried at sea

While the image of Viking warriors laid to rest in their sleek ships is a mainstay of popular culture, the idea that the craft were set on fire or pushed out to sea as part of burial ceremonies has little archaeological evidence to support it.

These are the most spectacular Viking artefacts.

Rather, around A.D. 400, hundreds of powerful Scandinavian warlords began to be buried in their longships under earthen mounds more than 20 feet high. Thousands more, presumably of lesser means, were buried in smaller boats.

Today, however, Scandinavia’s ship graves are a critically endangered species. Over the centuries, the prominent mounds were robbed or plowed away, their contents stolen or damaged. The few ships found since 1904 were simple shipwrecks or were left in bogs.

This made the Norwegian government’s 2018 decision to leave the newly discovered Gjellestad ship underground a surprise to the public, but not to archaeologists who understand sometimes leaving things in the ground is the best way to preserve them for future researchers.

A year later, however, a team of archaeologists returned to the potato field to conduct a small excavation and get a sense of how well the wooden longship was preserved. A trench cut across the centre of the vessel revealed that the keel—the “spine” of the ship—was still intact, surviving for centuries in a deep, damp layer of earth. Based on tree rings from the keel and other parts of the vessel, researchers learned the Gjellestad ship was built sometime around A.D. 800.

Inside a Viking amulet "factory"

Thanks to an agricultural ditch dug in the 1960s and increasingly hotter, drier weather due to climate change, however, parts of the ship above the keel protruded above the protective water bath that had kept the ship’s wood oxygen-free and intact for more than a thousand years.

“The keel is so deep it’s been wet the whole time,” says excavation director Christian Løchsen Rødsrud , a University of Oslo archaeologist, “but the [planking has] been dried and become wet again so many times, there’s not much left.”

What’s more, archaeologists identified an aggressive fungus present within the ship that had begun to consume any wood that remained. What started as a cursory examination quickly unfurled into a large-scale emergency excavation: the Gjellestad ship had to be dug up.

“It’s going to be like Tetris"

In the summer of 2020 researchers broke ground on a Viking ship burial for the first time since 1905. The condition of the ship forced Rødsrud and his team to get creative. The top half of the Gjellestad ship had been plowed away long ago, and much of what remained had rotted away, leaving just plank-shaped impressions in the soil.

But a key element of the ship’s construction remained: More than 1,400 rusted-covered iron rivets, each exactly where it was when it held the ship’s planks together. Every rivet is surveyed, and its exact location recorded before being excavated in a small block of surrounding soil. Over the next year, each block of soil will be CT scanned, and the rivets reassembled into a 3-D model of the ship. Ultimately, the rivets will map the curvature of the hull, creating a digital version of the ship itself.

“Imagine reconstructing a house by looking only at the nails and roof beam,” Rødsrud says. “It’s going to be like Tetris.”

Even before the digital model is complete, the researchers have uncovered critical clues about the Gjellestad ship. The 60-foot-long keel is unusually skinny for a Viking longship, and it’s missing the reinforcements required to support a mast—meaning the vessel might have been rowed, but never sailed.

More importantly, the vessel dates to the late 8th century, around time Scandinavian mariners first began to fit sails on their longships, which made them capable of both long voyages and fast, sudden attacks. This suggests that the Gjellestad ship “is from the very beginning of the Viking Age,” says Rødsrud, and could be a transitional design reflecting a period of experimentation with sails. However, “[we] cannot conclude that the ship was not able to carry a mast before the reconstruction is made,” he adds.

Jan Bill , a curator at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo and expert on Viking-age sailing vessels, suggests cost might have been a factor. Sails were hand-woven from wool, involving huge investments of time and labour. Perhaps the mast and sail were removed from the Gjellestad ship and reused on a later vessel. “The cost of the sail might be almost as much as the ship itself,” says Bill. “It could be they removed the mast because it was so expensive.”

Theatre of the Dead

The technology researchers bring to the first Viking ship excavation in a century is also providing extraordinary insight into Scandinavian burial practices at the time. By analysing the soil in and around the Gjellestad ship, archaeologists were able to determine that people cleared a 50-foot circle of grass and topsoil from the site before hauling the ship on shore, possibly from a nearby stream. A ditch dug around the circle would keep spectators away from the vessel in its centre, while an earthen ramp or gangplank was installed on one side of the ship to facilitate the burial. At the bow of the ship was a “pool” of blue-grey clay. The effect may have resembled a theatre-in-the-round, with rituals taking place on the ship over weeks or even months.

Such Viking ship burials were “more than just a static ceremony,” says Neil Price , an archaeologist at Uppsala University in Sweden who was not part of the project. “They’re an arena for interacting with the dead.”

Whoever orchestrated the burial some 1,200 years ago paid attention to the smallest details. Squares of sod were carefully cut and then re-used like bricks to build up around the burial chamber. Squashed into layers less than an inch thick over hundreds of years, the turf bricks allowed the researchers to pinpoint the time of year it was cut by the blades of grass. The long-gone warlord was laid to rest at “harvest season, when the fields are all yellow,” Rødsrud notes.

The scene has echoes in other well-known Viking ship burials like the Gokstad ship , which was built not long after Gjellestad vessel and is now on display in Oslo’s Viking Ship Museum. Researchers took over 100 soil samples from its burial mound, which was excavated in 1880 and still stands today.

By analysing the layers of soil in and under the Gokstad mound, Rebecca Cannell , a soil expert working for the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, revealed other Viking ship graves were also far more than just piles of dirt. The Gokstad burial, too, was elaborately constructed, with a clay “pool” beside the ship and turf squares in alternating colours brought from nearby wetlands and stacked in specific patterns above the burial chamber. “It would have been beautiful,” Cannell says, “like a mosaic in brown and black and green.”

Ravaged by Bluetooth

When they began their work, archaeologists hoped to find out who was buried in the Gjellestad ship. Skeletons found in other ship graves belonged to both women and men; often there were multiple people interred in the mounds, with some perhaps representing retainers or enslaved people sacrificed to accompany their ruler into the afterlife. Unfortunately, the archaeologists soon realised the burial had been plundered long ago. “There’s no gold or silver left, even though I’m sure they were in there,” Rødsrud says.

But because burial mounds were important symbols representing a Viking community’s revered ancestors and were often erected next to significant settlements, presumably filled with heavily armed warriors, the theft was puzzling. How, they wondered, could tomb robbers escape undetected and unpunished? “You can’t really rob something like that in secret—it’s huge,” Price observes. “You’d not only have to dig a hole but cut through the ship’s planking.”

From disturbances in the soil around the plundered central chamber of the Gjellestad ship, the team determined that robbers cut a gaping tunnel in the mound’s west side, possibly big enough for someone to walk upright into the burial chamber.

Similar break-ins at other Viking burial mounds have been dated to 950, coinciding with the takeover of southern Norway by Harald Bluetooth. Archaeologists think the conqueror made a show of violating the graves of his rivals’ ancestors—and the Gjellestad ship burial might have been one of his targets.

Whenever they broke in, the Gjellestad robbers didn’t get everything, and what’s left hints at the rich treasure that once lay within: amber and glass beads, some covered in gold foil, a broken whetstone, a shard from a glass beaker, and fittings from a large wooden chest. Inside and outside the burial chamber, archaeologists recovered the bones of horses and oxen, suggesting a sacrifice accompanied the deceased to the afterlife. Other finds are more mysterious, like an axe head apparently wedged under the ship’s hull during the burial’s staging, either to prop it in place or as part of an unknown ritual.

Over the next year, Rødsrud’s team will continue scanning rivets and reassembling them digitally. They’ve decided not to unwrap the blocks of soil that contain the ancient fasteners: As part of a planned museum on the site, the rivets will be put back in the ground, in the exact spots where they were found. The data gathered, meanwhile, will be made available to scholars around the world to study, and hopefully reveal more about what drove the Vikings to set sail across the known world in their fearsomely efficient longships. In the meantime, the research team will continue to post their results online , and hope to soon have a digital reconstruction to “display” virtually.

“[The Gjellestad ship is] a type of ship we didn’t know before,” Rødsrud says hopefully, “and I’m sure it will tell us about seafaring in the Viking Age in a new way.”

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The world's most modern Viking ship can parallel park

You probably haven’t heard of electric viking ships before. old meets new in ‘saga farmann’ — and the vikings would probably approve, being the innovators that they were..

The Klåstad ship is often referred to as ‘Norway’s fourth Viking ship’, according to Norwegian Wikipedia . It was discovered in 1893, but not excavated until 1970. Unlike the other known Viking ships, the Klåstad ship was not used for a burial, it is a shipwreck.

In Vestfold, a district in eastern Norway, the Oseberg Viking Heritage Foundation has built a replica of the Klåstad ship.

The ship was launched in 2018 and is named ‘Saga Farmann’. From its location, docked along the wharf in Tønsberg, there is little evidence that the ship is powered by the latest in electric motors.

The Klåstad ship

• Norwegian merchant ship from the Viking Age.

• Found in 1893 in Larvik municipality in Vestfold.

• Dated to 998. Stranded or wrecked probably shortly afterwards.

• Built from oak timbers, as well as some pine and beech.

• Was loaded with whetstone from Eidsborg in Telemark

Source: Oseberg Viking Heritage Foundation

Needed approval

The foundation built the ship with long-distance voyages in mind. But it’s not (any longer) quite so easy to set sail with a Viking ship outside Norwegian waters.

‘Unfortunately, it has turned out that an open wooden ship, built the way that was used in the Viking Age, cannot realistically get approval as a passenger ship outside Norway's territorial waters,’ the foundation wrote on its website in 2018.

Long story short: It was a tortuous road to get approval.

“We found out early on that in order to be allowed to travel on Europe's waterways, you must have your own engine power on board,” Lars Bill said to sciencenorway.no. He is project manager for ‘Saga Farmann’.

The modern Viking gang was clear on one thing: They didn't want an old, smelly diesel motor with a propeller to power the new ship.

“We wanted an environmentally friendly variant with electric propulsion,” Bill said.

How do you build a Viking ship? These woodworkers are joined by researchers on their third Viking ship project

A result of many years of engineering experience.

That's where Finn Limseth and his colleagues came into the picture. Limseth is the founder and part owner of SeaDrive, which makes electric boat motors.

Limseth has many years of engineering experience. He has worked with underwater technology in the North Sea, among other things. He has also worked for many years with side propellers and anchor winches for the company Engbo.

“I have seen a lot of strange things in the North Sea,” Limseth said, referring to construction quality and materials used underwater.

Now he has brought his experience from both worlds to his own company.

It started with an old Draco

“I met these guys when they were test-driving a prototype in the canal below us,” Jan Vogt Knutsen said. He is construction manager at the Oseberg Viking Heritage Foundation.

The year was 2018, and the prototype was an old Draco boat that had just had a new electric motor installed. Draco boats are iconic Norwegian-produced fibreglass motorboats that were first sold in the 1960s. Knutsen wondered what this was all about and chatted with them.

“‘You are clearly the right people to create a specially adapted electric system for a Viking ship’, I said somewhat jokingly,” Knutsen said.

Limseth did not consider it a joke. He took up the challenge and invited people from the Oseberg Viking Heritage Foundation to a meeting.

Lars Bill and his people went to the meeting with strict requirements for what they needed.

Can turn completely around

They wanted a motor that could not be seen, heard or smelled. It sounded a bit like requirements taken from a fairy tale. The whole thing also had to be controlled with a joystick.

But Finn Limseth is an engineer and innovator. And so ‘Saga Farmann’ became a test ship for SeaDrive to play with.

The system they came up with involves four electric motors, called pods. They are controlled by a joystick. Apart from that, all the technical stuff is hidden under the deck.

“The pod can turn around completely, plus or minus 120 degrees. That gives you an ability to manoeuver that is completely unique,” Limseth said.

“With our system, you can motor backwards like a traditional Viking snekke,” which are pointed on both ends, says Limseth.

Four of the pods were mounted on the Viking ship: two in the front, two in the back.

The pods from SeaDrive are made from a material called aluminium bronze, which is highly corrosion resistant.

Can go on long journeys

The first journeys with the Saga Farmann after it was fitted out with its electric motors involved a bit of trial and error.

“We have had a new upgraded solution roughly every year,” Bill said.

Each improvement is a step forward.

In the beginning, they had no joystick control, so the pods had to be controlled manually. One person for each of the four pods, with two people given responsibility for communication between the controllers.

With limited battery capacity and manual steering, they snaked the ship up through the Telemark Canal.

“There were a number of things that stopped and there were some problems. This is what it’s like when you're involved in the basic development of a completely new solution,” Bill said.

There was never any danger, because SeaDrive showed up whenever problems arose, he says. That’s why the team always made progress.

After several updates and new sets of pods, the final solution may now be in place, Bill said. They have been on several long journeys in Norway and Scandinavia, with only one situation where the engines stopped working.

Shipwreck discovered at the bottom of Norway’s largest lake – possibly 700 years old

Setting sail for istanbul.

They’ve reached the stage where they trust the system enough to be willing to embark on journeys without accompanying boats. This is crucial for the great journey that they have planned to begin on 29 April 2023.

“This is the trip the ship was actually built for,” Bill said. “We will sail through canals, rivers and streams down to Istanbul, Turkey.”

‘Saga Farmann’ will spend the winter there before crossing the Mediterranean again the following year.

Before then, Limseth hopes that they will be able to start regeneration with the pods, using updated software. Regeneration is a kind of engine braking effect that charges the battery when the ship is under sail and the regeneration function is activated.

The crew knows there will be long distances between charging stations, so in addition to the batteries, ‘Saga Farmann’ has a diesel generator on board. But they will only use environmentally friendly diesel, Bill said.

Parallel parking Viking ship

The crew has encountered many curious people when they have been out with ‘Saga Farmann’, says Bill.

“One thing is its enormous manoeuvrability. We can turn it around in a circle and drive sideways. We can sneak in with a clearance of ten centimetres and have full control,” he said.

“When we docked in Risør during the wooden boat festival last year and parallel parked the Viking ship, curious people came over from the restaurant next door,” he said.

Racing boat with pods

“Many say that electric boats won’t be a realistic alternative for another five years,” Limseth said.

He is doing his part to prove that wrong. Admittedly, electric propulsion doesn't suit everyone's needs yet.

Take the racing boat of the Swedish alpine ski racer Jon Olsson as an example, he said. Olsson owns a fifty-foot carbon fibre boat, able to travel at speeds of more than a hundred knots, with two engines of 1,500 horsepower each.

“It has two of our pods as a hybrid. These pods are not just designed to provide a smell-free, mellow operation,” he said.

Large diesel-powered racing engines require servicing every fifty hours.

“So the half hour when he has to drive at three knots from the quay to open water, he would rather use electric propulsion to save his engines,” Limseth said.

Limseth often hears that there are currently too few charging stations. Completely wrong, he states.

“There is an untapped potential to easily double the number of charging stations by allowing boating associations to earn income by selling electricity. Many have compressors for bubble systems in winter and thus power capacity that’s available in the summer,” he said.

The Vikings were innovators

According to Lars Bill, old meets new in ‘Saga Farmann’.

“We are modern people, and even though we are building a culture to preserve

Viking Age craftsmanship, it’s very fun to bring innovation into this,” he says.

Bill says the ship represents the meeting of the best of two worlds. They describe the vessel as the world's most modern Viking ship. The Vikings were also innovators, he points out. The blacksmith was the great innovator of the time.

“I think it's cool that we have taken the most innovative thing we have in our time and connected it to this project. There doesn’t need to be any conflict between the new and the old as long as you have respect,” he said.

Research on electric boat motors

It is not only entrepreneurs like Finn Limseth who have seen the potential in electric boat engines. Researchers are also working on this.

Earlier this year, Trondheim was home to the world's first city-based trial operation of a self-driving electric passenger ferry.

“In the longer term, the technology can be further developed to create green, flexible and cost-effective transport along the entire Norwegian coast,” said Morten Breivik at the Department of Engineering Cybernetics at NTNU in an article from the university published on sciencenorway.no .

In 2018, we wrote about the world's first autonomous, zero-emission open-top container ship (in Norwegian). The plan was for it to go to Telemark and to be fully electric.

And in April this year, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation wrote about this ship's christening (in Norwegian).

Translated by Nancy Bazilchuk

Read the Norwegian version of this article at forskning.no

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 18, 2023 | Original: November 4, 2009

From around A.D. 800 to the 11th century, a vast number of Scandinavians left their homelands to seek their fortunes elsewhere. These seafaring warriors–known collectively as Vikings or Norsemen (“Northmen”)–began by raiding coastal sites, especially undefended monasteries, in the British Isles. Over the next three centuries, they would leave their mark as pirates, raiders, traders and settlers on much of Britain and the European continent, as well as parts of modern-day Russia, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland.

Who Were the Vikings?

Contrary to some popular conceptions of the Vikings, they were not a “race” linked by ties of common ancestry or patriotism, and could not be defined by any particular sense of “Viking-ness.” Most of the Vikings whose activities are best known come from the areas now known as Denmark, Norway and Sweden, though there are mentions in historical records of Finnish, Estonian and Saami Vikings as well. Their common ground–and what made them different from the European peoples they confronted–was that they came from a foreign land, they were not “civilized” in the local understanding of the word and–most importantly–they were not Christian.

The exact reasons for Vikings venturing out from their homeland are uncertain; some have suggested it was due to overpopulation of their homeland, but the earliest Vikings were looking for riches, not land. In the eighth century A.D., Europe was growing richer, fueling the growth of trading centers such as Dorestad and Quentovic on the Continent and Hamwic (now Southampton), London, Ipswich and York in England. Scandinavian furs were highly prized in the new trading markets; from their trade with the Europeans, Scandinavians learned about new sailing technology as well as about the growing wealth and accompanying inner conflicts between European kingdoms. The Viking predecessors–pirates who preyed on merchant ships in the Baltic Sea–would use this knowledge to expand their fortune-seeking activities into the North Sea and beyond.

Early Viking Raids

In A.D. 793, an attack on the Lindisfarne monastery off the coast of Northumberland in northeastern England marked the beginning of the Viking Age. The culprits–probably Norwegians who sailed directly across the North Sea–did not destroy the monastery completely, but the attack shook the European religious world to its core. Unlike other groups, these strange new invaders had no respect for religious institutions such as the monasteries, which were often left unguarded and vulnerable near the shore. Two years later, Viking raids struck the undefended island monasteries of Skye and Iona (in the Hebrides) as well as Rathlin (off the northeast coast of Ireland). The first recorded raid in continental Europe came in 799, at the island monastery of St Philibert’s on Noirmoutier, near the estuary of the Loire River.

For several decades, the Vikings confined themselves to hit-and-run raids against coastal targets in the British Isles (particularly Ireland) and Europe (the trading center of Dorestad, 80 kilometers from the North Sea, became a frequent target after 830). They then took advantage of internal conflicts in Europe to extend their activity further inland: after the death of Louis the Pious, emperor of Frankia (modern-day France and Germany), in 840, his son Lothar actually invited the support of a Viking fleet in a power struggle with brothers. Before long other Vikings realized that Frankish rulers were willing to pay them rich sums to prevent them from attacking their subjects, making Frankia an irresistible target for further Viking activity.

Did you know? The name Viking came from the Scandinavians themselves, from the Old Norse word "vik" (bay or creek) which formed the root of "vikingr" (pirate).

Conquests in the British Isles

By the mid-ninth century, Ireland, Scotland and England had become major targets for Viking settlement as well as raids. Vikings gained control of the Northern Isles of Scotland (Shetland and the Orkneys), the Hebrides and much of mainland Scotland. They founded Ireland’s first trading towns: Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, Wicklow and Limerick, and used their base on the Irish coast to launch attacks within Ireland and across the Irish Sea to England. When King Charles the Bald began defending West Frankia more energetically in 862, fortifying towns, abbeys, rivers and coastal areas, Viking forces began to concentrate more on England than Frankia.

In the wave of Viking attacks in England after 851, only one kingdom–Wessex–was able to successfully resist. Viking armies (mostly Danish) conquered East Anglia and Northumberland and dismantled Mercia, while in 871 King Alfred the Great of Wessex became the only king to decisively defeat a Danish army in England. Leaving Wessex, the Danes settled to the north, in an area known as “Danelaw.” Many of them became farmers and traders and established York as a leading mercantile city. In the first half of the 10th century, English armies led by the descendants of Alfred of Wessex began reconquering Scandinavian areas of England; the last Scandinavian king, Erik Bloodaxe, was expelled and killed around 952, permanently uniting English into one kingdom.

Viking Settlements: Europe and Beyond

Meanwhile, Viking armies remained active on the European continent throughout the ninth century, brutally sacking Nantes (on the French coast) in 842 and attacking towns as far inland as Paris, Limoges, Orleans, Tours and Nimes. In 844, Vikings stormed Seville (then controlled by the Arabs); in 859, they plundered Pisa, though an Arab fleet battered them on the way back north. In 911, the West Frankish king granted Rouen and the surrounding territory by treaty to a Viking chief called Rollo in exchange for the latter’s denying passage to the Seine to other raiders. This region of northern France is now known as Normandy, or “land of the Northmen.”

In the ninth century, Scandinavians (mainly Norwegians) began to colonize Iceland, an island in the North Atlantic where no one had yet settled in large numbers. By the late 10th century, some Vikings (including the famous Erik the Red) moved even further westward, to Greenland. According to later Icelandic histories, some of the early Viking settlers in Greenland (supposedly led by the Viking hero Leif Eriksson , son of Erik the Red) may have become the first Europeans to discover and explore North America. Calling their landing place Vinland (Wine-land), they built a temporary settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in modern-day Newfoundland. Beyond that, there is little evidence of Viking presence in the New World, and they didn’t form permanent settlements.

Danish Dominance

The mid-10th-century reign of Harald Bluetooth as king of a newly unified, powerful and Christianized Denmark marked the beginning of a second Viking age. Large-scale raids, often organized by royal leaders, hit the coasts of Europe and especially England, where the line of kings descended from Alfred the Great was faltering. Harald’s rebellious son, Sven Forkbeard, led Viking raids on England beginning in 991 and conquered the entire kingdom in 1013, sending King Ethelred into exile. Sven died the following year, leaving his son Knut (or Canute) to rule a Scandinavian empire (comprising England, Denmark, and Norway) on the North Sea.

After Knut’s death, his two sons succeeded him, but both were dead by 1042 and Edward the Confessor, son of the previous (non-Danish) king, returned from exile and regained the English throne from the Danes. Upon his death (without heirs) in 1066, Harold Godwinesson, the son of Edward’s most powerful noble, laid claim to the throne. Harold’s army was able to defeat an invasion led by the last great Viking king–Harald Hardrada of Norway–at Stamford Bridge, near York, but fell to the forces of William, Duke of Normandy (himself a descendant of Scandinavian settlers in northern France) just weeks later. Crowned king of England on Christmas Day in 1066, William managed to retain the crown against further Danish challenges.

End of the Viking Age

The events of 1066 in England effectively marked the end of the Viking Age. By that time, all of the Scandinavian kingdoms were Christian, and what remained of Viking “culture” was being absorbed into the culture of Christian Europe. Today, signs of the Viking legacy can be found mostly in the Scandinavian origins of some vocabulary and place-names in the areas in which they settled, including northern England, Scotland and Russia. In Iceland, the Vikings left an extensive body of literature, the Icelandic sagas, in which they celebrated the greatest victories of their glorious past.

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• Sail and rigging

The reconstruction of the Skuldelev ship’s sails has proved a particular challenge for the Viking Ship Museum, as there are but few traces preserved in the archaeological record. It is therefore necessary to draw on information from comparable finds and ethnological evidence. Below is a summary of the general questions concerning the reconstruction of sail and rigging:

The Viking ships’ square sail was, in size and shape, developed together with the individual hull size and type of ship. The central crucial factor is the elementary balance between hull, sail and rudder when sailing against the wind, i.e. sailing close-hauled.

If the sail is too broad relative to the hull and the shape of the hull, the ship seeks away from the wind – it has lee helm, and cannot tack against the wind.

If the sail is too narrow, the ship turns into the wind without the rudder being able to prevent this – it has weather helm. If this is not corrected, the ship is dangerous to sail – in fact it is useless as a sailing vessel.

If the sail is too low, the ship will sail too slowly and it will first sail properly when the wind is very strong.

If the sail, and with it the mast, is too high, the load is too great and it is necessary to reef the sail too early.

Further to all this, it is vital that the individual types of ship are ballasted and loaded correctly.

All these factors can be followed closely on Skuldelev 3, which not only has traces of the mast preserved but also has tacking holes for securing the sail forward at the rail, and sheet holes towards the stern to take the sheet. The breadth of the sail can therefore be calculated precisely.

In the successors to the Viking ships, the North European square-rigged boats, identical conditions can be traced. Here there were regulations for the dimensions of the mast, sail and rudder for the individual boat types.

There are a number of finds of rigging details, for example blocks, shroud pins, mast fragments, yard etc. from the Viking period and the Middle Ages. They show little variation in principle and execution throughout this time, and also relative to the last Nordic square-rigged boats from the early 20th century. In combination with oral tradition, it is therefore possible to produce rigging for the individual ship finds within very narrow constrains.

References Andersen, Bent & Erik Andersen 1989: Råsejlet - Dragens Vinge. Roskilde.

Andersen, Erik 2001: The woollen sail. Research in long lenghts. Maritime Archaeology Newsletter from Roskilde 16, 22-29.

Andersen, Erik, Ole Crumlin-Pedersen, Søren Vadstrup & Max Vinner 1997: Roar Ege. Skuldelev 3 skibet som arkæologisk eksperiment. Roskilde.

Read about:

• Wool sailcloth
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It is also possible to steam green wood without complex equipment like the steam boxes used today. Simply by heating a plank over a fire, the moisture inside the wood heats up and causes the fibres to loosen. This means that – for a few minutes – it can be twisted into shape with less danger of it splitting and breaking. It is highly likely that this was done during Viking times – we know the technique was used to make "expanded" log boats, for example.

Oak or pine were the preferred woods to construct boats from. The only reason for using one over the other appears to be what was growing locally. There is, amongst marine archaeologists, a tentative division of Viking shipbuilding areas into “pine areas” (probably Northern Norway and Sweden) and “oak areas” (Southern Norway, Southern Sweden and Denmark).

Even in the "pine building" regions (mostly Northern Norway) Oak was still the wood of choice for the keel, so it must have been imported from the South. It's likely that masts and yards were made out of pine, so it may have been a two-way trade. The big difference between oak and pine is how planks are made from them. For oak, large straight trees of around two centuries old are cut, and then using wedges split multiple times like slices of a pie – it might be possible to get upwards of 60 planks from one tree. A pine tree will yield only two.

One advantage of pine over oak is that, as they age, pine planks will bend depending on whether the bark side of the plank faces the water or the inside of the boat, so they can be used to enhance the curve of the vessel over time.

The one boat definitely made outside Scandinavia, the “big longship” from Skuldelev in Denmark (Skuldelev 2), is made from Irish Oak. Most of the British Isles was probably an oak building area, although boat builders probably used the nearest timber to hand. Certainly some boats appear to have been repaired with anything, including bits of other boats!

Almost all planks found on Viking boats are made from what is known as “radially split” wood. This type of wood is virtually unknown today – you won’t find it at any timber merchants. It is, however, the strongest way that you can process wood, because it works with the grain of the wood – it gains strength by following the way that the tree grows. The log is split using an axe to make a cut, running up and down the trunk. The split is widened and extended by driving wedges into it, until eventually the whole trunk splits in half.

At this point, for a pine tree, the splitting stops. Younger pine trees are used, which are only about half the diameter of the an oak. Only two planks can be made from a pine tree with any success, and the two halves of the log are now shaved down along their length to remove the curved sections – a very wasteful process – so that they look less like two D’s facing each other and more like two planks. Oak trees can be split further; each half is split into quarters, each quarter split into eighths, and so on. In fact, from a 200-year-old tree, with skill, about 64 planks can be obtained. They are all slightly triangular, and quite rough, so they are smoothed down a little, like the pine planks.

For the frames inside the ships, the Viking shipwrights used another type of timber that is rarely seen today – the grown timber. A grown timber is simply one that has grown to the right shape. The grain runs in the direction that was needed, making the timber incredibly strong.

Viking ship frames are like display cases of grown timbers. For instance, the stem and stern posts would be taken from large, curved branches. Where two parts of the frame are to meet (usually a weak spot that needs re-enforcement) the Vikings used a single timber, cut from a branching element of a tree. On smaller vessels, where the oars didn’t pass through oarholes, the tholes (or rowlocks) were made from the junction of a branch with the trunk – putting the strongest part of the wood at the point of most strain.

Shipbuilding Tools

The tools used for this smoothing would appear to us (at first glance) quite simple. An axe with a long blade could be used to smooth, as could an adze and a draw knife. Planes were known, and are shown being used for boat building on the Bayeux tapestry. Later on in the process, augers would start holes for rivets and trenails. Profiled irons would make decorative marks in the planks, or carve channels for caulking.

These apparently simple tools were so good that they remained unchanged for centuries – in fact, until the introduction of modern power tools!

Laying the Keel

To make a Viking ship, you lay down a keel first. The keel is made of Oak, as long and as straight as you can get. It’s not a flat piece of wood, but will have a T or a V shape to it, so that the first planks of the hull can be joined to it. Often this shape will change along the length of the keel, changing from a V section at the stem and stern (front and back) to a U section in the middle. This is to help shape the final lines of the hull.

Two pieces of curved wood are attached at the front and back of the keel, the Stem and Stern pieces. They are made from what is called “grown timbers” – wood that has been especially selected because it approximates the shape that is needed. There is some evidence to show that there was a relationship between the length of keel and the diameter of curve in the stem and stern pieces. Viking ships are pretty much symmetrical both fore and aft (front and back) and port and starboard (left and right), so the curve in these pieces will be the same.

Two types of stem and stern piece construction have been found. In one, the stems are simple curves. In the other, they are carved and notched with steps, forming the beginnings of the planks that they will eventually hold. Although this is a lot of work to do, it can save time in the long run. It was important for Viking ships to have the planks sweeping up and running together along the stems. The Gokstad ship, which has the “simple” stem and stern, has to use much more complex shapes on the planks to achieve the same effect as the later “Skuldelev” ships.

The keel is joined to the stem and stern posts by trenails – wooden pegs, “tree nails” if you prefer. It is then ready to have the planks (or strakes) put on it.

Building the Hull

The first strake to go on is called the Garboard strake (dunno why, it just is) and it is riveted and nailed on to the keel. Iron rivets are the most common Viking method of joining planks together (modern clinker boats use copper). Nails are used where the end of the rivet cannot be reached – usually at the stem and stern, where space is tight. The heads of the rivets are bent over rectangular (ish) washers, which are called roves. The next plank is riveted on to the garboard strake, so that it overlaps it when seen from outside. The rivet passes through the outside of the plank near its bottom edge, through the garboard strake near its top edge, and it is bent over a washer inside the boat.

Caulking (or luting) is used to stop water from getting into the boats. No wooden boat can claim to be entirely watertight, but the Vikings did their best. The caulking was made from animal hair (such as sheep’s wool) that had been dipped in a sticky pitch made from pine resin. It was laid in the groove on the plank and, when the plank was riveted to the rest of the boat, created an almost watertight seal, whilst still having the flexibility to move with the boat.

As each plank is riveted to the next, the boat would begin to take shape. To get the boat to the correct profile involves cutting the planks into some fairly strange shapes. The way that the ends of the planks join onto the stem and stern helps determine the profile of the boat – whether it will be a beamy cargo ship or a knife-thin warship. The larger the ship, the more planks will be required. Long ships would require that several shorter planks be joined together by scarf joints – some of which could be quite elaborate. As the planks are added one above the other, clamps were used to hold them in place and the frame inside could be added.

Framing the Ship

Once the shell is finished, it was time to put the frame into the boat. This is where this method of construction really scores. The frame has the job of transmitting forces from the “propulsion system” (the sail or the oars) to the hull, allowing it to move through the water. The hull is strong in itself – it doesn’t need a heavy frame to keep it together. Boats that are built “frame first” need a heavy frame as it has to deal with all of the forces on the boat – the hull is little more than a waterproof skin.

There are a bewildering number of frame types for Viking ships, dependant (perhaps) on area of construction, time of construction, what the boat was used for, and (probably) what the builder was used to. Most frame systems have ribs that run across the hull, which join to timbers that run across to support a deck. One important part of the frame was a long timber called the keelson. This sat inside the boat on the ribs, just above the keel. It had a hole or slot cut in it to take the mast, and on some of them a branch was left just in front of this hole to act as an extra support. This is another example of a grown timber.

Related articles on this subject in Regiapædia

• 'Woodworking' - Anglo-Saxon And Viking woodworking techniques.

• Expeditions

Press Release

Viking expedition team publishes first scientific paper from inaugural antarctic season, following submarine encounters with rare giant phantom jellyfish, viking becomes first cruise line to publish scientific paper.

Los Angeles (February 15, 2023) – Viking® ( www.viking.com ) today announced its Viking Expedition Team has published the company’s first scientific paper, following observations of the rarely encountered scyphozoan Stygiomedusa gigantea , commonly known as the giant phantom jellyfish. The encounters took place during submersible dives in the coastal waters of the Antarctic Peninsula in early 2022. Despite reaching up to 30 feet (10 meters) in length, only 126 encounters with the giant phantom jellyfish have ever been recorded since the species was first described in 1910. During Viking’s inaugural season in Antarctica in 2022, direct observations of the giant phantom jellyfish were made three times from submersibles deployed from Viking’s expedition vessel, the Viking Octantis ®, and documented through stills and video photography. 

Authored by two of Viking’s Chief Scientists with contributions from the submersible teams, the scientific paper describes for the first time how personal submersibles, such as those on the Viking Octantis and her identical sister ship, the Viking Polaris ®, can be vessels of opportunity for biological research in polar regions and allow the science community to access under-explored waters. With citizen science activities being popular among expedition guests, the paper also notes the potential to gather guest-derived data from submersible dives. Lead author, Dr. Daniel Moore, noted “It is extraordinary that we know so little about such large marine creatures as the giant phantom jellyfish, however now we have the means to make regular observations at greater depths than previously possible, which provides an exciting opportunity for discovery.”    

Published in Polar Research , the scientific journal of the Norwegian Polar Institute, the article can be read here: http://dx.doi.org/10.33265/polar.v42.8873 . 

“In creating ‘the thinking person’s expedition,’ it was our intention that every voyage should provide opportunities for scientific discovery,” said Torstein Hagen, Chairman of Viking. “At the core of Viking Expeditions is the goal to do meaningful scientific work. After just one full season in service, we are pleased that our expedition vessels and scientists have already contributed to research that might not have been possible otherwise, and we look forward to providing critical research opportunities on future voyages.” 

Viking Expedition Team & Scientific Partners

Viking has created the world’s leading scientific enrichment environment in an expedition setting with the help of partnerships with esteemed academic institutions. During each expedition, visiting researchers from partner institutions are part of the 36-person Viking Expedition Team. This diverse group of experts lead guests through meaningful scientific work, provide guiding and interpretation during shore excursions and deliver world-class lectures. 

“The Viking Octantis and the Viking Polaris are re-imagining what a research ‘ship of opportunity’ can be,” said Dr. Damon Stanwell-Smith, Head of Science and Sustainability at Viking. “During each voyage, our guests participate in real, significant science. Our scientific approach centers on having the platform to explore with the personnel to interpret what is found, and we believe this is the first of many scientific papers that will result from research conducted on board Viking expedition vessels.”

In April 2022, Viking announced a strengthening of its lead partnership with the University of Cambridge, establishing a new Professorship aimed at advancing research in the field of polar environmental science. The Viking Polar Marine Geoscience Fund endows the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) with its first-ever fully funded professorship—the Viking Chair of Polar Marine Geoscience . This new post enhances the scientific leadership at the Institute and enables the development of new lines of research into the behavior of polar environments, including polar ice sheets, sea ice and ocean circulation. 

The research fund builds on Viking’s existing partnership with Cambridge University’s SPRI, which played a significant role in developing the scientific enrichment program for Viking Expeditions. Specialists from the Institute were also consulted in the development of The Science Lab on Viking’s expedition vessels; the 380-square-foot lab is comprehensively appointed with wet and dry laboratory facilities and supports a broad range of research. Julian Dowdeswell, Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Cambridge, and former director of SPRI, serves as the Chair of the Viking Research Advisory Group, a consortium of scientific leaders from Viking’s partner institutions who have been actively involved in overseeing the field research being undertaken on board.

In addition to the University of Cambridge’s SPRI, Viking’s other scientific partners include: 

• The Cornell Lab of Ornithology : Ornithologists are regularly on board Viking’s expedition vessels, undertaking post-doctoral research on new observation methods and providing guest advice and interaction.
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) : Conducts innovative research on the dynamic environments and ecosystems of the Great Lakes and coastal regions to provide information for resource use and management decisions that lead to safe and sustainable ecosystems, ecosystem services, and human communities. Viking’s expedition ships have been designated official NOAA / US National Weather Service weather balloon stations, from which regular launches are undertaken.
• Norwegian Institute of Water Research (NIVA) : Scientists from NIVA are engaged in cross-disciplinary research programs on water-related issues. On Viking’s expedition ships, NIVA FerryBoxes are installed to sample the marine and freshwater regions the vessels sail, to provide continuous information about chlorophyll, oxygen, temperature, salinity, microplastic presence and complementary meteorological data.
• Norwegian Polar Institute : The permitting authority for Viking’s Norwegian flagged expedition vessels, who review and approve all of Viking’s expedition and science activities in Antarctica.
• Oceanites : Viking supports the fieldwork of Oceanites, an American Not-for-Profit field research entity, that has led on Antarctic penguin monitoring for the past thirty years, through mobilizing teams of penguin researchers on Viking expedition Antarctic voyages.
• Fjord Phyto : Viking hosts a NASA-funded program of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, that provides the opportunity for guests to engage in research and public education through novel citizen science sampling of polar phytoplankton, for genetic population analyses.  
• The IUCN Species Survival Commission Species Monitoring Specialist Group : Viking coordinates with this international group of experts to develop marine biodiversity monitoring systems that enable Viking expedition vessels to collect valuable species population data.

Viking Expeditions

Viking offers destination-focused expeditions in Antarctica and North America’s Great Lakes, with an expedition fleet that includes the Polar Class Viking Octantis and Viking Polaris . Designed for discovery by the same team that designed the award-winning Viking Longships ® and ocean ships, the 378-guest vessels are purpose-built for expeditions, at an ideal size for safety, comfort and to support an unrivalled range of activities in remote destinations. With more indoor and outdoor viewing areas than other expedition vessels, guests are as close as possible to the most magnificent scenery on earth. 

Media Assets

For more information, images and b-roll for Viking, contact [email protected] .

About Viking

Viking was founded in 1997 and provides destination-focused journeys on rivers, oceans, and lakes around the world. Designed for experienced travelers with interests in science, history, culture and cuisine, Chairman Torstein Hagen often says Viking offers experiences for The Thinking Person™. Viking has more than 250 awards to its name, including being the first cruise line to ever be named both the #1 Ocean Line and the #1 River Line in a single year in Travel + Leisure ’s 2022 “World’s Best” Awards. Viking has also been rated the #1 River Line and #1 Ocean Line by Condé Nast Traveler in the publication’s 2022 and 2021 Readers’ Choice Awards. For additional information, contact Viking at 1-800-2-VIKING (1-800-284-5464) or visit www.viking.com . For Viking’s award-winning enrichment channel, visit www.viking.tv .  

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Viking Holdings Hopes To Cruise To A Successful U.S. IPO

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Viking's Growth Has Bounced Back After The Pandemic

Viking Holdings Ltd. ( VIK ) has filed to raise $100 million in an IPO of its ordinary shares, according to an SEC F-1 registration statement .

The company operates a fleet of cruise ships and related travel and accommodation services worldwide.

VIK has produced strong growth and operating profits after the pandemic period, and forward growth rate assumptions, proposed IPO pricing and valuation will be critical for investors to consider.

What Does Viking Do?

Woodland Hills, California-based Viking Holdings Ltd. was founded to develop cruise ship service offerings for recreational travel and now has over 90 vessels with a global reach.

Management is headed by founder, Chairman and CEO Mr. Torstein Hagen, who has been with the firm since its inception in 1997 and was previously CEO of Bergen Line and a partner at McKinsey & Company in Europe.

The company’s primary offerings include the following:

River cruises

Ocean cruises

Expedition cruises.

As of December 31, 2023, Viking has booked fair market value investment of $98.1 million from investors, including Viking Capital Limited (Mr. Hagen), CPP Investment and TPG.

The company seeks travelers who want a premium and differentiated cruising experience connected to local cultural activities.

The firm currently operates 80 river cruise ships, 9 ocean ships, 2 expedition ships and one time-chartered river ship.

Selling and Administration expenses as a percentage of total revenue have dropped as revenues have increased, as the figures below indicate:

(Source - SEC.)

The Selling and Administration efficiency multiple, defined as how many dollars of additional new revenue are generated by each dollar of Selling and Administration expense, was a reasonably robust 1.9x in the most recent reporting period. (Source - SEC.)

What Is Viking’s Market?

According to a 2023 market research report by Grand View Research, the global market for cruises was an estimated $7.7 billion in 2022 and is forecasted to reach $18.3 billion in size by 2030.

This represents a forecast moderately strong CAGR of 11.3% from 2023 to 2030.

The main drivers for this expected growth are the continued rising popularity of cruise vacations for a growing demographic of people who appreciate the combination of experiences and affordability.

Also, the chart below shows the projected U.S.' cruise market by type of cruise, from 2020 to 2030.

Grand View Research

Major competitive or other industry participants include the following:

Viking Holdings' Recent Financial Results

The company’s recent financial results can be summarized as follows:

Quickly growing top line revenue

Sharply increased gross profit

Growing gross margin

Much higher operating profit

Increased cash flow from operations.

Below are relevant financial results derived from the firm’s registration statement:

As of December 31, 2023, Viking had $1.3 billion in cash and $11.4 billion in total liabilities.

Free cash flow during the twelve months ended December 31, 2023, was negative ($673 million).

Viking Holdings' IPO Information

Viking intends to raise $100 million in gross proceeds from an IPO of its ordinary shares, although the final figure may be as high as $500 million.

There have been no existing shareholders who have indicated an interest in purchasing shares at the IPO price.

After the IPO, the company will have two classes of shares: ordinary shares and special shares.

Ordinary shares will be entitled to one vote per share and special shares will have 10 votes per share.

The S&P 500 Index ( SP500 ) no longer allows companies with multiple classes of stock in its flagship index.

It appears that the entity controlled by the company founder will own the special shares and the company will be a "controlled company" according to the rules of the NYSE immediately post-IPO.

Certain shareholders may seek to sell shares as part of the offering, although the names and amounts have not yet been disclosed.

Management says it will use the net proceeds from the IPO as follows:

The principal purposes of this offering are to increase our capitalization and financial flexibility and to create a public market for our ordinary shares. We intend to use the net proceeds from this offering for general corporate purposes, including working capital, operating expenses and capital expenditures. We may also use a portion of the net proceeds to make acquisitions or investments, although we do not have agreements or commitments for any material acquisitions or investments at this time. (Source - SEC.)

Leadership’s presentation of the company roadshow is not currently available.

Regarding outstanding legal proceedings, management says that in its opinion any legal proceedings against the firm would not have a material adverse effect on its financial condition or operations.

The listed bookrunners of the IPO are BofA Securities, J.P. Morgan, UBS Investment Bank, Wells Fargo Securities, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, Rothschild & Co and Stifel.

Viking Is Producing Strong Growth And Operating Profit

VIK is seeking U.S. public capital market investment for its general working capital requirements and possibly for selling shareholders.

The company’s financials have shown sharply growing topline revenue, much higher gross profit and increasing gross margin, growing operating profit and sharply increased cash flow from operations.

Free cash flow for the twelve months ended December 31, 2023, was $697 million.

Selling and Administration expenses as a percentage of total revenue have fallen materially as revenue has increased, contributing to increased operating leverage; its Selling and Administration efficiency multiple was 1.9x in the most recent calendar year period.

The firm currently plans to pay no dividends to shareholders and to keep future earnings to reinvest in the company's expansion and working capital requirements.

The firm is also subject to Bermuda law restrictions on dividend payments.

The large comprehensive loss for 2023 was a function of a non-cash private placement derivatives loss valuation change.

VIK’s recent capital spending history indicates it has spent materially on capital expenditures as a percentage of its operating cash flow.

The market opportunity for providing cruise and related travel services is large and expected to grow at a double-digit rate of growth through 2030, so the company enjoys a positive industry growth backdrop as more consumers seek cruise ship vacation activities.

Risks to the company’s outlook as a public company include its capital-intensive nature, changes in the price of fuel and other commodities, geopolitical changes and ongoing operating risks for maritime operations and environmental changes.

However, Viking Holdings Ltd. appears to be operating at an impressive level in the aftermath of the pandemic, so the IPO's pricing and valuation assumptions will be critical and interesting to compare to those of existing publicly held cruise operators.

A realistic forward estimation of revenue growth rates will also be important for investors to consider, as 2023's growth rate was a function of depressed demand in 2022 following the pandemic period.

I’ll provide a final opinion when we learn more IPO details from Viking Holdings Ltd. management.

Expected IPO Pricing Date: To be announced.

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This article was written by

Donovan Jones is a research specialist with 15 years of experience identifying opportunities for IPOs.

He also leads the investing group IPO Edge , which offers actionable information on growth stocks through first-look S-1 filings, previews on upcoming IPOs, an IPO calendar for tracking what’s on the horizon, a database of U.S. IPOs, and a guide to IPO investing to walk you through the entire IPO lifecycle - from filing to listing to quiet period and lockup expiration dates.

Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have no stock, option or similar derivative position in any of the companies mentioned, and no plans to initiate any such positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Seeking Alpha's Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.

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The 3 types of Viking cruise ships, explained

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Editor’s note: This is a recurring post, regularly updated with new information.

Viking is unusual among major cruise lines in that it operates both ocean ships and river ships. Despite this, it has one of the easiest-to-understand fleets.

The vast majority of Viking’s river ships — at last count, there were 80 — feature the same design. If you’ve seen one of them, you’ve seen them all.

Ditto for the line’s ocean ships. Nine of Viking’s 11 ocean ships are nearly identical. The two exceptions are the recently unveiled Viking ocean vessels specifically designed for expedition cruising — a type of cruising that involves traveling to remote, hard-to-reach places on hardy vessels that carry their own landing craft.

For more cruise guides, tips and news, sign up for TPG’s cruise newsletter .

As a result, the bulk of Viking’s vessels falls into one of just three groups; all the ships in each group sport nearly identical designs.

An introduction to Viking cruise ships

Viking has expanded enormously in recent years with the addition of dozens of new river and ocean ships.

Founded in 1997 with four river vessels, the company operated just 29 ships as recently as 2012. Now, there are more than 90 ships in its fleet.

The vast majority of these ships are river ships — the company’s sole focus for its first 18 years in business. The company dominates the market for river cruises aimed at North Americans, accounting for about 50% of all such trips.

Starting in 2015, Viking began rolling out ocean cruise ships, too.

In early 2023, as noted above, Viking had 80 river ships in its fleet — almost all of which have the same basic design. The exceptions are a few vessels that Viking operates on rivers in Egypt and Asia (more on these ships below). The line also recently began offering cruises on the Mississippi River and its tributaries using a new type of vessel.

Related: The ultimate guide to Viking ships and itineraries

Viking’s ocean ships fall into two distinct groups: a series of 930-passenger traditional ocean ships that began debuting in 2015, and a series of 378-passenger expedition ships that began debuting in 2022.

Unlike most cruise lines, Viking doesn’t use the term “classes” to define different sets of ships in its fleet. Instead, it refers to its series of traditional ocean ships as the “Viking ocean ships” and its series of expedition ships as the “Viking expedition ships.” We’ve followed the same breakdown of the line’s ocean and river fleet below.

Viking ocean ships

Ships: Viking Saturn (2023), Viking Neptune (2022), Viking Mars (2022), Viking Venus (2021), Viking Jupiter (2019), Viking Orion (2018), Zhao Shang Yi Dun (2017), Viking Sky (2017), Viking Sea (2016) and Viking Star (2015).

Size: 47,800 tons.

For years, Viking only operated river ships, and some cruisers still think of the brand primarily as a river cruise company. However, since 2015, Viking has been rapidly rolling out a series of upscale ocean vessels; these new additions are increasingly dominating the world of higher-end ocean cruising.

As of June 2023, Viking has nine ships sailing the world’s oceans, each with a capacity for 930 passengers. That gives Viking 8,370 berths in the upscale ocean cruise market — more than competitors Oceania Cruises and Azamara combined.

The series is far from finished. Six more of the vessels are on order from Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri for delivery between 2024 and 2028, and the company also has options with Fincantieri for four more of the ships to debut in 2029 and 2030. Assuming they are all built, Viking’s ocean division will soon be bigger than Oceania, Azamara, Seabourn and Silversea Cruises  combined.

The first thing to know about the ships in this series is that they all are pretty much identical. When sailing on any one of them, you will be hard-pressed to tell what is different.

They’re also quite upscale. While Viking doesn’t market itself as a luxury line, some still consider it so. The vessels are full of luxury touches, from sumptuous bedding in cabins to heated floors in cabin bathrooms.

Related: The complete guide to Viking cabins and suites

Each of the ships in this series has a stylish, Scandinavian-influenced design that is a Viking trademark, and the cabins are large by cruise ship standards. Even the smallest cabins on each of the vessels have 270 square feet of space — a generous amount. Many cabins are significantly bigger than that, with 14 two-room suites on each of the vessels ranging in size from 757 to 1,448 square feet. Many of these bigger suites offer sweeping views from wrap-around private balconies.

Each of the ships’ interior spaces is built around an elegant, three-deck-high atrium filled with comfortable seating areas that have a living room-like feel. Each also has a bar and guest relations desk. At the top of the ships, you’ll find two-deck-high, glass-walled lounges that offer stunning views over the bow. Other interior spaces include a fitness center and a stylish spa with a thermal suite area that is open to all passengers at no extra charge (something that is not common on cruise vessels).

Multiple restaurants on board each of the vessels include Italian eatery Manfredi’s (named after former Silversea owner Manfredi Lefebvre d’Ovidio, a friend of Viking founder Torstein Hagen) and The Chef’s Table. The latter features rotating themed menus.

The centerpiece of the top deck of each of the ships is the main pool area, which features a glass magrodome that can close during inclement weather. The main pool area on each of the ships sits next to a lovely, glass-topped lounge with comfortable seating called the Wintergarden, which is home to afternoon tea. A den of serenity, it’s one of our favorite places on these vessels.

A secondary pool area with an infinity pool is at the back of each of the ships.

While all of the ships in this series are essentially identical, you will find small differences on a few of them. Most notably, two of the vessels in the series — Viking Orion and Viking Jupiter — have a small planetarium built into the top level of the two-level lounge at their fronts (known as the Explorers’ Lounge). Some of the later ships in the series have slightly larger fitness centers and slightly smaller hair salons.

Note that in addition to the nine Viking ocean ships officially in the Viking fleet, a 10th ship from the same series, Zhao Shang Yi Dun, caters exclusively to the China market as part of a joint venture between Viking and a Chinese company. When it debuted in 2017, the ship originally catered to the North American market and was called Viking Sun.

Viking river ships

Ships: Viking Fjorgyn (2022), Viking Kari (2022), Viking Radgrid (2022), Viking Skaga (2022) and more than 60 other Longships built since 2012, as well as additional river vessels.

Size: 4,000 to 5,000 tons.

River ships originally put Viking on the map, and they’re still at the core of the brand.

As noted above, the line has 80 river ships in its fleet. The vast majority of them have the same basic design and are known as Longships — a reference to the historic vessels used by Vikings in the Middle Ages.

Unveiled in 2012 and designed specifically to fit into the locks used across many of Europe’s rivers, the Longships broke new ground in river ship design in multiple ways.

For starters, they have a configuration that includes some of the largest suites ever for river ships in Europe. They also have a significant number of cabins with balconies — which is made possible by an innovative cabin area layout that offsets main corridors. (In other words, the corridors don’t run down the middle of the ship, creating a wider side with space for balconies and a narrower side with cabins turned sideways to also create room for verandas.)

Related: The ultimate guide to Viking’s cruise loyalty program

Other innovations include a squared-off bow that allows for eight more cabins than similarly sized ships operated by competitors. Also, quieter engines allow for more cabins at the rear. An enormous amount of groundbreaking engineering went into redesigning the bow areas of the ships, in particular, to enable extra cabins while still leaving room for needed machinery.

As a result of such innovations, the Viking Longships can carry more passengers than similarly sized ships operated by competitors. This has allowed Viking to offer lower prices than other river cruise lines and still bring in a similar amount of revenue per ship — a fact that has contributed greatly to the company’s rapid growth.

Like many river ships, each of the Viking Longships has one main restaurant where most passengers eat their meals as well as one main interior lounge with a bar. There’s also a secondary, casual dining area at the front of each vessel with indoor and outdoor seating. (The outdoor portion, called the Aquavit Terrace, also serves as a forward-facing outdoor lounge during off hours.) Unlike many river ships, the vessels have no spas or fitness centers.

As is typical for river ships, the top of every Viking Longship is covered with an expansive lounge area. There’s also a walking track and an herb garden — the latter used by the kitchen staff to grow herbs used during the preparation of onboard meals.

Most Viking Longships are 443 feet long — the perfect length to fit into the locks on many of Europe’s rivers. Viking also built slightly smaller versions of the Longships, measuring 361 feet or 410 feet in length, specifically to sail on rivers where lock sizes or other navigational factors require smaller vessels. The 410-foot-long versions of the vessels, for instance, were specifically built to sail into the heart of Paris on the Seine River.

Related: Fast-growing Viking unveils four new ships for the Seine

While the Longships come in several different lengths, they are essentially identical in their offerings and decor. The only notable difference is that the smaller versions of the ships have fewer cabins and thus hold fewer people. The 443-foot-long versions of the ship are designed for 190 passengers, for example, whereas the 410-foot-long versions of the vessels hold 168 passengers (since they have 11 fewer cabins).

While most Viking river ships are Longships, there are a few exceptions in the Viking river fleet. Viking operates several smaller, purpose-built vessels on the Nile River in Egypt. It also has several older river vessels that predate the Longships and traditionally have operated on rivers in Russia and Ukraine. (For now, river cruise itineraries in both countries are on hold due to the war in Ukraine.)

Viking also recently began sailings on the Mississippi River with a new ship specifically designed for the river and its tributaries.

As of May 2023, Viking had another 14 river ships either under construction or on order via provisional contracts.

Related: First look at Viking’s stylish new Nile River ship

Viking expedition ships

Ships: Viking Polaris (2022) and Viking Octantis (2022).

Size: 30,150 tons.

Designed to hold just 378 passengers, the Viking expedition ships are specifically designed to take travelers to the most off-the-beaten-path parts of the world, including Antarctica and the Arctic.

As of now, Viking operates just two ships in the series, Viking Octantis and Viking Polaris, both of which debuted in 2022 . No more are currently on order.

As is typical for expedition ships, these are tough vessels with reinforced bows that let them bump through ice in polar regions; the ships also have extra tanks for fuel and food.

Each of these vessels has its own landing craft on board to bring people ashore in remote locations, as well as kayaks and even submarines for exploring. (The latter is the hot new thing for expedition ships — upscale cruise brands Scenic Luxury Cruises & Tours and Seabourn have been adding submarines to expedition ships , too.)

Like other expedition ships, both Viking Octantis and Viking Polaris are designed to operate with a large and seasoned “expedition team” that includes biologists, botanists, geologists, glaciologists and ornithologists who lecture regularly.

Related: The 5 best destinations you can visit on a Viking ship

Each of the vessels has several new and unusual features, too. Most notable is The Hangar: an enclosed marina that allows passengers to transfer to a 12-seat excursion craft while still in the protected interior of the ship. It’s a first for an expedition cruise ship.

In another first for a polar expedition cruise vessel, every cabin has floor-to-ceiling glass walls that slide partially open from the top to create a balcony-like feel.

Both Viking Octantis and Viking Polaris are designed to be upscale. Like all Viking’s vessels, they boast elegant Scandinavian designs. The restaurants on both vessels include a version of Viking’s signature Italian spot, Manfredi’s and the Scandinavian-inspired Mamsen’s outlet.

Another feature of both ships that will be familiar to regular Viking customers is a top-of-the-ship, glass-walled Explorers’ Lounge offering stunning views of passing scenery.

In case you’re curious, Viking Octantis is named after Sigma Octantis, the current “south star” that hovers over the South Pole (also known as Polaris Australis). Polaris is named after the current “north star” that hovers over the North Pole. The names are a nod to the polar regions where these expedition ships will likely spend much of their time.

Bottom line

Viking operates more cruise vessels than any other major cruise company catering to North Americans. This is in part because it’s involved in both the ocean cruise and river cruise businesses. Despite its large size, its fleet of vessels is relatively easy to understand. The vast majority of both its ocean ships and river ships are almost identical in their designs.

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Editorial Disclaimer: Opinions expressed here are the author’s alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, airlines or hotel chain, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of these entities.

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What You Need To Know About Cruise Operator Viking’s IPO

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Key Takeaways

• Cruise operator Viking Holdings generated $4.7 billion in revenue last year, the company revealed in a Friday filing with the SEC, ahead of its planned debut on the New York Stock Exchange under the "VIK" ticker.
• While the cruise line has not disclosed the number of shares that will be offered or their pricing, Barron's estimated Viking's IPO could be valued at over $10 billion.
• Cruise stocks have started to rebound after reporting strong results amid a surge in demand as the industry works to recover from the billions in losses suffered during the pandemic.

Viking Holdings, the parent company of the Viking cruise line, filed an F-1 form Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ahead of its planned initial public offering (IPO) that revealed the company made $4.7 billion in revenue in 2023.

Viking, which said Friday that it plans to debut on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker "VIK," initially announced plans to pursue an IPO in February. While the cruise line has not disclosed the number of shares that will be offered or their pricing, Barron's estimated Viking's IPO could be valued at over $10 billion.

Viking's Business Metrics Show Growing Revenue

The cruise line generated $4.7 billion in revenue in fiscal 2023, compared to $3.18 billion in 2022, and $625.1 million in 2021. Viking posted a $1.86 billion loss last year, largely because of a refinancing program it undertook through private placement , a way to raise capital without undergoing an IPO.

Adjusting for those one-time losses, Viking said it reported earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of about $1.09 billion for 2023.

Viking's luxury cruise business is divided between 80 river vessels and nine ocean ships, along with two expedition ships and a chartered river ship that operates in the Mississippi river. The cruise line expects to receive 18 new river ships by 2028, and six new ocean cruise liners by 2026.

Cruise Stocks Climb on Surge in Demand

In what could be a promising sign for Viking's debut, some cruise stocks have started to reverse losses suffered during the pandemic, with Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings ( NCLH ), Royal Caribbean Group ( RCL ), and Carnival Corp. ( CCL ) recently reporting record bookings.

As of Friday's close, Norwegian shares have gained 45% over the past 12 months, while Carnival shares have surged 55%, and Royal Caribbean shares more than doubled in value over the same period.

Securities and Exchange Commission. " FORM F-1 REGISTRATION STATEMENT ."

Viking Holdings. " VIKING FILES REGISTRATION STATEMENT WITH SEC FOR PROPOSED INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERING ."

Viking Holdings. " VIKING ANNOUNCES CONFIDENTIAL SUBMISSION OF DRAFT REGISTRATION STATEMENT FOR A PROPOSED INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERING ."

Barron's. " Cruise Operator Viking’s IPO Could Be Valued at Over $10 Billion ."

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Viking Ocean Orderbook: 6 Ships Get Accelerated Delivery; 4 More Options

• April 7, 2024

Viking’s ocean cruising fleet could see the addition of just under 10,000 additional berths if the company picks up four options it has with Fincantieri in 2029 and 2030.

Per the company’s recent IPO filing, it is set to take delivery of 998-guest ocean-cruising ships in 2024 and 2025. Those will be followed by two ships in 2026, and then individual newbuilds in 2027 and 2028.

“In January 2024, we amended the shipbuilding contracts to accelerate the delivery dates for Ship XIV, Ship XV and Ship XVI. Ship XIV, Ship XV and Ship XVI are now scheduled to be delivered in the years 2026, 2027 and 2028, respectively,” the company said in its filing.

Newbuild prices also adjust, with the 2024-built Viking Vela listed at $446 million, as is the 2025-built Viking Vesta. The 2026 newbuilds come in at a cost of $501 million each, while the 2027 and 2028 newbuilds cost $517 million a piece.

The company’s orderbook chart then lists two additional options in 2029, and two options in 2030, all at 998 berths each, which are slightly upsized from the majority of its fleet at 930 berths.

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