Photo: a replica of a Viking longship from the Scandification media library; a general view, not one of the original excavated vessels.
A Viking longship looks simple: a long, narrow hull, a single square sail and a row of oars. Yet this plain-looking vessel carried raiders to Paris, settlers to Iceland and explorers to the coast of North America. Nothing else in the early medieval world combined its speed, its shallow draft and its toughness in open water. The reason is not mysterious. It comes down to how the Scandinavians chose their timber, how they shaped it and how they let the whole hull bend with the sea instead of fighting it.
We know a surprising amount about these ships because a handful of them survived, buried in clay or sunk in a fjord. Three groups tell most of the story: the Oseberg and Gokstad ships from Norway, and the Skuldelev ships from Denmark.
Built from split oak, not sawn planks
The secret begins in the forest. Viking shipwrights did not saw their planks. They split oak logs radially, wedge by wedge, so the cut followed the natural grain of the tree. A plank cleaved this way keeps its long fibres intact, which makes it lighter and far more flexible than a sawn board of the same thickness. The planks were then smoothed with axes and adzes to a thickness of only a few centimetres.
The hull was built clinker style (also called lapstrake): each plank overlaps the one below it and is fastened with iron rivets. Gaps were sealed with wool or animal hair soaked in pine tar. Because the hull was held together by flexible joints rather than rigid frames, it twisted and flexed in heavy seas. Tests on replicas of the Gokstad ship have shown the hull ends moving noticeably with the waves, which is one reason it did not break apart on long ocean crossings.
A shallow keel and a side rudder
Below the waterline sat a single long keel carved from one piece of timber. It kept the ship tracking straight under sail, while the hull itself was shallow enough to draw less than a metre of water. That is what made the Viking style of attack and trade possible: a crew could cross the North Sea, then slide up a river or onto a beach without needing a harbour.
Steering was done with a large oar mounted on the right-hand side of the stern. The old Norse word for that side, stýri-borð, “the steering side”, is the origin of the English word starboard.
Oseberg: the royal burial ship
Excavated in 1904 from a burial mound at Tønsberg in Vestfold, the Oseberg ship was built around 820 AD and buried in 834 as the grave of two high-status women. It is about 22 metres long and just over 5 metres wide, with 15 pairs of oar holes, and its prow and stern curl up into elaborately carved spirals of animals and knotwork. It was a ship for rivers and sheltered coasts, not an ocean-going warship, and it was clearly meant to impress as much as to sail. Along with the hull, the mound held sledges, a cart, textiles and kitchen gear, giving us a rare picture of the lives of elite women in the early Viking Age.
Gokstad: the ocean-going ship
The Gokstad ship, found at Sandefjord in 1880 and built around 890 AD, is the more practical vessel. It is roughly 23 metres long, about 5 metres wide, and had 16 pairs of oars with shield racks along each side. Its mast was stepped in a massive block of oak that let the sailors lower it quickly. Proof that such a ship could cross an ocean came in 1893, when Magnus Andersen sailed a full-size replica called Viking from Norway to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in about four weeks, reaching speeds of over 10 knots. The voyage mirrors the real journeys that took Norse settlers to Greenland and Vinland, which we explore in Famous Viking Explorers: Leif Erikson and Erik the Red.
Skuldelev: a whole fleet from the seabed
The most useful discovery for historians came from Denmark. Around 1070, the people of Roskilde deliberately sank five ships in a narrow channel of Roskilde Fjord to block the approach to the town from raiders. In 1962 archaeologists built a dam, pumped out the water and recovered the pieces of the Skuldelev ships. Together they show that “the Viking ship” was not one design but a family of specialised vessels: a long warship, a smaller raiding ship, a broad cargo vessel called a knarr, and coastal ferries and fishing boats.
Skuldelev 2 was a huge warship, around 30 metres long and built from Irish oak, probably in Dublin. A faithful reconstruction, the Havhingsten fra Glendalough (“Sea Stallion”), sailed from Roskilde to Dublin in 2007 with about 65 crew and returned the following year, giving researchers real data on speed, handling and crew endurance. It proved that a Viking warship was fast and seaworthy but also hard, wet and cold work.
Sail, oars and the crew
Under sail a longship could pass 10 knots or more with a following wind. The square sail was woven from wool, often in a double layer and sometimes dressed with animal fat. Oars were used for leaving harbour, for fighting and in calms. In a Viking fleet most warriors were also rowers, which is why a shipload of fighters could arrive from the sea with strong arms and a clear head. If you want the wider story of why they went to sea, start with our brief history of the Vikings, and for the people who sailed in them see Shield-Maidens: Did Viking Women Really Fight in Battle?
Where to see Viking ships today
- Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde (Denmark): the five Skuldelev ships, a working boatyard and reconstructions you can sometimes sail on in summer.
- Viking Ship Museum, Bygdøy, Oslo (Norway): home of Oseberg and Gokstad. The building has been closed for major renovation, with a new Museum of the Viking Age planned, so check opening status before planning a visit. Our Oslo city guide covers what else to see in the area.
- Ships in myth: Norse stories also gave ships a place among the gods and the dead, from Naglfar to ship burials. Our guide to the nine worlds of Norse mythology sets the wider cosmos behind those stories.
Why the longship still matters
The longship was not magic. It was a very good answer to a specific set of problems: how to move many people quickly over water, land them anywhere and take them home again. Split oak, flexible clinker hulls, a shallow keel and a single efficient sail gave Scandinavians reach that rival powers could not match for roughly three centuries. When you stand in front of the Gokstad hull in Oslo or watch a Skuldelev reconstruction slide into the fjord at Roskilde, you are looking at the machine that built the Viking Age.
Which Viking ship would you most like to see afloat? Tell us in the comments, and keep exploring our Viking history section for more.
