Crusader Gold: the ship in the ice
David Gibbins
Nicholas
Roerich, Guests from Overseas,
1901 (oil on canvas, the State Tretyalev Gallery, Moscow)
While I was writing Crusader Gold, this wonderful picture was in my mind’s eye - a view of two Viking longships by Nicholas Roerich, one of my favourite painters. A great deal is known of the reality of Viking ships from excavations at Roskilde Fjord, Denmark, which have revealed a group of ships deliberately sunk to restrict the entrance to the fjord in the 11th century. The ships were clinker-built, a characteristic Viking technique in which planks were overlapped and joined to each other with iron rivets. One of the vessels was broader and deeper-hulled than the rest, and more suited to open ocean voyages – the type of vessel the Norse might have used to travel to Greenland. But the other image that played in my mind when I wrote about Jack and Costas’ extraordinary discovery was the famous photograph below, taken in 1904 at Oseberg in Norway. It shows the hull of a Viking longship fully exposed on land, after the central chamber and all the contents had been removed – the burial ship of a great Viking queen, sent on her journey to the afterlife some time in the 9th century AD.
And what of the longships of Eric the Red and his followers? No Viking ship has yet been found in Iceland, Greenland or further west, though some discoveries have come very close. At the Viking site of L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, I stood on the foreshore where excavations have revealed detritus from woodworking – almost certainly a yard where ships were repaired. Earlier I had explored the southern shore of Ellesmere Island, at the edge of the polar ice cap almost 2,000 miles north of L’Anse aux Meadows. Here, at a bare outcrop called Scraeling Island, archaeologists excavating a native Inuit settlement were astonished to uncover a scatter of Norse artefacts – links of chain mail armour, woolen cloth, iron ship rivets. The finds may date from the 14th century, about the time of the Kingigtorsuaq runestone in Greenland, which you can see here. Robust Viking ships of the type that reached L’Anse aux Meadows would also have been able to sail far into the Arctic, into the ice-free channels of the north-west passage. Were the Scraeling Island finds salvaged by Inuit hunters from abandoned Norse sites in Greenland, or traded, or are they tantalizing evidence of a Viking ship that reached this place – a ship that was perhaps caught in the ice, and may even lie nearby?
The 9th century Oseberg Ship, excavated from its burial mound near Oslo in Norway in 1904. The wood was astonishingly well preserved in clay under air-tight layers of turf, though the hull had been filled with rocks and the timbers were crushed – just as I imagined they would be under ice. The ship was almost 70 feet long and wonderfully decorated with relief carving, some of it visible here at the stern, where you can also see the characteristic overlapping planking of Viking ships. Inside was a rich array of grave goods – a four-wheeled cart and sledges, as beautifully decorated as the ship, beds, a loom, everyday utensils and food, all that was needed for the afterlife. Within the burial chamber, removed in this picture, lay the remains of a noblewoman in her late twenties, and around her were thirteen horses, three dogs and an ox which had clearly been sacrificed – many were decapitated. There was also an older woman, perhaps a slave. Had she too been sacrificed? The Arab writer Ibn Fadlan described witnessing such a scene during a Viking ship funeral on the river Volga, when the slave mistress of the dead chieftain was sent with him in his burning longship – a scene reconstructed in the film The 13th Warrior, based on the Michael Crichton novel.