Longships where very slim, long and sometimes short. So the Vikings could sail up narrow rivers so they could invade places, so people that thought that they were safe because they lived near a narrow river would be more in danger if they live they lived right in the middle where there was hardly any sea or rivers around.
The longships were very fast so if they were sinking they could travel to the nearest land that they could find. Longships could fit up to people who were coming to invade.
Longships were different sizes. This was particularly handy when navigating icy conditions. TV A new online only channel for history lovers.
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The longships were motored by a combination of manpower and wind. Innovative short drama. A crocheted horned helmet hat. It is important to realise that these were ships which could be built basically everywhere. If you had wood, and iron, and the know-how, then you could build a Viking ship. The owners of the big ships were wealthy and powerful. That is one of the key results of the experimental archaeological work that has been carried out on Viking ships over the last few decades.
We now know much more about the quantity of materials and the number of work hours that went into building these ships. It is really quite impressive amounts that were involved. About 60 sheep were needed to produce enough wool for one sail for a large warship. They also required perhaps some 15 big oak trunks of about a metre in diameter in order to produce all the planks.
They would have needed maybe a couple of hundred kilograms of iron, plus a lot of tar and a lot of rope. These ships were really major investments and they were extremely carefully built. The shipbuilders had a very strong aesthetic sense, coupled with a very strong idea about quality.
This was a key advantage over other ships of the period. The Scandinavian ships were built in a tradition that we can follow several centuries backwards in time.
The early examples were specialised rowing ships, propelled only by oars rather than sails. This meant that there was a huge incentive to build them as light as possible so that they were easier to row.
Compared to ship remains from other parts of northern Europe, Viking ships were very lightly built and so very speedy. They were easy to pull up on shore. They could be taken up rivers and over land if need be. So that was the main secret behind the Viking ships, that they were so light that they could be used for a lot of things.
When sailing in one, you would have been pretty exposed to the elements. It was not a holiday to try to cross the North Sea and definitely not to try to go to Iceland or Greenland.
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