To Study Viking Seafarers, He Took 26 Voyages in Traditional Boats

New York Times

5 days ago

Late in the summer of 2021, Greer Jarrett set out on the first of 26 voyages to retrace the maritime paths taken by Norse sailors during the Viking Age, which lasted from roughly A.D. 800 to 1050. The Vikings, beyond their reputation as medieval bad boys — Pillage People, if you will — were accomplished traders who established commercial routes that stretched all the way to Baghdad. Their primacy relied on mastery of the seas.
Mr. Jarrett, a doctoral candidate in archaeology at Lund University in Sweden, was intrigued not only by where these ancient mariners started and wound up, but also the paths they took to get there. 'The details of Viking Age trade are often limited to its origins and destinations,' he said. So over the next three years, and in the spirit of experimental archaeology, Mr. Jarrett piloted nine different modern vessels, built in the styles of those used a millennium ago.
Most of the journeys were undertaken in 30-foot fyringer, square-rigged, open clinker boats, built in the tradition of Afjord, a small Norwegian municipality where Viking-era boatbuilding techniques endured into the 20th century. Fyringer, the smallest boats in Mr. Jarrett's fleet, were favored by both fishermen and farmers. 'Most scholarship has focused on the large, impressive longships, which were not designed for long-range sailing and did not represent the realities of everyday life in the period,' Mr. Jarrett said. Longships, he reasoned, give a skewed image of what sorts of sailing trips would have been possible.
For much of those three years, Mr. Jarrett led student and volunteer crews on sailing expeditions along the west coast of the Scandinavian Peninsula, the historical core of Norse seafaring. Even without traversing oceans, they encountered perils that sometimes rivaled those of Leif Ericson and his father, Erik the Red, who is believed to have been the first European to reach North America. Turbulent tidal currents. Broken yards (the horizontal spars on a ship's mast to which the mainsail is attached). Encounters with 14-foot waves, a surfacing submarine and an amorous minke whale.
The most challenging, if not the most terrifying, of the hazards were powerful, frigid winds that swept down mountain slopes. The Norwegians have a term for these surprising gusts: fallvinder, because they seem to fall off hillsides and onto the water without warning, and can reach speeds comparable to that of a tornado.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.