Sublime

the largest longship ever found—thirty-two metres long, with a single-watch crew of eighty that could have been doubled for war. Dating to the early eleventh century, it is of the dimensions the sagas give for the highest rank of royal warships.

In the modern Nordic languages, vikingar or vikinger is still used only in the exact sense of seaborne raiders,

In a different context again, in 1962 an innovative coffer-dam excavation revealed five ships that had been deliberately scuttled in the eleventh century to form part of a sunken blockade controlling access to the Roskilde fjord in Denmark. They proved to be of types that had not been seen before in the archaeology, but which expanded the typology

Whereas the broader ships of the early Viking Age seem to have been multipurpose, capable of transporting both crews and cargo, from the late 800s, there is evidence of specialised vessels ranging from offshore patrol boats to the equivalent of royal yachts, deep-sea cargo haulers, fishing smacks, and—of course—a range of slim, predatory warships o

In poetry, the English called them wælwulfas, ‘slaughter-wolves’, and with good reason—but the Vikings even said it themselves. Here is the great tenth-century Icelandic warrior-poet Egil Skalla-Grímsson, describing his raiding experiences (in an effort to impress a woman at a feast, which also tells you something about him): Farit hefi ek blóðgum

The Scandinavians of the eighth to eleventh centuries knew the word—víkingr in Old Norse when applied to a person—but they would not have recognised themselves or their times by that name. For them it would perhaps have meant something approximating to ‘pirate’, defining an occupation or an activity (and probably a relatively marginal one); it was

Larger ships would have been commissioned either by major landowners and their families, consortia of merchants, or the nobility. They were long known only from images on coins, wall hangings such as the Bayeux Tapestry, and graffiti. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the post-medieval world got its first glimpse of the real thing.

Leif Eiríksson, allegedly the first European to land in North America, was also known as hinn heppni, ‘the Lucky’.

In 792 a charter of King Offa of Mercia refers to Kent, and the need for military service against “seaborne pagans” (who can only be Scandinavians) in migratory fleets that had presumably been active for some time.