Viking ships

I´ve built one heller example as a gift for my girlfriend and now I got an heller viking as a gift. I dont know about the accuracy of the kits as I´m not a pro, but both look fantastic. I enjoyed the heller build very much and it looks impressive finished. And I´m looking forward to the revell. If I wanted to buy another, I would pick either which would be available in the nearest store.

Differences: heller has benches for oarsmen
revell has rigging thread
revell has more shields
revell looks somewhat simpler (less pieces)
revell rigging diagram looks better and more complex (I dont know about historical accuracy)
I like more the heller dragons when weathered.

Both have pros and cons, but look impressive when weathered and are good for beginning with ship models.

vonBerlichingen wrote:

Thank you, Prof. Tilley. I would agree that the Gokstad shields' colouration suggests a special purpose or dedication, e.g. as grave goods or as the shields of a bodyguard of some kind.  However, that does not necessarily mean that the shields themselves were any different in construction and materials from ordinary shields.

Here's a little more information from what appears to me to be a well researched perspective.

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~chrisandpeter/shield/shield.html#Fig.1

From other sources, the woods used were spruce, fir, pine, willow or linden (which sounds to have been used as a generic term meaning shield wood). These are light weight affairs, a single layer of wood around 5mm thick, with the only iron being the boss in the middle for the hands. Reproductions demonstrate that they wouldn't survive an axe blow too well, although they seemed to do well against swords, as skeletal remains indicate a lot of head and shin injuries. (Only found one source for that). But a major use, according to combat descriptions, admittedly legend, was to hit or push the opponent with it to restrict his movements, limit the range of his windup and then counter. 

Also, these are raiding parties, not ship to ship combats. At least the legends talk of heroes in single combat, and the archeology is neccessarily land/ tidewater based. There is no clear practical reason I can find in reading why shields would much be hung on the side of a ship at all, other than to get them out of the way. They had a lot of leather components. And they would certainly interfere with oars, it they were continuous. On the other hand, coins do show them sailing that way, so it probably was done.

I believe most if not all other shield finds showed remnants of a leather facing, as do the legends, and indeed there's an accomodation for that on the Gokstad shields. Then why is the wood painted?

This is all meant in the most lighthearted fashion. I'm no expert by any means, just interested in this history, and have had the opportunity to live in Scandinavia several occasions, so to me it's just a sport. Any better and more thoughtful info is much welcome. One aspect of this research is how quickly searches get you to pictures of young guys in Connecticutt swinging axes at each other in the woods. Ie it's all pretty fanciful.

 

 

There's a "middle of the road" position.  It looks as though the shields were made for the purpose of hanging on the gunwales of the ship.  Maybe they were used for that purpose throughout the ship's active career (i.e., not necessarily just for the burial). 

The Osprey book contains (p.174) a nice modern painting by a gentleman named Steve Noon reconstructing the Gokstad Ship as she might have appeared during her active career.  It shows the shields hanging on the gunwales and a dragon's head and tail fastened to her stem and sternpost - among many other reconstructed details.  To my eye, this painting is prettty convincing.

I have no idea what Mr. Ezra's physique may have been - but I have to say I do find the idea of those shields having been built as components of the ship, rather than weapons, quite believable.  But I guess we'll never know for sure.   

Thank you, Prof. Tilley. I would agree that the Gokstad shields' colouration suggests a special purpose or dedication, e.g. as grave goods or as the shields of a bodyguard of some kind.  However, that does not necessarily mean that the shields themselves were any different in construction and materials from ordinary shields.

Re. Daniel Ezra's experiments, I would wonder about his general physical fitness and strength, compared to, say, Viking farmers and warriors...

Interesting question.  The best coverage of the Gokstad Ship's shields in the books I've got is in the very nice Osprey publication, The Vikings, by R. Chartrand, K. Durham, M. Harrison, and I. Heath.  (It's a compilation of three earlier Osprey books, The Vikings, Viking Hersir, and Viking Longship.  Highly recommended.) 

On p. 132 is a good black-and-white photo of one of the shields from the Gokstad Ship.  The caption explains that it's almost a meter in diameter.  The text on the facing page reads:  "The largest group of surviving shields from the Viking Age was part of the ship burial at Gokstad.  However, these shields may have been made specially for the burial and could be unrepresentative of those used in combat.  Experiments carried out in 1990 Daniel Ezra of City University revealed that a reproduction Gokstad shield was unwieldy in individual combat and tiring to use in close formation.  Shield bosses have been relatively common finds.  It has been assumed that many shields had metal rims; in fact, not a single excavated shield has been found with a complete metal rim.  Organic components of shields are usually decayed to a point that defied early excavation techniques."

The book doesn't mention the species of the wood.  The ship herself is made largely of oak, with the major exception of the pine deck boards.  The wood in the photo of the shield looks like pine to my eye, but black-and-white photos of thousand-year-old wood can be deceptive.  (It's probably stupid of me to take a guess.)

One interesting feature that the photo does reveal is a pair of thin, perforated iron rings that apparently run around the back of the shield.  (They're visible at one spot where the wood has rotted away.)  The caption refers to them as "curved metal strengtheners"; apparently the holes in them received the little nails that held the leather rim in place.

Brogger and Shetelig have this to say (The Viking Ships:  Their Ancestry and Evolution, pp. 88-89):  "...the shields were hung to adorn the sides of the ship, a custom which is frequently mentioned in the sagas.  When the Gokstad Ship was found in the grave-mound it had 32 shields on each side, two for each oar-hole.  The shields were hung externally along the gunnel, tied to the shield rack with thin bast cords drawn through the handles of the shields.  The shields were hung so that each one half-way overlapped the one aft of it.  They were painted yellow and black alternately, forming a continuous row from stem to stern.  This corresponds to a stock phrase in the sagas:  'The ship was completely shielded from stem to stern.'  Naturally the shields could not hang there when the ship was under way, nor could they serve for defence; they were used solely when the ship was in port, and only for decorative purposes and to indicate the rank and honour of the ship.  To sail with the shields hung out was at variance with proper conduct, or anyway a most unusual procedure; as we can see from the sagas wher Bjorn, one of the early settlers of Iceland, came into Bjarnarfjord with the shields hung out; and bore the name of Skjaldabjorn (from skjold = shield) ever since."

All that seems pretty sensible.  I suspect the shield that a Viking warrior used to fight with was a pretty distinctive piece of equipment; it seems unlikely that 64 Vikings would go trooping ashore with identical shields, half black and half yellow, slung over their shoulders.  But once again, the bottom line is that we just don't know exactly what was going on here.  One of the tantalizing, frustrating aspects of this subject is that we know so many details of certain aspects (e.g., how the parts of the Gokstad Ship were fastened together) and practically nothing about so many others.

jtilley wrote:

The Gokstad Ship was buried with sixty-four wood-and-metal shields, painted alternately black and yellow (no designs on them), which apparently were hung on the ship's gunwales.  It's pretty generally agreed that shields were hung on the sides of Viking ships for ceremonial purposes (perhaps when the ships were entering or leaving port, or on other special occasions).  They wouldn't have lasted long in a seaway, and wouldn't actually have been of much use in a fight.  The Revell instructions, interestingly, suggest the option of omitting half of them. Revell's renditions of the Gokstad Ship's shields are excellent, but there's a small glitch in the painting instructions that might mislead the unwary.  Each shield consists of several wood boards, with a dish-shaped boss in the middle and a rim around the edge.  Revell suggests painting the shields as though both the central boss and the rim were iron.  Not so.  The central boss is iron all right, but the rim is leather, held in place with lots of little iron nails.  If the rim were in fact iron the shield would be mighty heavy.

Which aspect of those shields suggests that they would not have been of much use in a fight? Wood had been the main material used in shield construction for more than a millenium before the Vikings.

Were the Gokstad shields made of a soft wood, such as pine, and clearly intended as burial goods? To what extent are other Viking grave finds thought to have been meant solely for burial purposes? Based on some of my reading, other finds must have been actually quite functional before burial.

Using shields in a ceremonial way, e.g. temporarily slung over a ship's sides, does not mean that the shields themselves were not intended for other, more warlike purposes.

In any serious discussion of this topic it's a good idea to start out by understanding just what these various kits are.

The old Aurora one (copied by Smer) is a product of the early 1950s.  It represents a popular, Americanized conception of a Viking ship:  dragon's head and tail on the bow and stern, striped sail, brightly-decorated shields along the gunwales, and a crew wearing horned helmets.  I, like lots of modelers from my generation, have a warm spot in my heart for it; it was great fun for a kid getting interested in maritime history to build, and a big factor, I'm sure, in getting lots of people into ship modeling.  But it isn't a scale model of anything.  There's nothing Norse about the shape of the hull, the deck arrangement (such as it is) doesn't match any of the archaeological evidence, the charactersitically "clinker" hull construction is conspicuous by its absence, and the decorations are vintage 1950s American.  (Though I haven't had that kit in front of me for at least thirty years, I can still close my eyes and visualize that dragon head in all its wonderful detail.  But imagine what it would look like full-size.  And think how much the piece of wood from which it was carved would weigh.)

Two major Norse vessels, and quite a few fragments of smaller ones, survive.  The two biggest ones (both of which have been the basis of plastic and wood kits) are in the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo:  the Oseberg Ship and the Gokstad Ship.  (The names "Oseberg" and "Gokstad" had nothing to do with the ships originally; they're the names of the farms on which the ships were found.) 

The Oseberg Ship is a relatively small, highly ornate vessel with low gunwales.  It was found in the burial mound of a woman (perhaps a queen or a chieftain's wife).  Scholars are pretty much agreed that it was built as a ceremonial barge - not a seagoing ship of any sort.  Relatively recent research, including dendrochronological study on the wood, has established that it was built in about 800 A.D. and interred in about 834.

Heller issued a kit labeled "Drakkar Oseberg" back in the early seventies.  (The label should have tipped me off right away that something was wrong.  "Drakkar" was a Norse term for a "longship," a big, seagoing, semi-military vessel.  The Oseberg Ship most definitely is not a drakkar.)  Apparently the people who designed the kit didn't bother to look at the real vessel, or a set of plans for it - or even any decent photographs of it.  The kit's hull is distorted in proportion to the point of caricature, and the "carved" details (normally Heller's strong suit) bear no resemblance to those of the actual ship.  That approach is pretty hard to excuse.  Good, detailed plans of the Oseberg Ship are easy to find - and have been for decades.  The standard book on the subject, The Viking Ships:  Their Ancestry and Evolution, by A.W. Brogger and Haaakon Shetelig, has been around (at least in its English-language edition) since 1951; it contains excellent, easily-understood plans for both the Oseberg and Gokstad Ships. 

The other big, famous ship find is the Gokstad Ship.  This one is considerably bigger and less ornate.  The researchers have established pretty firmly that it was built in about 890 A.D. and buried about twenty years later.  (The hull planking has been damaged and repaired at several points; scholars are pretty much agreed that this vessel saw considerable active service before being interred.)  The Gokstad Ship is a remarkably well-constructed vessel, clearly intended for long voyages over open water.  It probably was built as a general-purpose ship, for both militant and peaceful purposes.  The Norse probably didn't make a rigid distinction between "warships" and "merchant ships."  Whether this one was ever used for terrorizing English or French villages, or for hauling cargo, or for carrying people back and forth around the fjords, is anybody's guess; there's just no evidence.  But it was a genuine working ship of some sort. 

A full-size replica of the Gokstad Ship was built and sailed across the Atlantic in 1893, in conjunction with the Chicago World's Fair.  (The idea apparently was to draw attention to the achievements of Leif Ericsson, at a time when Christopher Columbus was getting lots of publicity.  It's since been established that Leif's ships didn't look much like the Gokstad Ship - but hey, what the heck.)  The captain and crew of the replica reported that it handled beautifully during the crossing; the hull structure flexed as much as six inches without leaking.  The replica eventually ended up in Grant Park, near Chicago.  I'm not quite sure what its status is today; as of a few years ago a local group was raising money to do a major restoration job on it.  (Maybe a Forum member from the Chicago neighborhood can fill us in.)

According to Dr. Graham's history of Revell, the Revell kit is based on the "Grant Park Viking Ship."  If so, the people responsible for building the latter, in 1893, must have been extraordinarily precise in reproducing virtually every feature of the Gokstad Ship.  The Revell kit is simplified a little in a few places, but in its overall shape and details it matches the plans of the Gokstad Ship in the Brogger and Settelig book exactly - down to the apparently rather arbitrary layout of the deck planks and the inconsistent width of the hull planks at the bow and stern.  (The biggest deviation from the plans is one I don't understand:  the kit's "main deck" - if we can call it that - extends aft, under the little "afterdeck," by several feet more than the real thing does.  The real deck terminates at the last thwartships beam.  The extra length would be almost impossible to see on the finished model.  Maybe it matches the Grant Park replica?)  I'll say it again:  in my opinion this is one of the finest plastic sailing ship kits ever released.

The Gokstad Ship was buried with sixty-four wood-and-metal shields, painted alternately black and yellow (no designs on them), which apparently were hung on the ship's gunwales.  It's pretty generally agreed that shields were hung on the sides of Viking ships for ceremonial purposes (perhaps when the ships were entering or leaving port, or on other special occasions).  They wouldn't have lasted long in a seaway, and wouldn't actually have been of much use in a fight.  The Revell instructions, interestingly, suggest the option of omitting half of them.

Revell's renditions of the Gokstad Ship's shields are excellent, but there's a small glitch in the painting instructions that might mislead the unwary.  Each shield consists of several wood boards, with a dish-shaped boss in the middle and a rim around the edge.  Revell suggests painting the shields as though both the central boss and the rim were iron.  Not so.  The central boss is iron all right, but the rim is leather, held in place with lots of little iron nails.  If the rim were in fact iron the shield would be mighty heavy.

I haven't seen the Emhar kit, but it seems to be the only one on the market that's actually advertised for what it is:  a scale model of the Gokstad Ship.  On the basis of the photos that have been posted on the web it appears to be a fine kit; as I mentioned in an earlier post, in some ways it beats the Revell one.  I started my Revell version before the Emhar one was released.  If I were doing it again now I'd have trouble choosing between them.

In other words, either the Revell or Emhar kit has the potential to produce a first-rate scale model of the Gokstad Ship.  Turning the Heller kit into a scale model of the Oseberg Ship would be just about as difficult as starting from scratch.  (The various modified versions Heller released later are, in terms of historical fidelity, even worse.)  And the Aurora/Smer version is great fun, but not, by most reasonable definitions, a scale model.

Viking ships make beautiful, challenging model subjects.  Even if one starts with the intention of making a scale model of the Gokstad Ship, there's plenty of room for interpretation - and plenty of necessity for guesswork.  The real ship was buried in such a way that the stem and stern projected upward into a more acidic layer of soil; they've rotted away just a few feet above the gunwales.  Whether they ever had any sort of decoration on them is anybody's guess.  (The only purely ornamental work on the Gokstad Ship is a bit of carving on the tiller, and a series of simple beads along the edges of the hull planks.  Revell, unfortunately, didn't reproduce the beads - and I confess I didn't either.)  The mast was hacked off a few feet above the deck, to form the centerpost of the structure in which the body of the chieftain (or whatever he was) lay; nobody knows how tall the mast was originally.  And, apart from some interesting blocks and some bits of rope attached to them, there's no evidence whatsoever of how the ship was rigged.  Plenty of room for the individual modeler to come up with his/her own solutions.

I haven't yet bumped into any pictures of finished models based on the Emhar kit.  I suspect that, especially with the addition of the figures that Emhar also sells, the results could be pretty spectacular.

One other thought.  Anybody wanting a smaller Viking ship model would be well advised to look out for the one produced by Imai, during that company's brief heyday in the late 1970s.  Like all other Imai ship kits, that one was definitely worth building.  As I remember, it was six or eight inches long.  It shows up occasionally on E-bay. 

jtilley wrote:

There is, of course, plenty of room for interpretation and personal taste in all this; our knowledge of Viking ships isn't exactly comprehensive.  But my advice to anybody wanting to build a scale model of a Viking ship is to get hold of either the Revell or Emhar kit.

Buy both, either, as often as possible. Low Middle Age ship models are virtually non existant. The Revell kit is probably pretty accurate and compares well to Norwegian and Dane examples. The Aurora kit is nostalgic at best, but wonderful in every way from the figgies to the fanciful dragon and the striped sail.

I believe that the single biggest misconception in Low Middle Age "viking" ship modeling is the over abundance of shields. Lindstrom gives a good account of the availability of points from which to lash a shield, yet the biggest Gokstad ship had almost twice as many shields.

My own personal opinion is that the find was a pyre, therefore overladen with symbols and not a true raider.

What the ship modeling world needs now is anything from the Byzantines, AD 500 to AD 1000 in plastic. Historians have dispensed with the false notion of a "dark age" purported by Plutarch. A good rendition of Venetian rigged sailing ships, Turks etc.

As an aside, one night I fell asleep on the train out of Copenhagen ( did my last year in college  there, in architecture). I was prodded awake in the grey dawn by a railroad conductor at the end of the line, in Roskilde. There's a very nice museum out there with lesser but important ships. Spent the day, very interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_Ship_Museum_%28Roskilde%29

 

 

 

 

 

The bigger SMER Viking ship kit originally was an old MERIT kit from England,
from the late 1950s / early 1960s, which was a copy (but not a pantographed one)
from Aurora´s Viking ship. Its easy to build if you want it "straight from the box",
but not very detailed. Revells Viking ship or the bigger Heller ships have more detail
and engravings.  The smaller version is an older Heller tool, from the "Cadet"
series. A few years ago Heller sold a lot of tools to SMER, including many french
aircraft kits from the pre-war era.

HTH  Woxel

 

I'm aware of two kits labeled "Viking Ship" that are marketed under the Smer label.  One is listed (by Squadron Mail Order, at least) as being on 1/60 scale; the other as 1/180:  http://www.squadron.com/SearchResults.asp?offset=20&comflag=N .

It looks to me as though the smaller on is a reboxing of an old Heller kit, but in all honesty I haven't seen it "in the flesh."  My guess is that it's too small to be taken very seriously - especially if it's based on the larger Heller version.

The 1/60 version is, as I understand it, a slightly modified copy of the old, old Aurora kit.  I, like many other modelers of my vintage, have a big soft spot for that kit; I built it for the first time when I was seven or eight years old, and I have no idea how many times later.  It undoubtedly was responsible for introducing lots of people to ship modeling - and one of these days I may actually buy one again as an exercise in nostalgia.  But it bears to resemblance to a real Viking ship.  Nothing about the hull shape is Norse; some of the fittings (the steering oar on the starboard side, the T-shaped supports for spare oars, etc.) are vaguely reminiscent of the real thing, but that's about all.  And of course there are the delightful crew figures, complete with horned helmets.  (One of the first things one learns when studying Norse culture seriously is that the horned helmet is NOT part of it.  Wagnerian operas, yes; Vikings no.)

As I've indicated elsewhere in this Forum, I'm a big fan of the Revell Viking ship.  It is in fact a remarkably accurate model of the Gokstad Ship - one of the two major surviving Norse vessels.  In my opinion that Revell kit is one of the best plastic sailing ship kits ever.

I haven't seen the Emhar kit personally, but on the basis of pictures it looks to me like it can compete seriously with the Revell one.  Each seems to have its talking points.  The Revell one has some remarkably convincing "wood grain" detail; Emhar offers more detail below the level of the deck.  (The "deck" of the Gokstad Ship consists of short pine planks laid loosely on rabbets in the deck beams.  Leaving some of the deck planks ajar would be a nice touch - if there's detail to be seen beneath them.)

I'm most emphatically NOT a fan of the bigger Heller kits.  All of them, so far as I can tell, are based on the same hull.  It was originally released under the label "Drakkar Oseberg."  Presumably it was supposed to be a scale model of the Oseberg Ship, the other one that sits in the Viking Ship Hall in Oslo.  (The Oseberg ship, however, is not a "drakkar"; scholars generally are agreed that she's a non-seagoing ceremonial barge.)  But Heller completely botched the proportions of the hull.  (Compared to a scale drawing of the Oseberg Ship, the Heller travesty looks almost like a cartoon.  The bow and stern are ludicrously tall for the hull's length.)  And though the artisans at Heller were capable of doing some magnificent work in the way of "carved" ornamentation, they completely screwed it up this time.  The elaborate carvings on the sides of the stem and sternpost of the Oseberg Ship are stylized sculptures of dragons - not the abstract squiggles Heller supplies.  And the tips of the "spiral" shapes that form the extreme bow and stern of the real ship are carved to represent the head and tail of a snake.  Heller rendered them as nondescript blobs.

The several reissues of the Heller kit are, in terms of historical accuracy, even worse. 

There is, of course, plenty of room for interpretation and personal taste in all this; our knowledge of Viking ships isn't exactly comprehensive.  But my advice to anybody wanting to build a scale model of a Viking ship is to get hold of either the Revell or Emhar kit.