AFP
In Denmark, blacksmiths work to reconstruct a Viking boat
Facing a fjord in the heart of Denmark, blacksmiths help rebuild a Viking boat to better understand the secrets of navigation of Scandinavian warriors a thousand years ago. Amid the crackling and tinkling of metal, a team from the School National Ironworks of the United Kingdom painstakingly recreates the iron anchor of the ‘Skuldelev 5’, a 17 meter warship whose remains are on display at the nearby Roskilde Museum. “We are exploring as much as possible the techniques that would have been used at the time,” Rowan Taylor, lecturer, explains to AFP while his students hammer the hot iron. According to archaeologists, the ship with its slender silhouette was once part of a war fleet. It is much smaller than the 37 meters of the largest Viking ship ever discovered, the “Roskilde 6” found nearby. Along with four other boats, the “Skuldelev 5” was found in the Roskilde Fjord in 1962, almost a thousand years after having sunk while trying to protect access to the city from invaders. About half of its oak hull has survived but not its iron anchor, the reconstruction of which is based on another, dating from the same period and forged from iron bars welded together. The model, found in Ladby in the center of the country, 1.26 m long and 0.83 m wide, is equipped with an 11 meter long chain. “Access to resources for them was much more difficult than for us,” said 28-year-old apprentice Michael Phillips. “This shows the capabilities they must have had.”Once completed, the new iron anchor will hang from a reconstruction of the “Skuldelev 5”, expected in 2028. Since the 1980s, the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, has exhibited , reconstructed but also uses ships of the period, thanks to experimental archeology techniques. – Window on the past – For specialists, this process of recreation allows them to acquire a deeper and more practical understanding of past periods. Thus, reconstructing a Viking boat makes it possible to evaluate the speed at which the ships sailed, their loading of goods but also of weapons. “It’s a way to unlock all the information you have stored in these ships,” says curator Triona Sørensen. “When you have them here, like we have them in a museum, you can find out how old they are, what materials they are made of, where they were built (…) but you have no idea how they actually behaved and that’s what really interests us.” Between the 9th and 11th centuries, Scandinavian warriors sailed across Europe and into North America, pillaging but also trading with the populations. “Ships are really the driving force behind all this expansion in the Viking Age and brought Scandinavia (…) onto the European political scene of the time”, underlines Ms Sørensen. “For us, the ships are truly (…) the heart of the Viking era,” she insists. The British team hopes to complete the new anchor within six days. str-cbw/ef/cab
