KS2 / KS3 History: Viking ships

NEIL OLIVER:'The Vikings came from Scandinavia, where there are many mountains. Crossing those mountains was difficult, so the easiest way to travel was by boat, through the steep, sea-flooded valleys known as fjords. And over thousands of years, the Vikings learned how to build seagoing boats and become expert sailors.

Today in Oslo, the capital of Norway, is the best Viking ship ever discovered. It is over one thousand years old, and just as the Vikings left it.'

NEIL OLIVER:This stunning craft is the Oseberg Ship. It's certainly the most famous Viking ship we have, and to my eyes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most beautiful.

NEIL OLIVER:'This ship was built almost entirely of oak, and is over 18 metres long. It has a steering board on its right hand side, 'and an iron anchor, and it would have had a crew of around 35 men, and could be powered by either oars or sails. But it's the carving on the ship that I find truly incredible.'

NEIL OLIVER:The ship itself is the work of many craftsmen, but here in this carving is the imagination and the skill of just one artist. One person. It's this… exciting, vivid depiction of a dragon or sea serpents twisting together, biting tails. The scales on the skin are picked out with these carefully etched lines. And while it's one thing to be handed an object that you can hold in your hand, and be told, 'This is a thousand or 1200 years old.' It's of another order of magnitude to stand beneath something like this, to be reminded that these people were capable of, this kind of imagination, to make something so big, it makes them that bit more real. You know, this, this is what he Vikings were capable of.

NEIL OLIVER:'For centuries, the secret of Viking success was their ships. To sail in them was to be a Viking. They were built from shaped wooden planks, held together with iron rivets and wooden frames. Any gaps were sealed with animal hair to make them waterproof.'

NEIL OLIVER:Rowing one of these, well, on a day like today, is actually quite pleasant, if you can get into the rhythm. It's not such a bad way to spend a morning.

NEIL OLIVER:Oh, hold on. Hold on. It's all gone terrible.

NEIL OLIVER:'These ships meant you could sail all around Scandinavia, and then on to Ireland, England and Scotland, transporting people, animals, weapons and tools.'

NEIL OLIVER:It's been estimated that in the case of the bigger vessels with crews of 70 men, to keep them going through a sailing season lasting four months, would require the surplus from 460 farms. Or alternatively, you could just get your food from raiding and pillaging.

SAILOR:Okay. Go.

NEIL OLIVER:'If there was no wind, the Viking boats could be powered by oars. But they really came into their own as sailing ships. Then they were able to travel much, much further. It seems remarkable that when the Vikings reached the open sea, far away from land, somehow they still knew where they were going. One expert sailor thinks she knows how this was done.'

LENA BORJESSON:They were dependent on the sun. If they didn't find the sun, they were haf víl. They were lost at sea.

NEIL OLIVER:Haf víl.

LENA BORJESSON:Haf víl.

NEIL OLIVER:That's a word you don't want to hear on a Viking ship, then.

LENA BORJESSON:Right.

NEIL OLIVER:But what happens if you're in the open ocean and the weather is bad, and you don't see the sun for hours on end?

LENA BORJESSON:I've done it several times. The sky is all grey. We really need the sun. We haven't seen it for a long time. It's raining. I'm looking, I'm looking, I'm looking. Hey, where is the sun? Maybe there, maybe there. Yes. And then you just get it for ten seconds. Then like that. Wow. There. You've got it. And then you just adjust your course, because you can see, okay, maybe we have been sailing for 30 degrees wrong, but now we are on the course again. Thank you. I'm so happy for that sun.

NEIL OLIVER:'But not all Viking boats and ships were meant for sailing across the open ocean. Some Vikings used their vessels to sail up the mighty rivers in Russia and beyond. This would take them to the mysterious lands in the East, where they could find riches beyond their wildest dreams.'

NEIL OLIVER:Morning, Vikings. Where can I be? Up here?

NEIL OLIVER:'But travelling along the rivers presented a whole new challenge.'

VIKING:Stop.

NEIL OLIVER:'If they reached a point where the river was blocked, by ice or rapids, the boats could be taken out of the water and rolled on logs beyond the obstacles. Sometimes they would even transport their vessels between different rivers. That's why these boats are smaller than the oceangoing ships. They weren't so heavy, and they could be moved, metre by metre over land, from one place to another.'

NEIL OLIVER:Imagine how long it would take to get anywhere. You know, from when you leave home in Sweden. Cross the Baltic in ships and then get everything into boats like this, and every now and again you've got to take the boat out of the water and move it over land. These guys must have been away for years at a time. It's time-consuming, and it is laborious, but, you know, there's enough men here to move a boat this size, so the system does work. As history shows.

VIKING:Stop.

NEIL OLIVER:'As well as exploring and traveling along the rivers, east across Russia, the Vikings also explored new lands far to the West, across the vast North Atlantic ocean.'

NEIL OLIVER:One stormy day, sometime in the second half of the ninth century, a Viking ship sailing from Norway to the Faroe Islands was blown off course. After several more days sailing, it finally beached up on an uninhabited, unexplored shore, here, on Iceland.

NEIL OLIVER:'Some of the Vikings settled on Iceland, and built farms there. But in time, they headed even farther west.'

NEIL OLIVER:And in 1000 A.D., the unforgettably named Erik the Red led a fleet of 25 ships out into the North Atlantic in hopes of founding a new colony.

NEIL OLIVER:'After a difficult voyage, during which many Vikings lost their lives, just 14 boats arrived on what we now know as Greenland. But in the years to come, other Viking explorers would go even further. Objects dug up in Newfoundland tell us that the Vikings set up a trading camp there, and that makes them the first Europeans ever to reach America.'

NEIL OLIVER:The distance from Norway to Newfoundland is 4,500 miles, and we're talking about a time when that land mass was beyond the knowledge, far less the reach, of any other Europeans. What those Vikings did then was simply staggering.