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In 1880 a whole Viking ship was discovered in a burial mound on Gokstad farm in Sandar, Norway, giving way to a new found appreciation of the ship building design and construction skills of the Nordic people.

Ship building in Scandinavia did not start with the Vikings however, as the Norse ancestors had canoes capable of sea travel during the Stone Age, some 7000 years ago. They were a dugout design carved from a single softwood log using fire and flint tools. They ranged in size with the largest found to date being over 30 feet long. The dugouts were likely used for cod fishing, whaling and raiding expeditions. If you were important enough during this period you might even be buried in one.

The Bronze Age Ships

The overall design was that they were light open boats with a shallow draft, which means they sank very little when in the water. They had rounded bottoms which made them very unstable but their long narrow hulls were to become the standard for northern built ships until the Bronze Age, about 3000 years ago.

The Iron Age Ships

By the time the Iron Age arrived, about 2500 years ago, boat building had changed from burning and carving from a single log to being made from planks because of the introduction of hard iron tools. This became known as the clinker design and proved so successful it is still in use today. The clinker design made it possible to taper the bow and stern to resemble a typical canoe you'd see today. These boats were very seaworthy, held twenty oarsmen and allowed the ancestors of the vikings to explore the coastline of Denmark and Norway as early as 350 AD.

The Viking Age Ships

A couple of centuries before the Viking Age began another key development occurred in ship design, it was the addition of a keel, a T shaped piece of wood that run the full length of the boat giving it better stability and allowing it to run straighter through the water than ships without. An added bonus was that the keels solid construction gave the boat the ability to carry a sail.

The perfection we see in the Viking ships with regard to design, structure and materials was not the result of any one shipbuilder or work accomplished in any one year of the Viking Age. Like most final products it was changes made over a long period, in this case 6000 years,

The Vikings built many different sized and shaped ships with each one serving a different purpose, but they all were based on the same design, overlapping planks, solid keel, matching bow and stern and open deck.

Viking Ship Design