They don’t make men like that anymore.
Those ships were incredible.
The ribs were actually fastened to the planking by fiber rope. The long ship actually writhed up and down like a snake in the ocean.
I wonder what ship it was. The two best preserved ones are the Gokstadt Ship and the Oseberg Ship. I think the Oseberg ship is the more beautiful of the two - the lines on it are breathtaking. It looks “alive”.
I read somewhere that the dragon head on a Viking Ship was not put there until the ship was out of port and replaced at sea. The Vkings believed in spirits called Landvetter(spelling?) which were sort of guardians of the land. They believed the fierce dragon head whould scare away the Landvetter of the places they were rading, but didn’t want it to scare away the guardain spirits of their own land.
I guess Norway is a beautiful place with the fjords and mountains and snow. The closest to it here is probably Washington State north into the Alaska panhandle. Never was in Norway, but was in Alaska - a real beautiful place.
I went to Norway with my mom a year before she died. She wanted me to meet her family in Oslo because she knew she didn’t have long to live.
The Hjemkomst is actually a recent reproduction of a viking ship, not the real thing. It was build in Minnesota, I believe, and sailed through the canal systems until it got to the Atlantic. (I bought a tee shirt...) I saw one old ship at the folksmuseum there. (I’m a descendant of Roald Amundsen so I’m interested in these things.)