Ships and Society in the Viking Age - an online day with Dr Gareth Williams

Title-picture above: the ship-building scene from the Bayeux Tapestry (thanks to Wikimedia Commons for this Public Domain image).

Ships and Society in the Viking Age - an online study-day with Dr Gareth Williams

Friday 14th November 2025, from 10.15 - 11.15, 11.45 - 12.45, & 13.45 - c.15.00

The Viking ship is one of the images most immediately associated with the Vikings in popular imagination. Unlike some of the other Viking stereotypes, which represent more recent invention, the choice of the ship to symbolise the Vikings is entirely appropriate. The Viking homelands were a series of maritime landscapes within which boats and ships were essential both for daily life and long-distance communication long before the Viking Age. It was the Vikings’ skills in shipbuilding and seamanship which underpinned their extraordinary expansion overseas to become the first people in the history of the world to establish contacts on four different continents. Within the same shipbuilding tradition, they developed different types of ships for different functions, from coastal raiding and river trading to the exploration and settlement of the North Atlantic.

In addition to their practical functions, ships were also a popular theme in the artistic culture of the Viking world, from representation in poetry, jewellery and picture stones to cruder graffiti all around the Viking world. This reflects in part their significance in daily life, but also a range of symbolic functions and, in some cases, the importance of individual named ships in Norse mythology.

This study day will explore both the practical and symbolic importance of ships within Viking society, and how they evolved over time to meet the varying needs of different groups across the Viking world.

1. Ships with everything

The opening lecture sets the theme for the day, exploring the centrality of ships both to daily life and to the Viking expansion of the 8th to 11th centuries. The lecture begins with the geography of the Viking world, and the development of ships in Scandinavia and neighbouring areas, including the burial ship from Sutton Hoo Mound 1, culminating in the creation of what may be regarded as a ‘typical’ Viking ship. It continues by examining how the varied geography of surrounding areas posed a range of challenges which were met by the development of varying ship types within the same tradition, a theme which will be explored in more detail in lecture 3. The lecture will then explore the popularity of the ship as motif in Viking art and poetry, and how this reflects the symbolic significance of the ship within society as well as its practical function.

2. Life and afterlife

As in other societies, Viking ships often had names of their own, while the many kennings (poetic metaphors) used for ships in skaldic verse also in many cases suggest creatures with lives of their own. This lecture explores the life-span of ships, from their creation to their eventual destruction. It begins with discussion of how the ships were built, and the resources involved, before moving on to the evidence (both archaeological and literary) for the journeys undertaken by individual ships, how they functioned, and the extended periods for which ships could be used. The lecture concludes by examining the different ways in which ships met their end (as reflected in both archaeological and written evidence), with a particular focus on the different ways in which ships could function in Viking funerary traditions.

3. The evolution of the Viking ship

Both the name and the image most often associated with Viking ships is the longship, a large warship of the later Viking Age. However, this was quite a late development. Early ships had more of an all-round function, serving equally for warfare or trade. This lecture traces the evolution of ship types from pre-Viking rowing vessels, through the ships of the early Viking Age to the development in the 10th century of more specialised warships and cargo vessels. This was not a straightforward linear development, with older types surviving alongside more modern innovations. In the same way, the Viking shipbuilding tradition continued to evolve beyond the Viking Age, with later developments in the Viking tradition surviving alongside other unrelated types such as the cog, which came to dominate maritime trade around the North Sea and the Baltic.

Archaeological evidence of ships surviving in different states of preservation is combined with pictorial and historical evidence, and it will be argued that some of the popular notions about Viking ships are based on anachronistic evidence from saga literature, reflecting developments in ship technology between the end of the Viking Age and the time these accounts were written. This chapter will also consider the terminology often applied to different types of Viking ships in secondary literature, and the extent to which this has any genuine basis in contemporary sources.

Recommended reading

• Williams, G. 2014. The Viking Ship, British Museum Press, London.

Some Suggestions for Optional Background Reading

• Bill, J. 2008. ‘Viking ships and the sea’, in S. Brink and N. Price (eds, The Viking World (Routledge: London and New York), 170-80.
• Bill, J. et al 2007. Welcome on board! The Sea Stallion from Glendalough. A Viking Longship Reconstructed. Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde.
• Borg, J. at al 2000. The Story of the Viking Ship from Äskekärr. Götebergs Stadsmuseum, Göteberg.
• Crumlin-Pedersen, O. 1997. Viking-Age Ships and Shipbuilding in Hedeby/Haithabu and Schleswig. Viking Ship Museum, Schleswig & Roskilde.
• Crumlin-Pedersen, O. 2010. Archaeology and the Sea in Scandinavia and Britain. Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde.
• Crumlin-Pedersen, O. and Olsen, O. 2002. The Skuldelev Ships I. Topography, Archaeology, History, Conservation and Display. Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde.
• Crumlin-Pedersen, O. and Vinner, M. (eds) 1986. Sailing into the Past. Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde.
• Jesch, J. 2001. Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age. The Vocabulary of Runic Inscriptions and Skaldic Verse. Boydell, Woodbridge.
• Marcus, G.J. 1990. The Conquest of the North Atlantic. Boydell, Woodbridge.
• Nylén, E. & Lamm, J.P. 1988. Stones, Ships and Symbols. Gidlunds, Stockholm.
• Pentz, P. with contributions by J. Bill and K. Strætkvern. 2014. ‘Ships and the Vikings’ in G.Williams, P.Pentz and M. Wemhoff (eds), Vikings: life and legend (British Museum Press, London), 202-37.
• Sjøvold, T. 1985. The Viking Ships in Oslo. Universitetets Oldsaksamling, Oslo.
• Sørensen, A.C. 2001. Ladby: A Danish Ship-Grave from the Viking Age. Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde.

Picture above: Gareth aboard a replica Viking ship at Birka, Sweden, July 2025 (©Dr Gareth Williams)

About Dr Gareth Williams

Gareth Williams studied history at the universities of St Andrews and Bergen. From 1996 to 2024 he was a curator at the British Museum, with responsibility for early medieval coins and latterly also Viking artefacts. He has had teaching and research links with a number of universities in Britain and Scandinavia, including two years as Senior Researcher on the Viking Phenomenon research project at the University of Uppsala in 2018-2019. He has honorary research affiliations at the universities of Cambridge and Nottingham and Oslo, and acts as an academic advisor to York Archaeology. He is also working as a freelance historian and archaeologist, specialising in the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. He has written one short book on Viking ships, and is now writing a more extended treatment on the same subject. He is also currently working on books on early medieval coins and Viking warfare.

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