The Scandinavian peoples have left few archaeological traces of themselves, the complex of finds does not live up to their rich historical past, because their buildings and their monuments were almost all made of wood, and therefore easily perishable. Yet the Nordic people of the past have handed down something spectacular linked to the sea, which survived despite being made of wood: ships intact, perfect, as if the shipwrights had just finished them. This is testified by two museums, in Oslo and Stockholm, which have no equal in the world of their kind: in the capital of Norway there are three authentic Viking drakkar (okay, let’s say two and a half) perfectly preserved (one of the three at 90%) and Stockholm is the only surviving galleon (98%) intact at the time of sailing; you will not find any in Spain, nor in England, nor in the Caribbean, nor elsewhere.
The Viking Ship Museum is located in Bygdøy, a suburb of Oslo, and houses drakkar which were used as tombs, and therefore buried them; a lucky combination meant that particularly high-quality soils did not corrupt the wood (who knows how many other Viking ships / tombs have vanished, perhaps already shortly after the burial). One of the three drakkars may even have hosted a queen (it is assumed a certain queen Åsa), or at least a princess, or a high priestess; all three were found with a rich assortment of precious but also commonly used objects (for the journey to the afterlife) that in our eyes turned them into time capsules about what everyday life was like in Viking Norway. When we say that they were found intact it is not really true in the literal sense: some restoration was necessary, but for at least two out of three the result is spectacular. Turning around it is astounding how the curvature of the hulls continually changes with the observer’s point of view; what was the mathematical function that the constructors followed? They look like they were designed on the computer, and instead they were made by eye, on the pure and simple basis of experience, and with ships like these from Norway you could reach Iceland, Greenland, and even “Vinland”, that is, America.
As for the galleon Vasa, younger than eighteen hundred years, which is in the museum of the same name in Stockholm, it had a fate not unlike that of the Olso drakkars, because also in his case it was an underground that preserved the wood; however, in the seventeenth century no one would have thought of using a very expensive ship to bury someone: the Vasa simply sank, and then the sand covered it; the waters of the Baltic, cold and poor in oxygen and life, and therefore also in wood parasites, did the rest. Underwater wrecks of caravels, galleons, etc. have been found in oceans all over the world but what are found are usually cannons, other metal objects, coins and (if all goes well) some fragments of wooden structure, but not a nearly ship. whole; the case of the Vasa is unparalleled.
The way in which the Vasa is presented at the Stockholm museum is marvelous: the lights and shadows, the costumed figures, the music of the time, all contribute to recreating a magical atmosphere. This alone is worth the trip.
An ironic end: once I had a news report in Tromsø, in the far north of Norway, a city of northern lights and the midnight sun, and in passing they point me to a fjord in which a ship was sunk during the Second World War German (at the moment it didn’t occur to me, but it was the famous Tirpitz). They add: “We have recovered it”. I get excited and ask: “How beautiful, then can you see?”. “No, we saw it as scrap iron”.
Luckily the wood of the Oslo drakkars and the Stockholm Vasa was not of commercial interest.
The author of this article has published – among others – the book “Savoy corsairs and kings of Madagascar” (Mimesis 2020), which also contains a review of piracy facts starting from the Viking age.