It seems I`m not the only one who is fascinated with the Viking age. Viking ship are still being built so many places in Scandinavia. One project I find especially interesting is this one in Tønsberg, Norway. They are building a copy of the Oseberg ship.
The last time they tried to do that the ship sunk. The reason was that it was an exact copy of the Oseberg ship. Unfortunately the Oseberg ship was found in a gazillion little pieces and wasn`t put together entirely right so when they made a copy of a ship that wasn`t exactly the way it should have been, things went wrong.
Now, with new calculations, they are trying again.
You can read more here:
http://www.osebergvikingskip.no/eng/
And follow them here:
I was reading a few weeks ago about a ship in Sweden and right now the name of it escapes me. It was a ship that sank not far from shore in the… late 1800s?? And they brought it to the surface and into a museum in the 1950s or so. Now they are currently working on saving it because it is beginning to deteriorate. I wish I could remember the name of the ship, it was a really fascinating read. Do you know which one I am speaking of?
It was the Vasa ship. There`s a very beautiful museum for it in Stockholm:
http://www.vasamuseet.se/
The ship sank in 1628 just after it had been launched. Some late additions to the canon decks and the size of the ship was the reason for it going down.
In the 50s (I think it was) the ship was pulled out of the sea and later put in a museum. The museum is really worth a visit. The whole ship is there but they`ve also made some lovely exhibitions about the ship and the time it was built.
I saw one kind of like that in a museum in Lisbon. It was so much smaller than I expected.
Yes, the Viking ships are much smaller than most people think. The longships were very narrow which was what gave them the good speed.