Forbidden History - Roskilde’s Lost Viking Ships

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

The 1962 discovery and excavation of thousand-year-old Viking ships at the bottom of a fjord near Roskilde, Denmark changed the understanding of Viking technology and culture. Cast List: Eric Meyers: Narrator Tim Sutherland: Host Karen Grønbæk Andersen: Viking historian Vibeke Bischoff: Archaeologist Ivan Jakobsen: Maritime historian Louise Kæmpe Henriksen: Curator Søren Nielsen: Archaeologist Neil Price: Professor of Archaeology Else Roesdahl: Professor of Archaeology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Wayfair, every style, every home. Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. We're an independent podcast, and advertisements help keep us going. Thanks for supporting the show. Blackened timber, rusted nails, twisted holes, and mud-burry, keels, shattered prows, skeletons of long dead vessels hidden for centuries, wracked by the tides. Now their stories are brought back to life, an amazing tale of archaeology and ingenuity. The excavation is absolutely a watershed in Viking studies.

The scattered fragments and wreckage are echoes of forgotten forages. There's just so many questions that we still need to answer. Echoes of a lost Viking fleet of Ross Kilda. From the late 8th to the mid-11th centuries, the Scandinavian peoples burst from their frontiers to almost anywhere the seas could take them. On this episode of Forbidden History, we can now explore the world of Viking life

by understanding the realm of the Viking dead. Long ships. In the Viking Age, the sight of these craft must have provoked fear, off the shores of Britain, Europe, or even in Scandinavia itself. Obviously one of the things the Vikings are most known for is their ships, these amazing long ships. Actually there's lots of different kinds of them,

but it is certainly true that Viking shipping technology is very good indeed, and it's getting better and better all through the centuries prior to the Viking age and into the age of the Vikings itself. And there's a certain sense, I think, in which that technology is developing because it's needed, but also the potential that it gives means they can do more things with it. Everyone in the Viking Age who lived coastal near must have known how to sail.

Today the longboat is the instantly recognizable symbol for Vikings. But for the best part of a millennium, no one ever actually saw a long ship. All that existed were images on Scandinavian picture stones, picture stones or the Bayou Tapestry. That changed around 800 years later, with the discovery in the 19th century of spectacular boat burials in Norway, like the Gokstad ship. But archaeologists debated whether these boats had ever actually sailed on the open seas, or if they had been specially made for the grave. Then, in 1962, in Denmark, the world saw beyond any doubt

Viking ships had once sailed the fjords and the seas. At the waterway of Pemberendon at Skoldelev, 20 kilometers north of the city of Roskilde, archaeologists embarked on one of the most innovative and ambitious rescue excavations ever attempted. It would take them four months under time pressure, working in the mud, completely surrounded by the waters of the fjord and always vulnerable to the elements. But in the end, it revealed to the world not one or two, but five real sea-going ships from the Viking Age. The excavation of the ships at Roskilde is absolutely a watershed in Viking studies. It's many decades in the past now, but it's absolutely fair to say that it transformed our understanding of Viking boat technology.

It's also, of course, a really high-profile archaeological project, one of the first of its kind actually, in Europe and it caught the imagination not only of the Danish public but around the world. It did an immense service to Viking archaeology and scholarship. And it's even now all these decades later it's an absolute credit to its originators. I mean when the school elude ships were found and excavated in 1962, I don't think anybody could have imagined what they would mean. Not only to the maritime culture of Denmark and what we suddenly knew about that, but also what it would mean for the city of Roskilde.

The excavation led to the foundation of the world-famous Viking ships' museum. They became part of a worldwide story of the Viking exploring the Viking voyages, the raids, and the trading sales and the maritime networks of the world. And it was the first time that it had been such a big maritime find from the Viking age. The museum researches all asked of Scandinavian boat building, sailing, and everyday life in the time of the great long boat fleet. In pride of place in the Viking Ships Hall, are the most original Viking ships you can see anywhere in the world together in one place. It's extremely fortunate any of the timbers survived at all, after so many centuries at the bottom of the fjord. More survived of some ships than of others.

The parts that didn't rot were those which had sunk into the mud of the shallow part of the fjord where they'd been abandoned. I mean finding one Viking ship at all is an incredible rarity, but considering there's five here, and in such good state of preservation and different types as well. These new types of boat were among the most revealing aspects of the excavation. It gave us new kinds of ships that we'd sustained. from the written sources, from the sagas. Logically, they had to be there, kind of ocean-going cargo ships, transport ships, that kind of thing.

But before Roskilde, we'd really only seen the kind of classic Viking longship. And Roskilde gave us these other types. It gave us a sequence of different sorts of Viking ships. Fantastic. And all because they've sank into the mud in the bottom of the harbour and then just been preserved for a thousand years. The upper parts of the hulls had either slowly rotted away or had been broken off by passing vessels over hundreds of years.

Yet even as late as the 20th century, there was still enough material projecting up from the fjord bed for local mariners to know something was there. In the 50s, they knew that there was something laying there. In the talk of between fishermen, they called it Queen Margaret's ship. So they just named it without knowing anything about it, because in between they had bits and pieces

from these boats in their nets. Parts of ships had been found continually for many years and were thought to be from the later Middle Ages. In the early 1960s, a move was made to find out more. It was thought that there was some potential for archaeology. But these things were some potential for archaeology. But these finds turned out not to be from the medieval Queen Margaret's time. Some pieces of timber were taken up and it looked suspiciously like Viking ships.

So they started to dive. And it was identified that it was very probably Viking ships and that there were several of them. Elsa Rosendahl was one of the team who uncovered them. She's one of Denmark's most respected archaeologists. In 1962, she was a young student. So what were your first memories of the dig? What sticks in my mind is that we were part of a very important and fascinating excavation. And there was water all around and it was a very, so to speak, watery excavation.

The main challenge was the physical problem of how to excavate the timbers from the Fjord bed far out into the open water. dig leaders Oleg Krumlin Peterson and Orleff Orlson decided to use technology developed for maritime engineering. They would build a cofferdam. Cofferdams had been used in maritime archaeology before, but rarely on this scale. It enclosed an area almost two kilometers square, and though the channel in the fjord was relatively shallow, The temporary walls held the water inside the coffer dam about two meters below the water level outside the barrier. We were working from wooden bridges stretched across the dig. So we were working on our stomachs or on our knees and using these water pistols

and to clean the space after we had with our dirty hands, taking the mud and the shells and the stones. The ship's hulls had been flattened by the weight. of the mud over centuries. But also they were covered with many stones, which it seemed had been used to fill and deliberately sink the boats into position. Because of the condition of the timber, there had to be sprinklers, so to keep them wet at all times. And of course, we also got some of the water. That was why we were in waterproof. And also the surface of the timbers was soft, while the the interior of the timbers was very hard. So we couldn't use trowels. We had to use our tiny hands and to take away the mud and the shells and the stones and so on. So our fingers got, they look terrible. So you were literally digging with your hands and your fingernails?

Yeah, yeah. But then it was fascinating to scrape away the mud and see the beautiful timbers. appear. It was hard work, but there were some perks of having your own private beach out in the middle of the fjord in the summer. We sneaked away on the other side where there was a bit of sand and sat and had a beer or drink or something and had a talk until it was discovered and we were not allowed anymore. Ah, students. The tempers were taken up individually and

put in big plastic bags, which were water sealed, and then they were put in a big dam at the National Museum Conservation Department. And then they started to do the conservation business, which is basically to replace the water in the cells with something else. The timbers dated to around the first half of the 11th century towards the end of the Viking Age. But the confused tangle of timbers didn't yet look like Viking ships. As each fragment was carefully logged and recorded, Peterson and Orelson, experts in maritime architecture, began to see the shapes of different Viking boat types.

They thought at first that there were six. They were one, two, three, four, five, six. And those numbers still stick, except that what we at the time thought were two ships that has turned out to be one ship, and that is the very long ship now called number two plus four. Hull find two plus four was around 30 meters long, much longer than expected,

and part of it projected beneath the Cofferdam wall. It's still the longest Viking boat ever found. Reconstructed, it sails again on Rosskilde Fjord as sea stallion. Despite all the technical challenges, the dig had to be completed in just four months. There was a limit to the excavation because it had to be finished before the autumn storms started. Work continued until late summer 1962.

It was a daring thing to do the excavation and see what was preserved of these ships. Yeah, something that I think I would recognise and lots of other archaeologists would recognise. You have to be brave and I think sometimes you have to stick your neck out a bit because these are untried methods and untried principles and scientific procedures or whatever. And sometimes they are not quite ready or you are right at the cutting edge of this. And so I think the word brave is quite appropriate because you never know whether it's going to work or not. But it worked here. But that's a dick. That's a big for you.

She was just starting out on what would prove a long career in archaeology. But it was Elsa's good fortune to discover one of the most important and iconic pieces of the ship's architecture. We were very lucky that the complete stem, one of the small cargo ship was preserved, and I found it. You were the first person to uncover it? Yes. Every Viking boat had two stems at either. stems at either end of the keel. Elsa's find was the only complete one to be found.

Four meters long, one piece of timber. One piece of calm timber. And now it is on the wall in the museum, like pride of place. And that was a big day. To be honest, I didn't really realize how unique it was. For the press it was, of course, especially interesting that it was a young girl of 20 with much all over. Not exactly glamorous.

No, no, no. I've told my students about it for many, many years. It's memory lane. It is, but it's also very, very important, and now it is, that is an archive in itself. After several years of conservation, the ships were eventually painstakingly put back together. And in 1969, the Viking Ships Hall opened.

In the decades since, the museum, has expanded to encompass its own artificial island in the fjord. It was during the construction of this in 1977 that nine more Viking ships were discovered. They were probably left to sink in the mud at the water's edge. Conservation and analysis of these wrecks is still going on, adding to the vast amount of data already gained from the School de Lev finds. The staff of the Viking Ships Museum, many of whom are volunteers, whom are volunteers are all passionate about their work here.

Vebeke is a trained boat designer, but she's moved away from using only computers to reimagine Viking craft. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly, 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

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AI Cloud ERP for any size business. You can present the ship finds in a book or in an article, but you don't learn anything from theoretical reconstruction or publishing in an article. You learn something when you really go all the way from the ship find through reconstruction of the hull form, through building of the full-scale reconstruction, and then sailing the ship find in its original. original waters where it has originally sailed.

And that is what all this research at the Viking Ship Museum is about. She begins by examining every single fragment of a whole surviving timbers. They're photographed, scaled down and mounted on thick paper to create a miniature model. So what scale is this now then? One to ten. I always use one to ten because then you don't make any mistakes of the meshes, one meter, ten centimeters. 10 centimeters, I can cope with that. I cut every piece from the whole find and attach them together. If you have an orange and you peel it and you have the skin lying on the floor

or the table, then if you put it back together, it will be round, even though it lies on the table flat. And it's the same with this one. So slowly, slowly you can build up the shape of of the ship. On average, only about 25% of most of the recovered Roskilde and Skoldelev holes have survived. But once Vebeka has the position of the ship's nails, even only from the known sections, she can reconstruct the missing parts. So I can say I have a hole here from the frame, and then I have to find the matching nail holes.

Building a model like this is actually like reversed naval architecture, you can say. By building it, we can study their mind when they were building the ship. And the other thing that I like about this way of doing things is it's very basic. I don't want to be crude, but you can do it with your hands, and you can do it with pieces of paper. And it's cheap and fast. And I still prefer it. I would go on.

Yeah. Yeah. The next day. is to transform the reconstructed hulls from the model into a more solid form. The museum's boathyard workshops can carry out every process in the reconstruction of a full-scale Viking ship. Rope, tar, iron, and most crucial of all, wood. It took dozens of individually selected trees to make just one boat. Can you go into a forest and say that tree would be perfect for that?

We try to find out how this tree was looking. The size of the tree, the dimensions, the height, the length of the planks, and the quality. And then we go into the forest and look for it. And sometimes we look for days and weeks because it is difficult to find. And I think experimental archaeology here at the Viking Ship Museum is about putting people with different backgrounds to look at the same plank because they'll see different things. they'll see different things when they look at the boat. Do you think in the Viking period they would have managed the trees and the forest to get

particular timber like we do now? We have had a week of seminar just discussing if the Vikings actually took care of their good trees. And if you go to traditional boat building in Norway, for example, they knew the good trees, they have got names because they know this tree don't take that because the boat builder, he needs it. maybe in 30, 40, 50 years. So I think that they have been taking care of the good trees. As well as the materials the Vikings used, it's also important to use the same tools that they used.

One of the first things Soren and the team had to do in building their first reconstruction was to work out just how tree trunks were cut into long planks or streaks, without machines, or even saws. They didn't use a saw. saw marks after any saw marks on the boat over there. We have been looking and we can't find anyone. And so they used axes and cutting tools for everything. There were many types of axes used in the Viking Age. Every type used in the

museum has been forged from an archaeological find. They work backwards from tool marks on the wood to work out what axes might have been used to make them. From cutting the tree down through cleaning the bark off and finally preparing the planks and streaks, various types of axes are used. There were many types of axes used in the Viking Age. Every type used in the museum has been forged from an archaeological find. They work backwards from tool marks on the wood

to work out what axes might have been used to make them. From cutting the tree down, through cleaning the bark off and finally preparing the planks and streaks. Various types of axes are used. I worked on a building that was about 900 years old in Windsor Castle. And in the roof of the castle, there were big oak timbers. And the way they tested whether the timbers were good or bad was by... Yeah, and listen.

And they listened to it. Because the best of the timber, it may... almost rings it, it's a nice solid tone. And then the roof, they were just a thud. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I learned that too. When I was brought up to actually, with a hammer, just listen to the wood.

Listen to the wood and smell the wood when it goes down in the forest. You can smell if it's a good wood. This kind of oak trees, they smell in a certain way. And if it's too sweet or if it's too, then don't bring it. Yeah. I've never heard that before, that's interesting.

On the Bayeux tapestry, for example, the Wilhelm, the Conqueror, he asked a guy to build him about 300 ships or something like that. And this guy, the guy he asked is standing like very demonstrative like that with his broader act. His special act. And I think it's because they want to show us that he was talking with the shipwright or the boat building. Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. So they were well paid at that time. Dendrochronological analysis of the wood used in the Skoldelev boats

revealed that they were all probably built in different locations and at different times. Sea stallion was built in Ireland, and so certainly crossed the North Sea at least once. The ships would have sailed different waters. So in the inner waters of Denmark, the waves have different capacities than the waves in the North Sea where the Norwegian ships would have been sailing. And the waves around the coast of Ireland and England, for example, going around lands and into the Inruz Channel, are completely different from that.

So you need to build a boat that fits the waters and the waves that you're going out into. The boat known as Sea Stallion has very particular characteristics in its design. It has room for 60 people to sit while rowing. On a trading ship, you wouldn't have these many hoofs in the boat. You wouldn't have ore holes. You wouldn't be able to row it. So based on the archaeology, you could say that this is a boat for transporting troops, basically transporting men. But that's not to say that you would have been rowing the boat all the way to England or Ireland or anything.

You would of course have been sailing as much as you can. sailing the reconstructed boat gives the crew valuable insight into the logistics and planning that went into any seaborne expedition in the Viking age every time the boat sails new knowledge is gained and all of this is fed back to the museum but it's important to know that you can't just say okay I want to go to Ireland right now so I'll sail out and then I'll be there like, I don't know, 12 days or something. You have to have a lot of weeks to do it, because you can't go out unless you know you can get in to shore within five or six days.

Because with the amount of people you need aboard to manure the ship and to row the ship, to balance the ship, we don't have enough room for food and water for more than five to six days. But it's unlikely that a boat like this would have sailed alone. on a raiding expedition.

At some point, probably towards the, let's say about the 820s, something like that, maybe the 830s, the nature of that raiding starts to change. It becomes more organised. The forces of Vikings get bigger and bigger. And one of the things we're seeing in the archaeology now is confirmation that the descriptions of the scale of this raiding, when you get into the 800s, first dozens of ships and then hundreds does seem to match the archaeology that these Viking forces. forces have left behind them. In other words, we really are dealing with massive Viking forces.

One thing is getting one ship, the sea stallion, over there at a specific date, at a specific point. A whole little deal is getting a whole fleet. At some point in history it would have been maybe 200 ships. Some of them this size, some of them smaller, some of them cargo ships, and they would have been sailing. so differently on the waters and there is just a small adjustment on the rother right now would mean that we don't get the same tacking possibilities as the next ship. So you very quickly get away from each other. So how did they communicate between the ships? How did they meet up at the same point?

That's quite amazing. There's just so many questions that we still need to answer. on how they did that. Because it's so light and we don't, we only go about a meter into the water. This is a boat that you can sail up on shore without it breaking or anything. So coming up to a place that you want to plunder, you could lay down the mast behind a hill or something

and then come out of nowhere rowing up on shore. Well actually when we move out in wave, in the high sea, the two sterns, they can move away from each other by a meter, because the whole ship moves like a worm. There's a reason why it's called worms in the Viking Age, because it moves so much around. The boat's flexibility comes from its build because the planks and strakes have been formed with axes from long timbers. It wouldn't be as strong if they were made from many smaller, shorter sawn planks. All the while, the crew must learn to understand what's going on instinctively,

especially when the boat is under sail. That's the thing about these boats, because they're so light, and actually sort of lie on top of the water. We only go about a meter and 20 into the water. So we need the people aboard to be intelligent ballasts, as we call it. We need people to think for themselves that now the boat is starting to this side, I move up to the other side. If we were only 30 people aboard instead of the 60 that we are right now,

then we wouldn't be able to balance the boat with this wind, with this much sail. So we would either have to reef the sail really much or we wouldn't be able to sail in this water weather. So, yeah, it's really important that we are enough people aboard. Whether they're ballast, hauling a rope or pulling an oar, each crew member has less than a meter of personal space in the boat. in the boat. Above all else, they must learn to work together. It's social skills, really. That's the key point to surviving on this ship.

You can learn to sail it quite easily, I think, if you've just got a bit of a knack of being outdoors and pulling on a rope. But the social skills. Yeah, you know this expression that we're all in the same boat. the same boat. If you sail in a boat and you have rough conditions and you sail for many days or many weeks, we're in the boat together. So you're depending on each other. So you make friends with the crew because you need to work together or nothing will function. In sailing the reconstructed boat, the Viking ships museum team has perhaps also recreated something of the spirit that was needed to live and work aboard these vessels almost 1,000 years ago.

The boats themselves have a limited working span in the water, just a few decades. But the experience, the camaraderie and the spirit of people working together like this in the Viking Age must have lasted lifetimes. The lifetime experience of being in such a tight-knit community, the intimacy of the crew, The fun of going out into difficult situations with other people pushing yourself and drinking good beer in the harbour and all that, the social world of it. It's also having a focus on what am I doing? How am I participating right now?

But it's not either just a one-man thing at all. all. So it's co-creation all the time with the boat, with the sail, with the wind, with the water, with other people sailing, with all the 60 other crew members aboard, co-creating the fact that we're able to get a move on and sail where we want to. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. And for more from the Like a Shot Network, check out Where Did Everyone Go, Histories of the Abandoned,

a deep dive into the incredible stories behind forgotten places, available now on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening.