Bob:

About 23 years back, Monika and I had visited the Viking ship museum at Roskilde, Denmark, but we had our two young and energetic boys with us then so I hadn't been able to really read and look at the ships slowly, as is my want. So I had yearned to go back and see that museum again for lo, these many years, and my chance finally came. We set off for Roskilde at 8:15, and despite having to change from the metro to a regional train at 8:48, we were there a little over an hour later. How do I know these times so exactly? Well we were using the punch-card multi-trip train tickets sold for the Danish system and they depend on stamping the time on your card because you have exactly two hours from the time of that stamp to get to your destination. The ticket machine at the Christiania station did not, by the way, have an English-language option, but Monika was good enough at deciphering the Danish instructions that we purchased our ticket with only a few false steps.

Although the S-trains in the city area are electric, the regional train turned out to be a diesel locomotive. Since the museum didn't open until 10:00 a.m.and we arrived at 9:30, we had a leisurely walk down the main shopping avenue of Roskilde, which was a pretty little town in its own right. Just across the street from the train station we saw a rather large sculpture that looked like 3 gigantic urns in a pool of water. Most of the main street had been converted to a pedestrian mall, which made rambling along quite easy, but the mall had bicycle lanes running straight down the center and as the bicyclists rode quite briskly we had to be careful to avoid walking into them. Most of the buildings along the main street were modern, but here and there we saw some older buildings with intricate, multi-colored brickwork that I though was quite pretty.

Monika:

Bob:

The Information Center in the center of Roskilde also didn't open until 10:00 a.m., but we already had a town map and my new GPS that had all the town's streets in it, so we really didn't have any trouble orienting ourselves. From the town center we turned North to walk past a large old brick church with a pair of perfectly matched steeples. Continuing on through a park we found a nice fountain sculptured from rough stone, with its overflow water meandering downhill to the harbor where the museum was situated.

Monika:

Bob:

The museum is a long, low, white building right at the water's edge, but I was distracted by the several ships that I could identify as reconstructions of Viking-style ships, floating in the water next to the museum. I had heard the museum folks had reconstructed one or two Viking ships, but I was totally surprised to find reconstructions of many different variations of old wooden ships. Putting aside that puzzle for the moment, we continued to the museum, paid our entrance fee of 90 Kroner each, and started looking at the exhibits.

Monika:

Bob:

The exhibit hall at the Viking ship museum was in some ways just as I remembered it 23 years ago. There were the remains of 5 Viking ships of different types that had been sunk at the mouth of the harbor to forestall enemy attacks. The blackened, thousand-year-old timbers have been preserved and put into their correct relative positions on the original boat shapes by scientists who assembled them like huge, 3-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. Wow, what complex but interesting work that must have been!

The Viking ships represent two warships of the type that we immediately think of associated with the word "Viking". There was a narrow 30-meter or almost 100-foot long warship that carried 60-80 warriors, and a smaller version about 1/2 that length that carried only 30 warriors. These ships had oarlocks for all the men to row when becalmed or maneuvering in close quarters, although I suspect the single square sail was used whenever possible to save their aching backs! On the topmost strake I saw a row of holes where the shields were mounted, and that plus the dragon head mounted in front when on a raid would give any observer the immediate knowledge of the purpose of the ships.

Originally, both of the warships were also brightly painted with the different strakes running down the hull being painted different colors. I saw the movie of the reconstructed long ship being sailed from Roskilde to Oslo to Scotland and on to Ireland, and boy was it frightening to me when that cockleshell of a ship was in storms in the North Sea. One night the movie showed the ship in a heavy sea--waves cresting up at the gunwales--and I saw everyone was sleeping in their lifejackets, which is pretty unusual. I had to wonder if it was because they really thought they were in imminent danger of sinking. How brave the original Vikings must have been to have gone on journeys with none of the modern navigational or rescue systems.

Monika:

Bob:

When we finished the museum, we walked outside and across a small pedestrian bridge to where we had seen the Viking ship fleet earlier. What it turned out to be was a boatyard where the workers and scientists had reconstructed not just the 5 ships in the Roskilde museum, but many other ancient sailing vessels. They had apparently begun shortly after my last visit in 1972 to reconstruct the 5 original ships, but after completing some of those they had apparently just continued making functional replicas of other ancient ships. A sign claimed that they had reconstructed 32 ships in total ranging in time from a primitive 100 AD boat to a fishing skiff from around 1900. All of the ships were clinker built and had been found in some part of Scandinavia. That explained the fine collection of Viking-style ships sitting in the small marina there.

Besides the ships in the harbor and one that we saw being taken by a crane and put on skids for launching, we also saw three of the very earliest ships in a display shed. The 100 AD ship was basically a dugout canoe that was steamed and bent further apart in the middle. The next stage of development was represented by a split-log type of dugout with a couple of strakes added to both sides to raise the freeboard and greatly increase the carrying capacity. The strakes were, however, actually sewed to the basic hull with willow withs! The third boat was already a boat constructed in the manner of the later Viking ships. The strakes were built up on a separate keel and then reinforced with ribs nailed into place and caulked with pitch to make it all watertight. The Viking ships, of course, had the added complexity of the rigging for the sail and the side-post rudder, but that all greatly increased the capability for the long voyages which made the Viking war and trading expeditions possible.

Monika:

Bob:

We curled around back uphill to return to Roskilde, and along the way we found some very cute thatched-roof houses. The thatch was a thick, brown mat of reeds all angling downward from the peak of the roof, so despite having gaps between the reeds the water will flow along the reed and downhill to the eaves. It makes an effective roof but as you might expect it really is susceptible to fire. Understandably it's hard to get insurance for thatched-roof houses and consequently they are quite rare, so we are always pleasantly surprised when we run across them.

Returning to the train station, we rode back to Copenhagen, shopped at a Netto store at Norreport, and carried our groceries back to our room in Christianshavn. After resting a bit we repaired to the public library down the block and signed on using their free WiFi network to catch up on our email and surf the web a bit. That ended up taking a couple of hours, but at last we closed down our session and went back to our room for dinner and a quiet evening of doing puzzles and working on the computer.

Monika: