A photo provided by Greer Jarrett, a doctoral candidate in archaeology at Lund University in Sweden, shows Jarrett and his crew aboard a femboring, an open clinker boat, along the west coast of the Scandinavian Peninsula. On 26 voyages, the archaeologist piloted boats built like those used by the Vikings 1000 years ago to gain insights into Norse maritime routes. Photo / Greer Kimsa Jarrett, The New York Times
Late in the summer of 2021, Greer Jarrett set out on the first of 26 voyages to retrace the maritime paths taken by Norse sailors during the Viking Age, which lasted from roughly AD 800 to 1050.
The Vikings, beyond their reputation as medieval bad boys – Pillage People, if you will – were accomplished traders who established commercial routes that stretched all the way to Baghdad. Their primacy relied on mastery of the seas.
Jarrett, a doctoral candidate in archaeology at Lund University in Sweden, was intrigued not only by where these ancient mariners started and wound up, but also the paths they took to get there.
“The details of Viking Age trade are often limited to its origins and destinations,” he said. So over the next three years, and in the spirit of experimental archaeology, Jarrett piloted nine different modern vessels, built in the styles of those used a millennium ago.
Most of the journeys were undertaken in 9m fyringer, square-rigged, open clinker boats, built in the tradition of Afjord, a small Norwegian municipality where Viking-era boatbuilding techniques endured into the 20th century. Fyringer, the smallest boats in Jarrett’s fleet, were favoured by both fishermen and farmers.
“Most scholarship has focused on the large, impressive longships, which were not designed for long-range sailing and did not represent the realities of everyday life in the period,” Jarrett said.
Longships, he reasoned, give a skewed image of what sorts of sailing trips would have been possible.
For much of those three years, Jarrett led student and volunteer crews on sailing expeditions along the west coast of the Scandinavian Peninsula, the historical core of Norse seafaring.
Even without traversing oceans, they encountered perils that sometimes rivalled those of Leif Erikson and his father, Erik the Red, who is believed to have been the first European to reach North America.
Turbulent tidal currents. Broken yards - the horizontal spars on a ship’s mast to which the mainsail is attached. Encounters with 4m-waves, a surfacing submarine, and an amorous minke whale.
The most challenging, if not the most terrifying, of the hazards were powerful, frigid winds that swept down mountain slopes.
Norwegians have a term for these surprising gusts: fallvinder, because they seem to fall off hillsides and on to the water without warning, and can reach speeds comparable to that of a tornado.
It was all in the name of science: providing Jarrett with practical insights into Norse navigation.
Scholars of seafaring, he contends, have over-emphasised terrestrial and textual sources at the expense of understanding the actual lived realities of sailors.
To counter his own academic bias and what he calls “mainland myopia”, Jarrett spends as much time as possible at sea, working as part of a crew onboard a traditional wooden boat, with few modern aids for navigation, comfort and food processing.
He has now published his findings in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.
His analysis, spanning the first 17 voyages and 1494 nautical miles logged during this investigation, weds firsthand observations with digital modelling of the ancient Norwegian shoreline to uncover lost sea routes and hidden harbours once used by Viking seafarers.
Vibeke Bischoff, a ship reconstructor at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, said Jarrett’s study, which encompassed several extended sea journeys, upended the notion that Viking traders were confined to coastal travel.
Instead, it suggests they were capable of lengthy trips across stretches of open ocean.
“Jarrett has demonstrated that the use of experimental archaeological approaches that marry theory and practice can uncover new subjects for investigation that haven’t been thought of before, quite simply because they haven’t been physically experienced,” he said.
Born in Scotland and raised in Spain, Jarrett, 32, descends from a long line of seamen dating back to at least the 16th century, when an ancestor helped build the Great Michael, the largest ship built under the reign of King James IV of Scotland.
Jarrett’s father sailed him, at 18 months old, through the Corryvreckan, the third largest whirlpool in the world, as a form of baptism.
Jarrett became interested in the North Atlantic’s Viking Age maritime links while pursuing an undergraduate degree in archaeology at the University of Glasgow.
He sought to understand the Viking worldview by seeing it through the eyes of seasoned sailors.
In 2020, Jarrett began his doctoral studies at Lund University, focusing on Viking Age seafaring.
He began exploring the North Atlantic in fyringer assembled at a Norwegian vocational centre.
The construction followed the clinker, or lapstrake, method, meaning the hulls were formed by overlapping spruce planks secured with metal rivets (originally iron nails with roves, in Viking times).
Jarrett’s fyringer featured one major upgrade: rather than the traditional steering oar (or steer board) mounted on the right side, his boats were controlled by a stern rudder.
The premise of Jarrett’s new study is that Viking expeditions – despite lacking navigational tools like sextants, maps or compasses – journeyed farther out into high seas than previously assumed.
“It is probable that Viking traders did not exclusively use large, established towns and harbours,” he said.
“Instead, they relied on a network of smaller, decentralised havens.”
Jarrett has identified four such havens, all previously unknown.
He said that the anchorages, dispersed on remote islands and peninsulas, likely served as crucial, informal staging areas, providing pit stops for sailors travelling between well-known hubs such as Ribe in Denmark, Bergen in Norway, and Dublin in Ireland.
He speculated that these were more than mere stopovers. Often situated in what he calls “transition zones” between open water and fjords, the havens offered temporary refuge from harsh conditions and opportunities to resupply and interact with other sailors.
When he reached a potential haven, Jarrett surveyed the area and gathered information from local sailors and fishermen about traditional Norwegian sailing routes used in the 19th and early 20th centuries. At that time, boats lacked engines, and navigation relied on visual observation and local knowledge.
Following each voyage, Jarrett consulted marine charts and historical documents, seeking references to havens in old sailing accounts and their archaeological features.
The islands of Torget, Hestmona, and Skrova, held significance for some mariners as a source of cautionary tales and coastal landmarks conveyed through shared memories and myths.
By integrating the sailing logs of the 26 voyages with advanced digital models, Jarrett reconstructed sea levels, spanning 1200 years of geological shifts.
“I took modern elevation values from a digital grid and subtracted the difference in sea level from the Viking Age for each square in the grid,” he said.
After plotting out where low and high tide would have been, he estimated how much dry land might have been available and the navigability of some of the shallower sailing channels.
Jarrett found that islands along the outer coast are easier to access than sheltered havens deep in the fjords because they can be approached and departed from under a wider range of conditions.
None of the havens that he identified were in narrow fjords, which are hard to access with a square-rigged boat.
“Each one had to be a safe space between different areas of risk, that can be easily found, and can fit multiple boats,” Jarrett said.
They also had to offer fresh water, shelter from swells, tidal currents, tempests and a vantage point from which to scout for incoming storms or hostile fleets.
It was not long after the first leg of his project that Jarrett experienced the terrifying perils of the North Sea.
One day a collision with another vessel snapped his ship’s yard, and the crew, two men and two women, made emergency repairs by hammering the two halves back together with the butt of an axe.
Jarrett and his shipmates cautiously hoisted the sail on the braced yardarm and departed, propelled by a gentle easterly breeze.
As they neared Brettingsneset, a headland under a steep hill, they had to turn into the wind.
With darkness descending, they strained to see the iron poles indicating treacherous reefs and rocks. Rounding the promontory, they were suddenly struck by fallvinder.
“In that moment I was sure the yard would break, and the boat would be turned sideways by the waves and capsize,” Jarrett said.
Fortunately, Jarrett had undergone capsize training a month earlier. He knew that exposure to 3C seawater causes moderate hypothermia.
“I was therefore very aware of what it would be like to be thrown into the sea, at dusk, with slowly numbing limbs and a brain clouded by icy water,” he said.
Panic rose inside him, and he feared that he would lose control. “Instead, I managed to greet the fear and hold it at bay while the rest of my mind and body took care of the situation at hand,” he said.
He hauled down the sail, stiff with ice, and used his oars to stabilise the boat against the roaring wind.
The boat remained steady on the tumultuous waves, effortlessly twisting as it rode over them. “Although fyringer are sensitive to fallvinder, they are actually more capable of dealing with them than boats with other rigs,” Jarrett said.
Staying composed, he and his crew quickly lowered the sail and prepared to weather the wind. They then resumed their course, safely arriving at port within a few hours.
“From then onI knew we could handle ourselves in even the most dreadful conditions.”
Jarrett’s conclusions highlight the impact of isostatic rebound, which occurs when land rises after glaciers retreat from the coast.
“Some of the havens that exist today, and which we have long believed were active in the Viking Age, were actually underwater at the time,” Jarrett said.
“The sea level had changed by as much as 20 feet [6m], and so low-lying islands had been entirely submerged back then.”
Of the four havens, only the island of Storfosna has yielded archaeological evidence of human habitation – a ship burial from the period just before the Viking Age.
Jarrett is hopeful that excavations will be carried out in the havens, to potentially unearth remains of jetties, mooring posts, ballast stones, cooking pits, temporary shelters, and the detritus of boatbuilding, such as rivets and bent nails.
Morten Ravn, a researcher at the Viking Ship Museum, said that Jarrett’s study illustrated that sailing in the Viking Age was a negotiation among ship, shipmates, seascape, and weather that required constant adaptation.
“Sailing, back then, was never about just taking one route from A to B, but having several routes to choose from,” he said.
In Jarrett’s view, the success of Viking voyages hinged on both robust vessels and unified crews who could withstand harsh environments and each other.
He asserts that mastering traditional sailing techniques and experiencing the bond of shipmates during difficult passages creates a tangible link, or “bridge of experience”, with the sailors of antiquity.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Franz Lidz
Photographs by: Greer Kimsa Jarrett and Lorenz Peppler
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