Yggdrasil · Humankind

The Builders of Skuldelev 2: A Longship Made in Ireland

A Danish-found longship whose timbers were felled in Ireland in 1042, built by people we cannot name.

Myth and literature

The story

Archaeological interpretation: the ship is real and its wood has been dated, but who built it is an inference from that wood.

Skuldelev 2 is a Viking Age longship about thirty metres long, found in Roskilde Fjord in Denmark. Tree-ring study of its timbers showed that the oak was cut in Ireland in 1042, in the area around Dublin. The ship was built in a Scandinavian way, yet its planks grew in Irish woods. That fits what the museum says about Vikings in Ireland, who worked as merchants, mercenaries and shipbuilders.

The shipwrights have no names. We do not know who they were, how they were taught or who ordered the ship. Later it sailed to Denmark, where it lay in the fjord with other ships. Nothing here ties the ship to a god or a myth; it belongs to the world of craft and travel the myths grew up in.

Myth and literature · Context

What we know, and what we do not

What is recorded: the ship exists in fragments, its wood is dated to 1042 and came from Irish woodland, and its form is Scandinavian. The museum’s reasoning links it to Dublin or Waterford. The Sea Stallion from Glendalough is a full-scale reconstruction built by the museum between 2000 and 2004 and, according to Wikipedia, sailed to Dublin in 2007 and back in 2008. It is a different kind of evidence: it shows how such a ship could be built and sailed, not who built the original.

What is not recorded: the builders’ names, their origin, whether they were Irish, Scandinavian or both, who owned the ship and why it was sunk. The crew figure is an estimate and sources differ on it. The Dublin or Waterford origin is the museum’s inference, and the museum presents it as probable, not proven.

Historical evidence

The evidence

The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde says tree-ring dating shows the keelson of Skuldelev 2 was felled in May or June of 1042, and that the plank trees were cut at the same time and grew near Dublin and Waterford in south-eastern Ireland. The museum infers from this that the builders were probably from one of those Viking-founded towns, most likely Dublin. Its exhibition page puts the build near Dublin.

The ship is reconstructed at about 29.3 metres long, 3.8 metres wide and 1.8 metres high amidships, with 60 oars. The exhibition page gives a crew of 65 to 70 and calls it a chieftain’s ship. Wikipedia gives about 30 metres and notes that other sources give a larger crew, 70 to 80, and that about a quarter of the original survives. Divers found the ship in 1957 at Peberrenden, and it was excavated in 1962. Archaeologists first thought XX, then found they were one vessel.