“I joke about many things, son of Ragnar, but never about ship-building.”
―Floki
The Vikings called their warship a Drakkar. Long, sleek, and lightweight, its averaged 28 meters in length. The largest longship excavated was about seventy meters long. Its sixty oarsmen could swiftly deliver four hundred warriors to a battlefield along any European coast or well inland via a river. Like most large Drakkars, it was owned by a powerful king. He was the only one who could afford to have it built. In the last days of the Viking Age, three hundred longships of varying sizes were part of the Viking fleet.
The Drakkar, the best known of the spectacular longships, was symbolic of the legendary Vikin...