Drakkar Longship Carved Bowl

This is a large, hand carved wooden bowl depicting a Viking Longship. It has been made out of a single piece of soar wood.

Longships were potentially called skeiðar (sing. skeið) if they were extremely long, serpent- or drakkar ships when dragon-heads were present, and snekke/snekkja when slightly smaller. They used both oars and sails to reach their frighteningly high speeds which were so instrumental to the Viking raiders’ hit-and-run tactics. They were also narrower than most of the ships from the early Viking Age; the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, states that archaeologically, ships have to be at least five times as long as they were wide to be classified as longships. The shields of the warriors hung on the outside of the ship.