Old oak forests and the Oseberg ship

This morning I went hiking in a primeval oak forest. The old, twisted oaks thrive in the hillsides of a narrow valley along with birch, elm and linden trees. At the bottom of the vale a hiking path threads its way along "Uråa" , which means "the brook under the scree". I Norway spring is now at its most intense with plants blooming, woods turning green, and birds singing like crazy. On my way into the ravine, I past a precipice and heard the hoarse croaks of a pair of ravens, but I saw none of them.

Both oaks and linden trees take on strange shapes in the primeval forest.

Oaks are among the last trees to come into leaves
and this old giant is among the latest of the late.

In the old days large oak forests covered much of Southern Norway before the woods were cut down and the timber exported to the Netherlands and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Back in the Viking Age the oak and pine forests were essential to the building and development of the Viking ships. Pine delivered timber for the strakes and masts, and oak, with its variety of forms, gave solid and enduring materials for knees, ribs, curved stems, keels and all the different shapes needed in the construction of a Viking ship, whether they were slender warships - longships - or heavy merchant ships - knorrs.

The Oseberg ship at The Vikingship Museum in Oslo.

The famous Oseberg ship may very well have had timber from the very wood I was visiting this morning. The ship was used in a burial in Eastern Norway, but examinations have shown that the trees used in the Oseberg ship were cut in the southern part of Western Norway.

Building a replica of the Oseberg ship.

Walking in the oak forest and watching the warped and crooked oak branches, I thought of my novels, and I could easily imagine Sigve the Awful's shipwrights walking the woods around Vik, searching for  materials for their shipbuilding. But on my return down the path beside the brook, I passed the precipice once more, and again I heard the ravens caw without seeing them. This time one of them was laughing a very hoarse laughter, and in the car back home I wondered whether it was Huginn, "thought"  or Muninn, "memory" who so overtly had been mocking me.

"Saga Oseberg" sails to Kaupang

Kaupang was an important Viking trading town in northern part of Denmark (today's south-eastern part of Norway). This summer "Saga Oseberg", an exact replica of the Oseberg ship, sailed in Viksfjord to Kaupang. See more pictures in the local newspaper Østlands-Posten and read my review of a beautiful Kaupang book below.

Saga Oseberg's rowers

Saga Oseberg with captain and crew

Kaupang

KAUPANG: The Viking Town. The Kaupang Exhibition at UKM, Oslo, 2004-2005 by Dagfinn Skre
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This s a gem of a book. It tells the story of Kaupang, the trading place at Skiringssal in the south-eastern part or Norway. Kaupang was an urban centre or town in the 9th and 10th centuries, and the book places Kaupang among the most important trading centres in the Scandinavian Viking age, along with Ribe, Birka, and Hedesby.

Images of "Saga Oseberg"

I'm back from my vacation, I've been relaxing on our cottage with my family and I've been sailing in the same waters as Saga Oseberg, the new replica of the famous Oseberg ship. I saw the ship being built, but I still haven't seen here sailing, unfortunately. But here are beautiful photos of her on her way to Risør Wooden Boat Festival.

The Oseberg ship

Last winter an exact replica of the famous Oseberg ship was built in Tunsberg, Norway. As part of my research for coming books, I visited the building site last spring, and it was extremely interesting to watch the work and talk with shipwrights, woodcarvers and other craftsmen building the ship. The building was done outside a hotel near the harbour in Tunsberg and the site was open to the general public. In the hotel’s lobby women were also weaving cloth for tents and sail.