About those Oars
Okay, the oars found on the Gokstad ship were from 17’ 2 ¾” to 19’ ½” (5.3 m. to 5.85 m.) and those of the Oseberg ship are 12’ 1 ¾” to 13’ (3.7 m. to 4 m.). However, a major factor is that these are both burial ships, and I repeat the caveat from the
Longship Company website on taking burial ships at face value:
“When considering an archeological find the context is everything. Why is the vessel there? Why are the objects aboard it there? Are those stones for ballast, or for sinking it? Are the tents and cooking utensils part of the ship's equipment or grave goods for the afterlife? Is the anchor all or part of the normal ground tackle or just the anchor that was handy at the time? If it's a grave site, did they choose the ship because it was beautiful, or because it was old, or because it happened to be at hand? As maritime archeologist Colin Martin once pointed out: you don't find very many sunken longships because they tend to float, even when holed or swamped, (ours certainly do) and they eventually fetch up on shore and get smashed and stripped down by the surf. What we mostly have are ships that were judged expendable, used for burials, blockades, fire ships, or just beached and left to rot. Any items present or missing must be looked at or extrapolated carefully to decide if they indeed were part of the ship's operating gear.”
Of the four rowing vessels I have skippered, we have used the following oars:
Sæ Earn: 5 pr. 9’ (2.74 m.) ash.
Fyrdraca: 6 pr. 14’ (4.27 m.) ash. (Surplus lifeboat oars)
Gyrfalcon: 2 pr. 9’ (2.74) ash. Later reduced to 8’ (2.44 m.) spruce.
Sæ Hrafn: 6 pr. 12’ (3.66 m.) laminated spruce, plus 2 pr. 12’ oak “heroic” oars (for those who managed to break the spruce oars), plus 2 pr. 10’ (3.05 m.) “bow” or “children’s” oars.
Here’s the trick; within certain parameters, it doesn’t seem to matter all that much. If you look at the plans of the Gokstad and Oseberg ships, (the only finds that seem to come complete with oars) there is actually not a lot of rise in the freeboard of the oarports between the midships and the bow and stern. Also, at least on our admittedly smaller vessels, the bow and stern are “pinched” and you don’t have a lot of space to swing the
oar without fouling the person next to you if you have too much of the
oar inboard; which is what you would have to do with a longer
oar. The Oseberg ship oars- (please note that these were unused and apparently crafted exclusively for the burial, some didn’t even have their handles finished) had painted decorative elements outboard, which gives an idea of how they were set (about 1/3 inboard). There are practical limits as to how much you have inboard and outboard for efficiency; so having a longer
oar set higher may be negated by the handling of the oars in a more cramped location, and may also not necessarily be as efficient as in other positions, such as amidships.
With only less than two feet (.6 m.) of difference between the longest and shortest oars of the Gokstad ship, and less than a foot difference on the Oseberg, all of the oars might have been used anywhere along the ship, or maybe (since those on the Gokstad were used, as opposed to custom made for the burial) they were both from the ship or from whatever oars might have been available in the shipyard at or near the time of the funeral. (I have a barn full of oars of various lengths; waiting to be used on whatever boats or Viking vessels we happen upon next.) Either that, or the Norse were extraordinarily sophisticated and were able to wring the last (unmeasurable at the time) ounce of energy from their crew members by carefully arranging the oars in increments of inches, and then keeping track of which
oar goes where when you stack them on the
oar rack.
Which brings us to the individual variations among the crewmen. Some oarsmen are bigger, taller, shorter, smaller, stronger and weaker than others. Some oars row better than others; especially some that have slight twists in the blade or bends in the loom. Some oars are just miserable to work with, and we tended to mark them to be left ashore except when we had an abnormally large crew, or when other oars were broken or damaged. On the Sæ Hrafn some of our strongest rowers love the oak oars. They can really put some power into them, for a while, but the labor of the lifting stroke also burns a lot of energy. Some of our smaller women, and occasional younger teens, do better with the 10’ spruce oars, which, oddly enough, seem to work best at the bow thwart, the highest rowing position as the
oar strake follows the sheer of the gun’l up to the bow. When everything is pulling along, we sometimes have three different types of oars of two lengths all in unison. And that’s the point- we are still able to keep them in unison, at least with no more chaos than when we use a uniform set of oars. Often enough, when having trouble keeping stroke, the solution is the pull the
oar a little more inboard or shove it a little more outboard until the oarsman is comfortable and the stroke is back in time.
Another interesting factor is that where longer oars can be more efficient, they can also be less seaworthy. Plans for the Gokstad faering replica call for 9’ oars; but on our copy (within inches and pounds of the original) the 9’ oars were too long for the freeboard, and we were constantly “catching crabs” (unintentionally getting the
oar blade caught by the waves or dipped in the water). We do much better, and the faering responds much better, with two pair of 8’ oars, rather than the original nine footers specified and supplied by the museum.
This autumn, if all goes well, we will have a large crew visiting from Hurstwic, (
http://www.hurstwic.org/ ) and it is their intention to experiment with various rowing strokes and stroke speed over a set course during their weekend visit. Once we have an established data base, maybe we can swap out the oars and observe differences in performance between the different lengths in a statistically significant way. However, I suspect that the individual physical variations of the crew, and perhaps the timing of the stroke, are far more important than relatively slight variations in the overall
length of the oars.
n.b.
There was a famous 19th century experiment in France where they decided to recreate a Greek Trireme, and they laid the hull out so that they used three different lengths of oars. It proved impossible to keep all the oars in stroke. It was sort of like a clock with three different lengths of pendulums trying to keep time. But there was also a considerably larger variation between the thalamites near the waterline, the zygians part way up, and the thranites at the top in the 19th century French model. (From memory, I think the bottom oars were about nine feet long (2.74 m.) at the lowest level and maybe 20 feet (6.1 m.) long at the highest level. (I will consult with Fred Blonder, one of our captains, who has sailed on the modern, and much more successful, trireme {Twice!} as a zygian.) The most recent trireme reconstruction uses all 170 oars of the same
length, and rearranges the seating of the oarsmen, with satisfactory results. The point that I’m wandering around with is that the difference in
oar length on the 19th century French model was much greater than the variation on the
longship; so some scholars who have belabored this point probably have not spent a lot of time rowing.