No single place has provided more spectacular evidence of the warlike character of Scandinavia in the Roman Iron Age than Nydam Moss in southern Jutland. Now just north of the Danish-German border, in the Iron Age Nydam was probably in the territory of the Angles, the Germanic tribe from whom the English get their name. The moss is now a rather soggy meadow but in Roman times it was a reed-fringed lake. In the 1830s, local farmers digging peat from the by then silted up lake began to find old iron weapons and shields. These discoveries eventually caught the attention of antiquarians and between 1859 and 1863 the moss was excavated by the Danish archaeologist Conrad Engelhardt, who discovered large quantities of weapons, two intact clinker-built ships, one built of oak and one of pine, and another oak ship which had been deliberately broken up before its deposition. The excavations were brought to an end by the outbreak of war between Denmark and Prussia in 1864, after which the area remained under German rule until 1920. During the war the pine ship was chopped up for firewood by German soldiers and burned. Systematic re-excavation of the site in 1984–97 produced thousands more artefacts.
The modern science of dendrochronology, the analysis of the pattern of tree rings preserved in ancient timbers, has dated the oak ship’s construction very precisely to 310–320. The ship was not new when it was sacrificed, so it was probably sunk in the bog around 350. The larger of the two ships, the oak ship, was around 70 feet (921.3 m)long by 12 feet (3.65 m) broad and was propelled by a crew of thirty oarsmen. The ship was double-ended, with long raking prows and was steered by a side rudder, which was only loosely attached to the hull. Like the Hjortspring boat, which was found only a few miles away, the oak ship was built of overlapping planks, but instead of being sewn together they are fastened using iron clench nails. Internal strengthening frames were lashed to the hull planks using lime-bast rope as on the Hjortspring boat. No fittings for a mast were found so the oak ship did not have a sail. Drawings made of the pine boat before its destruction show that it was about 61 feet (18.6 m) long by 10 feet (3 m) broad, had a crew of about twenty two oarsmen and was built in a generally similar way to the oak ship. There was no evidence that the ship had a mast. The modern re-excavation of the site discovered many fragments of the pine ship, the most important of which was a side rudder, which had been attached firmly to the side of the ship on a wooden boss. This type of side rudder continued to be used on longships until after the end of the Viking Age. Rudders were always fitted to the right-hand side of the ship, hence ‘starboard’ (from Old Norse styri/steer and borð/side of the ship). A shield found in the ship was made of timber felled in 296, so the ship was probably sacrificed in the early fourth century. Most of the third ship is thought still to be in the bog, but it was certainly rowed rather than paddled and its planks were fastened with iron clench nails. This ship was built of wood felled in AD 190, so it was probably sacrificed in the early third century.
The change since the early Iron Age from paddling to rowing is significant. For raiding, paddling has the advantage that all the crew can see where they are going, can keep a look-out for the enemy, and can disembark and re-embark more quickly than a crew of oarsmen. On the other hand, rowing is much more energy efficient than paddling so its adoption made it possible to raid further afield. The pine ship is evidence for this as it was probably built in Sweden. Pines large enough for shipbuilding did not grow in southern Scandinavia at this time and the ship’s timbers were decorated with patterns that are also found on contemporary inscribed stones in Sweden. The timing of the transition is uncertain but the earliest evidence for the use of oars is a rowlock found in a bog in Hordaland in Norway, which dates to c. 30 BC – AD 250. The question of the timing of the adoption of the sail in Scandinavia is a controversial one because the evidence is inconclusive. The Celtic peoples of Gaul, Britain and Ireland certainly used sailing ships in pre-Roman times and in his Histories, Tacitus describes the German tribes of the North Sea coast using sailing ships in their wars with Rome in the first century AD. However, in Germania, he also says that the Suiones (the Swedes) used neither sails nor oars on their ships. The two Nydam ships, of course, also used oars but not sails. At the time the ships were sacrificed, the Angles’ southern neighbours, the Saxons, were using sailing ships for pirate raids on Roman Britain and earning notoriety for their practice of sacrificing Roman prisoners to obtain a fair wind home. The Scandinavians cannot, therefore, have been ignorant of the sail in the fourth century. Many Scandinavian mercenaries and merchants must also have been familiar with Roman sailing ships. Despite this, the earliest clear evidence for the use of sails in the region is a seventh-century inscribed stone from Karlby on Jutland’s east coast showing a Nydam-type ship under sail.
The slow adoption of the sail in Scandinavia is hard to explain, especially as the technology itself is not complex: a woollen blanket or leather cloak, two wooden poles and some rope are all that would have been needed to make a rudimentary sail. The most commonly advanced theory, that the keels of ships like the Nydam ships were too weak to support the stresses of sailing, has never been tested experimentally and seems unconvincing given that, globally, sails have been fitted to all manner of watercraft, a great many of which have been technologically far less sophisticated than either of the Nydam ships. The argument usually advanced is that if the sail was not adopted it was because there was no perceived need for it. Warships needed large crews anyway and a sail would simply make a raiding ship more conspicuous (Vikings sometimes lowered their sails when approaching a hostile coast to increase their chances of landing unobserved), so it may not have seemed so advantageous for short range raiding in sheltered fjords and coastal waters. Chiefs and kings may also have seen commanding a crew of oarsmen as an expression of their own power. However, rowing long distances is hard work even for those accustomed to it, so these arguments are not really convincing. Perhaps it was only when Scandinavians began setting out on raiding and trading voyages beyond Scandinavian waters in the fifth century that the benefits of the sail become obvious to these technologically conservative seafarers?
The ships were only part of the Nydam find. Excavations have uncovered thousands of weapons, or parts of weapons, including swords, spears, lances, axes, and bows and arrows, elaborately decorated wooden scabbards, silver fittings from scabbards and belts, silver bars, and other personal items like combs and wooden storage boxes. The largest number of weapons were found in and around the ships but there were also many other weapon sacrifices in the bog. Most consisted of only a few spear or lance heads but one, which was surrounded by a fence of thirty-six swords thrust down into the bog, contained over 1,000 objects. Deposited c. 450 – 475, this was the last known weapon sacrifice at Nydam and one of the last in Scandinavia. Beliefs were changing again, bogs lost their significance as sacred places and the custom of bog sacrifices died out.
The finds from Nydam Moss illustrate another change in the north, the beginnings of literacy. The early Germans and Scandinavians wrote using runes, an alphabet of twig-like characters known as the futhark after the names of its first three characters. Though often inscribed on stone and metalwork, runes were originally designed to be carved on wood because the characters avoid horizontal lines, which would not have been clearly distinguishable from the grain. The oldest known runic inscription reads harja, a man’s name, and was found on a comb from Vimose bog on the Danish island of Fyn, which was made c. AD 150. The largest concentration of early runic inscriptions has been found in southern Scandinavia but it is not certain that this was the area where they were invented as runes were used by all the Germanic peoples. The origin of runes is surrounded by myth. In the Viking Age Scandinavians believed that runes were a gift of Odin, who had hanged himself, impaled on a spear, from the World Tree Yggdrasil for nine days to learn their secret. They are now more prosaically thought to be derived from Latin letters, which early Germans could easily have become familiar with through contacts with Roman merchants or during mercenary service in the Roman army.