How the Viking longship came to be
The longship was the culmination of centuries of seafaring innovation that is thought to have started as early as the third century B.C.
In 1880, two young men from Sandefjord, Norway set out on an expedition on the family farm armed with a couple of shovels and an old family legend. They had heard a king had been buried with his ship under a mound on their property, and they wanted to know if the legend was true. Though historians had theorized the existence of the mythical longship, and some picture stones in Sweden depicted them, no one in Norway, or the world for that matter, had ever seen one.
It did not take much digging for the two men to strike proverbial gold. They uncovered the mast of a mysterious ship and soon alerted the authorities. Nicolay Nicolaysen, the then President of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments, caught wind of the find and demanded the amateurs cease digging lest they destroy the ancient artifact. Nicolaysen organized a team to begin an official excavation of the site that started the following month.
What Nicolaysen and his team uncovered confirmed what historia…
