SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Book Reviews 1°5
consideration of philological evidence to others. Some of his own
criticism of certain established dogmas based on such evidence
would appear to be just. He here enlarges on an earlier paper
and is clearly very much at home with some aspects of the subject.
Even the layman can detect certain exaggerations, however, and
these do not make his arguments any more convincing. Faced
with Professor Smith's famous map of Scandinavian parish names
in England, the layman cannotbut be convinced that Scandinavian
influence - and probably therefore Scandinavian settlement ­
was very strong in comparison to English influence in the Danelaw,
and particularly in the area of Halfdan's settlement of Yorkshire.
The fact of which Mr Sawyer makes much - that many of the
most barren and inhospitable areas of northern England have
Scandinavian elements in their nomenclature - need mean
nothing more than that these areas had no particularised name
when the Vikings arrived and that settlement under the Vikings
was concentrated enough to require a name for them. They need
not indicate that these were the only areas available for Viking
settlement.
In his major detailed arguments there are some serious faults,
of which two examples will suffice. Firstly, to any writer on the
Vikings, the easiest chapter is that on ships and seafaring; the
evidence of archaeology is so impressive that, even though there
were no surviving literary description of voyages or boats, we
should still know an enormous amount about them. In his clear
technical discussion of the surviving ships Mr Sawyer has produced
nothing new, but he has made the interesting suggestion that the
ships normally used by the Vikings for their overseas expeditions
were not much larger than the Gokstad ship - that the long boat,
in fact, is a legend. One of his strongest arguments is that oak
trees yielding straight runs of timber long enough to form the keel
of the Gokstad ship were few and far between in Scandinavia ­
he points out that the keel of the r892 replica of the Gokstad ship
had to be imported from Canada and says "it is difficult to believe
that reliable seaworthy ships could be built (in the manner in
which Viking ships were built) with a keel made of more than one
piece of timber" He quotes no authority for this opinion - it
is presumably his own - but I fail to see any reason why a keel
should not be scarphed in the Viking period, as it was in later
periods. If he had merely suggested that boats of the size of the
Gokstad ship did make ocean journeys in the Viking period, he
would have many good arguments in his favour, but he has gone
farther and has overstated his case. There is ample evidence for
large boats in the Viking period and his arguments must be