SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

106 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
qualified. For example, he assumes that the Norwegian ships
levied in the thirteenth century, which are known to be
considerably larger than the Gokstad ship, were longer than any
used in the Viking period (p. 79). There is no evidence for this:
the representation of boats doodled in wood found in the
thirteenth-century levels of the recent Bergen excavations bear
a striking resemblance to similar doodlings on a plank found in
the Oseberg ship and the ships they represent are structurally
similar in every respect to the Viking ship found at Gokstad
(complete, incidentally, with weather-vanes of the Soderala type).
The Bergen representations are not unique in the thirteenth
century, for they can be paralleled by many an idle scratching on
the wood walls of Norwegian churches, and they suggest that this
was the normal type of boat in the thirteenth century. If long
ships of this type could be built in the thirteenth century, then
there seems no reason to deny the possibility that long ships were
built in the Viking period, the problem of the scarphed keels must
have been overcome, and we must await new evidence.
As the second example of serious deficiency may be noted the
pages later in the book where Mr Sawyer turns his attention to the
Trelleborg type of camp. He makes the point that these camps
cannot be closely dated (using the bracket A.D. 950-105°), saying
that they could be associated with anyone of a number of large
military campaigns. He goes on to say that there are "good
reasons for believing that these camps are more likely to have been
constructed after Cnut's conquest of England than before". But
his chief argument is extraordinarily weak: "There is. . no
reason to believe that the tenth-century rulers were more capable
of building (the camps) than their eleventh-century successors".
The argument seems singularly feeble and ill-marshalled on these
pages (134-135).
In many minor details Mr Sawyer has slipped up - the first
rule of iconoclasm is surely accuracy. There are repetitions of
long-accepted, erroneous saws in this book, some of which I list
here:
p. I: The date 798 for the sacking of a monastery in the Isle of
Man is based on an Irish annal for that year which records the
sack of Inis Patraic. There are many St Patrick's Isles in the
West of Britain and there is no reason why this one should be
St Patrick's Isle, off Peel, rather than, say, Holmpatrick off
Dublin. 2
pp. 54 f.: There is no evidence that Harold was buried in one
• Cf. B. and E. Megaw, 'The Norse Heritage in the hie of Man', Early
Cultures of North-West Europe (ed. C. Fox and B. Dickins; 1950), I43-4.