Viking Ships - Navigation

Navigation

With such vast technological improvements, the Vikings began making increasingly more ocean voyages, as their ships were infinitely more sea worthy. In order to sail in ocean waters, the Vikings needed to develop methods of relatively precise navigation. Most commonly, a ship was piloted using ancestral knowledge. Essentially, the Vikings simply used prior familiarity with tides, sailing times, and landmarks in order to route courses. In fact, scholars contend that the mere position of a whale allowed the Vikings to determine their direction. Whales feed in highly nutritious waters, commonly found in regions where landmasses have pushed deep-water currents towards shallower areas. The sighting of a whale consequently functioned as a signal land was near. However, some academics also argue that the Vikings developed more tangible means of navigation. Many claim the Vikings used a sun compass to show their direction. A wooden half-disc found on the shores of Narsarsuaq, Greenland seems to initially lend credibility to this belief. However, upon investigation of the object, scholars found that the slits circumnavigating the disc are disproportionately spaced, casting severe doubts about its role as an accurate compass. Many now hold that the instrument is a “confession disc,” used by priests to count the number of confessions in their parish. In a similar sense, researchers and historians continually debate the use of sunstone in Viking navigation. Recent studies identify the sunstone, with its ability to polarize light, as a plausible method for determining direction. The sunstone effectively has the potential to show the positioning of the sun, even if obscured by clouds, by showing which direction light waves are oscillating. The stone will become a certain color based on the direction of the waves, but the process is only possible if the object is held in an area with direct sunlight. Thus, most scholars debate the reliability and the plausibility of using a navigational tool that can only determine direction in such limited conditions.

Viking sagas routinely tells of voyages where vikings suffer from being "hafvilla" (bewildered): voyages beset by fog or bad weather where they completely lost their sense of direction. This description suggests they did not use a sunstone to aid them when the sun was obscured. Also, they would experience hafvilla when the wind died, implying they relied on prevailing winds to navigate, further supporting the use of ancestral knowledge for piloting.