Navigation  by Alex Clayphan.

            So having built your ship, you need to be able to get from place to place, and this is not as easy as it sounds. During the Viking period, there were no readily available maps, in fact there is a lot of dispute as to whether there were any maps at all, and the first known advent of a magnetic compass in north Europe, is in the late  twelfth century, so how do you navigate.

Well, one method, was to move up or down the coast until you were level with the place you wanted to reach, and then set out directly across the sea in an effort to reach the place. This technique is called latitude sailing, because you would keep to one latitude where at all possible, but this relied on you knowing where the sun was to keep your course. Debatable though it is to say it, there was certainly too much hit and not enough miss for this technique to have been done without some kind of instrument. Though there is no supporting evidence for it, the navigators of the time probably used crystals of  Calcite which when placed over a mark on wood or leather will give a double image in alignment with the sun’s position, personally though I’ve tried hard to get this to work, I’ve never been able to make it give better than a general quarter of the sky.

            Another method again still open to debate, is the sun compass device first proposed by Magnus Magnusson, this uses a rotational dial to give a position of longitude, and a rough latitude, also allowing for a reading based on, in this case, a scale of 32 degrees, the debate still rages, because the original find was only of half a dial, there have been subsequent finds of  stones with holes cut for the central spike (gnomon) and with similar markings that were almost certainly for the same purpose, but these have been discounted by some archaeologists, on the grounds that they were too few, and not made of wood.

            The last Navigation technique, which was certainly used according to documentary evidence was, word of mouth, basically a list of things to look out for as you journeyed, sea birds off the port bow, a mountain seen half over the horizon to the south, etc.

            So there you have it, in a nutshell the Vikings could find there way around by methods that were at least as complex as those used by our grandparents a few decades ago.

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