A. Sutherland  – AncientPages.com – Modern navigation instruments were unknown to Vikings, and they relied on own senses, celestial bodies, birds, swells, whales, chants, and rhymes to navigate the seas and discover new land.

During the Viking Age, people started to categorise ships according to their functions. There were two types. One was primarily suitable for transporting armed men. The other was suitable for transporting cargo. Pictured here is the Viking Ship Museum’s freighter Ottar, which is of the type that was used for navigating the North Atlantic islands. (PH๏τo: the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde via Science Nordic

They even took advantage of the wind and the stars as clues to make their navigation easier.

Viking sagas handed down orally from generation to generation may have been more credible sources of this kind of navigation than we earlier realized. The success of the voyage depended on several factors.

In their study,  researchers analyzed as many as one thousand conceivable “three-week-long Viking voyages along the laтιтude 60°21’55” N from Norway to Greenland with changing cloudiness at summer solstice and spring equinox.”

When the sun was hidden by clouds or thick fog, the navigators had to determine first the position of the invisible sun, and it was performed  by means of skylight polarization and sunstone (e.g. calcite, cordierite, or tourmaline) crystals functioning as linear polarizers.

Despite this important study, Viking navigation from Norway to America in the northern laтιтudes still remains a mystery for physicists, historians, and archaeologists. Crystal “sunstones” could have helped Viking sailors to navigate even when clouds or fog hid the sun and hindered long-distance sea voyages. One ancient travelogue can be found in the medieval Norse manuscript ’Hauksbók’. Various landmarks like trees, buildings, islands, hills, and more were often given place names based on their special characteristics. These names helped the Vikings navigate their way to their destination.

It is not known whether the Vikings really used the method, but if they did, they could navigate their ships precisely and with success.

This crystal found at the Alderney shipwreck. Image credit & copyright: Alderney Museum

However, the study further notes that nobody really knows what the Vikings’ navigation practices really were, especially during critical weather conditions on the high seas like storms, heavy winds, ocean currents, or ships drifting during the night.

Since there were neither nautical charts nor any written descriptions back then, the Vikings’ travelogues consisted of narratives and rhymes.

An example of these travelogues can be found in the medieval Norse manuscript ’Hauksbók’.

“From Hernam [present-day Hennø near Bergen] in Norway, head due west towards Hvarf in Greenland, and you will have sailed north of Hjaltland [the Shetland Islands}, so that you just glimpse it in clear weather, but south of the Faroe Islands, so that the sea [the horizon] is right in between the distant mountains, and thus also south of Iceland.”

So, they sailed from Hennø in Norway, heading due west towards Greenland, between Shetland and the Faroes and south of Iceland.

It is known that also Polaris – “Leiðarstjarna” the “guiding star” was as used for navigation.

To guide them across the North Atlantic, the Viking navigators also used their senses and relied on them. Anton Englert, who researches Viking Age seafaring at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, pointed out that these experienced seafarers were able to hear how close they were to land when it was too foggy to see.

In silence, they carefully listened to the screeching of birds and the sound of waves breaking on the shore. The Vikings could also extract a lot of information just from a sea breeze. Another kind of help for the Viking mariner was a plumb bob used to ᴀssess the depth of the water. Such a tiny sample from the seabed was touched and tasted to determine if fresh water flowed from land into the sea water.

Crystals of calcite, like this one, may have been the “sunstones” of Viking legend that enabled these seafarers to successfully navigate lengthy voyages. Credit: Public Domain

A thirteenth-century manuscript called St Olaf’s Saga, informs that the Icelandic hero Sigurd tells King Olaf II Haraldsson of Norway where the sun is on a cloudy day. Olaf checks Sigurd’s claim using a mysterious sunstone: ‘Olaf grabbed a Sunstone, looked at the sky, and saw from where the light came, from which he guessed the position of the invisible Sun…’.

A special crystal discovered with the wreckage of the Alderney, an Elizabethan warship that sank near the Channel Islands in 1592, suggests legendary Viking sunstones did exist in reality.

The sunstones (like the one discovered at the Alderney shipwreck) could have been held up toward the center of the sky, allowing sunlight to hit it and get polarized and broken into an “ordinary” and an “extraordinary” beam. On a clear not cloudy day, they could have rotated the crystal until the pair of beams lined up. By noting where the sun was when this happened, navigators could make a reference point to use even when the Sun was obscured by clouds or twilight.

If the crystal is held east-west, the double image becomes a single image and thus allows a sailor to locate the Sun.

According to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society, “such a crystal immersed in seawater plays a crucial role by limiting the solubility, strengthening the mechanical properties of the calcite, while the sand abrasion alters the crystal by inducing roughness of its surface.

Although both phenomena have reduced the transparency of the Alderney calcite crystal, researchers demonstrated that Alderney-like crystals could really have been used as an accurate optical sun compᴀss as an aid to ancient navigation when the Sun was hidden by clouds or below the horizon.

To avoid the possibility of large magnetic errors not understood before 1600, an optical compᴀss could have helped provide the sailors with an absolute reference.

An Alderney-like crystal permits the observer to follow the azimuth of the Sun, far below the horizon,” the research team writes in the science paper. It is doubtful archaeologists will ever uncover a complete crystal in a Viking site because Vikings preferred to commit their ᴅᴇᴀᴅ to funeral pyres, cremating them and their grave goods.

One of the reasons why the existence of sunstones has long been disputed is because they are mentioned in the saga of Saint Olaf, a tale with many magical elements. However, the latest discovery offers evidence that so-called magical Viking sunstones really existed.

Written by – A. Sutherland  – AncientPages.com Senior Staff Writer

Updated on Sep 15, 2023

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