With regard to the seamanship involved, there are incidents
recorded in the Sagas, as well as the use of a definite phrase for
"beating to windward," which prove that the handling of a Viking
ship was necessarily much the same as that of a square-rigged
vessel of today. The experience of the men who sailed the
reconstructed duplicate of the Goekstadt ship across the Atlantic
to the Chicago Exhibition bears this out entirely. The powers of
the beautifully designed ship were by no means limited to running
before the wind.
The museum at Christiania has a good example of the full war gear
of a lady of the Viking times.
Hakon, the son of Harald Fairhair, and foster son of our
Athelstane, took the throne of Norway in A.D. 935, which is
approximately the date of the story therefore. The long warfare
waged by Dane and Norseman against the Irishman at that time, and
the incidental troubles of the numerous island hermits on the Irish
coast, are written in the Irish annals, and perhaps most fully in
"the wars of the Gaedhil and the Gaill."
Chas. W. Whistler.
Stockland, 1906.
Chapter 1: The Old Chief And The Young.
The black smoke eddied and wavered as it rose over my father's
burning hall, and then the little sea breeze took it and swept it
inland over the heath-clad Caithness hills which I loved.
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