Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
Here is what we know: In the 10th century, some Vikings piled into boats and shoved off the shore of what is now Norway. They eventually ended up in Greenland, more than 1,000 miles away.
How they found their way there? No one is exactly sure.It was a long voyage through the dicey water of the North Atlantic—three weeks if all went well—with land rarely in sight. Their boats were sturdy, made from planks called strakes held together with iron rivets, but a swift and steady vessel was no guarantee of safe passage. “The Vikings were superb boatbuilders, but that great skill would count for nothing if they could not navigate properly,” says Stephen Harding, a biochemistry professor at the University of Nottingham and author of Science and the Vikings. “If a boat got lost at sea, that would almost certainly prove fatal.”
Navigation, however, was no easy task. There was no map or chart to rely on, no sextant for celestial navigation, and no magnetic compass to help with dead reckoning. (That was how Columbus did it 500 years later.) The Norse sagas offer a few hints about how Vikings rowed and sailed along—but they are vague and incomplete. Close to shore, Viking mariners relied on coastal landmarks, such as how the sun seemed to hang between two particular mountains. Out at sea, when they were lucky, they had the sun and the predictable movements of migratory birds. But the sagas shed little light on how they managed during cloudy or stormy days, common occurrences in the North Atlantic.
A 1942 translation of the sagas tells of choppy seas, and sailors “beset by fogs and north winds until they lost all track of their course.” When the weather soured, crews described the feeling of hafvilla, or “bewilderment.” If clouds and fog veiled their usual visual referents, they could only drift and wait until the sun returned to restore their bearings.
But some modern researchers think that Vikings actually did have rainy-day navigation options. And they think it may have had something to do with crystals.
Fifty years ago, late Danish archaeologist Thorkild Ramskou proposed that Vikings may have navigated with the help of what are called sunstones—probably chunks of calcite crystal, also called Iceland spar, that might be able to reveal the position of the sun even when it is behind clouds or has slunk below the horizon.
How this works isn’t entirely understood, but a number of research groups have tried to figure it…
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