Roar Ege

1982 - 1984

You work as though intoxicated, totally absorbed by the tool, the work, and the fantastic vessel taking shape before your eyes.
Søren Vadstrup, Construction Manager, 1993.

In 1982 Roar Ege, the reconstruction of the small, elegant and sturdy trading ship for transporting goods in Danish coastal waters and the Baltic, was built. The ship is the best preserved of the five Viking ships, and already during the excavation, the dream of recreating Skuldelev 3 arose. It is the first reconstruction built in the Viking Ship Museum's boatyard.

To avoid preconceived attitudes towards ship design and construction methods, the museums does not employ professional boatbuilders to build Roar Ege. The construction team has to be open to a shipbuilding tradition more than a 1,000 years old. The museum therefore engages a group of young people who, two years earlier, built Imme Skinfaxe, a 9:10 scale reconstruction of Skuldelev 3. The building of Roar Ege is carefully documented. All of the details are discussed, and for each decision, a memorandum is drawn up with descriptions, drawings and references. The decisions are tried out on a wooden model in 1:10-scale, and if the result are unsatisfactory, it is back to the drawing board.

When reconstructing the Skuldelev ships the museum faces several challenges. One of the most difficult is to explain how the Vikings, unlike us, built by eye, using rules-of-thumb that were passed down. We have chosen to build reconstructions that are as close to the original ships as possible. Consequently, we use models and drawings while contemplating the Viking building tradition.

The construction of Roar Ege was driven by a pioneering spirit uniting the museum in a joint project. The desire to study Viking Age shipbuilding lit a spark. Fascinated by shipbuilding and by the atmosphere surrounding it, several of the participants educated themselves in traditional maritime crafts - and thereby created the foundation for a professional, specialised handcraft environment at the museum.