BLACKSMITHING in the VIKING AGE, Part Three
(In which we look at the capabilities of the smiths, based upon the artifacts they created.)
by Bruce Blackistone (Atli) bruce_blackistone@nps.gov Mon Aug 3 05:22:50 PDT 1998
(*note: please click on the thumbnailed pictures to view them full size)
So, having smelted out and refined several pounds of
fair quality wrought iron, what would the Vikings have done with it? The first rule of
subsistence technology is: never use a valuable material if a cheaper, more abundant,
well-understood and easily worked material would suffice. In parallel to this, whatever
you do create tends to be well crafted, spare and elegant. Having achieved that spare
elegance, embellishment with other precious materials is used to enhance the status of the
object and the owner. 
Now, what in the three worlds am I talking about? Check out the Viking spearhead. It's sharp, slim and to the point. The silver decoration is geometric and spare. If you compare it to an 18th century partizan the contrast is informative. In a material poor, labor rich environment functionality tends to take precedence. The embellishment can be of a complex, interwoven nature, but it subtracts nothing from the efficiency of the object. Compared with the surviving wood carvings and precious metal work, most of the iron work of this period is understated to the modern eye, and some of the cooking implements would be at home either in a Shaker kitchen or a Viking hearth.
The blacksmith was the main supplier of tools to the rest of the community. He functioned as a member of a complex and developed society and a vital member of the infrastructure. Woodworkers, tanners, farmers, and other metal workers would all have their needs. Utensils for cooking and weapons for defense were pounded out at the smith's forge, and it was not unusual for the well off farm to have a smithy of its own.
The ships required large quantities of metal work.
Our small (32') vessel has about 5,000 rivets! Imagine how many wrought iron rivets went
into a great dragon ship approaching 150' in length? The ships also required the largest
pieces of metal work that I'm familiar with from this era: anchors. The anchor often shown
with the Oseberg ship is a small and elegant work with diamond shaped flukes and an
"unsnagging" ring at the crown. The wooden stock, unfortunately, did not survive
but there is evidence of one. (Please note that those books with pictures of these anchors
without the stock are illustrated by artists who have no understanding of how anchors
work. Also remember that this is a burial ship, so we're probably not looking at the
primary, and larger, anchor. ) I had a chance to visually examine a
larger anchor at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art's Viking exhibit in 1982. This was about 4.5 feet longand the shank not over
(probably less than) 3 inches square. The arms ended in rather small diamond shaped
flukes, but this may have been the result of a thousand years of slow rusting. Altogether
it may have weighed a couple of hundred pounds, light enough to be manhandled over the bow
and recovered by two or three crewmen. Welding up the shank and the arms at the crown must
have taken some doing in the days before trip hammers. The power and the talent of
sledge-men probably limited the scale of projects such as this. The anchor at the Met also
had a wrought iron lead chain attached, useful to prevent the anchor line from abrading
against the rocks on the bottom. I was surprised at the long, thin links, but this, too,
could be due in part to corrosion. If I get to Denmark next spring, I'll take a much
closer look.
In terms of sheet metal, the smiths of this period seem to be able to make sheets of only a foot or two square. For cooking pots much over a foot across they had two choices: steal a cast bronze caldron from the Celts or Franks or rivet one together from several sheets. (If you want a challenge, try riveting a watertight pot. Baked beans charred into the seams do seem to help.) They could also construct copper pots from several sheets using dovetails and solder. In York I was rather amused to discover a frying pan of somewhat modern design hammered from a sheet about a foot across.
The few surviving helms also point to a limit in sheet metal size, being usually formed of several pieces and embellished with bronze or gilded appliqued plates and panels.
In a previous response to my second post, listing Theophilus as a primary source, Michael at "hand forged…" pointed out that these works were mostly inapplicable as texts for learning the trade. For instance he noted that the formulas for glass consisted of putting the ingredients in a pot, and if it turned a certain color, save it! This is not an efficient way of doing things! On the other hand, that is just the point. They didn't know that a certain carbon content produced a certain quality of steel. They just observed that if they did things a certain way it usually produced a certain result. But not always! A book on craft that I was recently reading pointed out that a Roman blacksmith with a new-made chisel didn't know if the chisel would cut the metal or the metal would blunt the chisel. Until the late 18th century through the present, when science started to make some progress on the answers, people pretty much knew WHAT things or procedures would do, or how they might behave, but they didn't know WHY. This is one of the reasons you read about the old guilds and the "mysteries" of blacksmithing (or glass blowing, or bronze founding). The other reason, of course, was to keep it a mystery and reduce competition. If you are the vital link in the infrastructure, and you teach your sons, or those you choose for apprentices, the trade (but not your neighbors) then you have assured their livelihoods. This attitude firmed up into stultifying rigidity in the later middle ages. Theophilus was the exception in that he was literate and believed that spreading the knowledge would benefit everybody. He was not someone to keep his light hidden under a bushel, no matter how murky and confused it may look from our distance of 876 years.
At least during the Viking period the mystery lay mostly with the metal, and not with the knowledge. Many farmers had a small smithy; leading one to suspect that metalworking was another general skill expected of a well rounded man. On farms, at least, there was the constant demand from wear and tear. Harness rings, chains, sickles and scythes, coulters and plowshares, all needed manufacture, repair or replacement. What could be made from wood, was, but some parts demanded iron or steel. My favorite example is the iron edges to wooden spades. I have a photograph of one from Ft. Stanwix National Monument in Rome, New York, from about 1776 that is identical to Anglo-Saxon examples and the illustrations on the Bayeux tapestry. (It's on my "to-do" list for our spring encampment.) (For a rich overview of the agricultural underpinning of the medieval life and economy I recommend Lost Country Life by Dorothy Hartley © 1979 Pantheon/Random House; ISBN 0-304-51036-4)
Anchors, pots and plowshares were the stuff of everyday life, and were workmanlike in their design. Weapons, especially swords, were something else again, and I'll leave that for part IV.
Bruce Edward Blackistone
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