Traditional Wooden Boatbuilding in Norway

I'm fascinated by small wooden boats. I love rowing and sailing them and I love building them and now I want to travel back into the history of wooden boat building. I came to Nordfjord because of a film. I'm on a journey that will take me to mountains and breathtaking fjords where the land divides and the sea unites. Norway. I want to find out about a long and rich heritage. It's an adventure that will take me to some of the most skilled and feared boat builders in history. The Vikings. This is the largest Viking ship ever found. But I also want to meet their modern descendants and learn from their wonderful skill and knowledge. And maybe, just maybe, I can find a wooden boat future of hope and optimism. I really like wood. Here we are. It's first thing in the morning and we're waiting for the train that is going to take to Oslo. I've heard of some amazing projects in Norway. So I'm off to find out how Norwegians preserve their rich and varied wooden boat culture. Well, we're on our way to the Viking Ships Museum and these are probably the most famous Viking ships in the world. When you think of Viking ships, you've probably got a picture of one of these in your head. The museum is closed at the moment. It's, well, it's actually a bit of a building site. But we've been given special access to go into the museum, find out what's going on, and talk to the curator Jan Bill. The Åseberg ship is the oldest well-preserved Viking ship that we have. And it was built around 820 in Western Norway. And then it was used in a ship burial here in Eastern Norway in Vestfold at the Oslofjord in 834. The Gokstad ship comes from the same area, was excavated in the same area as the Åseberg ship in Sandefjord. And it was built around 900. Let's just take a look at it and see. Incredible to see it so close. And the huge size of it. The keel's massive, isn't it? It is massive, yeah. And the size of the strakes as well. So this means some huge oak trees. Well, about one metre in diameter. When I've seen photographs of the excavations, the ships are in quite a bad state. But now they're in a more reconstructed state. Those ships were quite heavily degraded because of the thousand years that they have spent in mounts. But in both cases, the ships were more or less taken apart and rebuilt. Would it be fair to say that the way in which the ships were reconstructed maybe didn't quite get it all right? Yes, that's true. And I think it was an intention to get things right. But they had another goal than we have today. If we excavated the Gokstad ship today, we'd probably never make it look something like it does here in the museum today. Because there's quite a lot of restoration involved and museum practices today. They are more that you show what you've got and then you just illustrate what is missing. But it has to be said that this is not like they were just inventing things. Because most of the wood was there and it was possible to make a very realistic interpretation. There are very exciting plans to open an entirely new museum in new buildings in 2027. And the reason for doing that is not so much that we wanted a new museum, but that the the old building that we have here was simply not capable of protecting the very valuable finds from the Osseberg, Gokstad and Thun ship burials that we used to display here. But of course, once these new buildings are finished, these priceless and very delicate ships will have to be moved. How do you go about moving an object that is 1,100 years old from here, I don't know how many yards or how many meters it is, but it's a fair old distance? Well, the first thing was that we have constructed these steel cradles around the Osseberg, Gokstad and Thun ships. We have lifted up each ship just some 20 millimeters or so. So they are resting now on these air bags up there. That is rubber filled with air and that is made so that any vibrations coming from the ground here will actually be absorbed there so that the ships will not be vibrating during the building period. And we also have a very big setup with sensors everywhere. And Jan, tell me, on the day that the ships are moved, what's going to be your job? Where will you be? Oh, I'll be here. You'll be pressing the button? No, no, no, no. We have a very dedicated group of people who are taking care of this whole undertaking. So I'm not going to interfere with their work, but I'll definitely see it happen. It sounds like 2027 is going to be quite some event, doesn't it? I guess when the original Vikings planned their funeral, even in their wildest and craziest dreams, they wouldn't have imagined a voyage to the afterlife like the voyage that is currently being prepared. You begin to wonder just how did our ancestors build such marvelous works of art? What tools did they use? What skills did they have that have been lost to us? It's exactly these questions that Bendik Skorvald is trying to answer at the Maritime Museum, where he's building a reconstruction of one of the smaller Gokstad ships. The keel did not want to become a keel. It's quite strange, the construction. A lot of the curve in the boat is in this keel. Usually in boats I've built before, you have a straight keel and then you join in pieces at the ends for the start of the curve. Here that curve is in the same log. So either you need a tree that's grown like a banana or you need a really, really big tree. So trying to convince this tree to take its right shape, to not take on a new shape, it took a while. The planks also were quite different to what I'm used to. I mostly built clinker built boats with flat square planks, which is quite common. Here there are these pieces that are left in the plank, so you have to axe away all the material around it. So that's also been a bit more of a challenge, you might say. So where these pieces are is where the frames are going to be. The frames are fastened to the plank with wooden nails with a wedge from the inside. It's less of a risk of rotting. Of course the Vikings used what we call green oak. Have you used green oak? Yeah. Axing in dry oak, it's a very depressing thing to do. The axe comes back, it doesn't really stick. Green oak is a completely different material. It's a lot softer, a lot more flexible, so we don't have to use steam when bending the boards. When it's green, they're flexible enough. For us, that's been the main thing. For the Vikings, I can imagine also the fact that you can make your planks before the trees ever leave the forests is quite a valuable thing. Hauling out a four-ton tree is not fun even today, but if you can fell the tree, split it up, axe it into planks where it lies, then the entire project becomes a lot easier. It's not the fact that it's old. There are a lot of things that are very old that are really bad, but it's the set of knowledge that kind of fascinates me, because it's not something you can invent in a generation. It's added on generation after generation. It's not that tradition. It's kind of a set in stone. We did it this way because that's how we've done it, but when we look at it more, it's constant elevation, alteration, trying and failing. Then when you do that for generation after generation for a thousand years, you get quite a set of knowledge and a way of building which feels very organic, which feels very natural where things kind of add up on its own. Well, I've snuck into the museum a few months later and the boat is looking pretty near to completion now. It's incredibly beautiful. This boat building history was fascinating, but I wanted to find out if it was all about the past or if it was still alive today. A busy side street in Oslo might seem like a strange place to find out about traditional wooden boats, but Forbundekusten is an organisation that gives those of us interested in small wooden boats a lot of hope. Forbundekusten is an organisation set up to preserve historic vessels, coastal culture and maritime heritage. They've helped fund hundreds of small Klinker boat building projects. A very important thing we are focusing on is to see the relations between the craft, the building of the boats and the use of the boats. It goes together. One of the major funders was Sparebank and I asked Tore why he thought they had chosen to fund Forbundekusten. But I think it was kind of, let's say, the timing was there because more and more people are concerned about this kind of, this cultural heritage, especially the small Klinker boats are disappearing, both the knowledge and the boats themselves. Applications are made by community groups. One good thing with small boats, especially if there is an old boat, it's not much money which is needed. And community groups that involve young people are given preference. Well, I think it's a vital part of the heritage. So I think that it's a part of our identity. It's in our stomach and brain. There are obviously some fascinating projects going on and I'm going to spend the next few days visiting just a few of those projects and finding out more. I can't wait. So there it is, home for the night. What could be better? My own little cabin to whisk me through the night over the mountains to Bergen. Well, it's first thing in the morning and I'm going to go to the Osserver Werkstatt and I'm hoping to meet and talk to Steve who's a boat builder there who's going to tell us all about Norwegian traditional boat building methods. Here at Osserver Werkstatt, they build beautiful traditional boats. You can see the Viking lines. One of the boats they're working on is a project from the Forbundekusten scheme. This is the Alnastal. And the whole idea of this is that the entire design of the boat is, well, on that stick and in your head. It's cropped down to this, these few measurements. When we start building the boat, we measure the length of the boat first, put the nail on the floor, the same length on the other side, put the nail on the floor and then add a string between the nails. So this is in the front of the boat, the height from the front of the keel to the string, the rear of the keel to the string, where the first plank is hitting the stems in the front and in the rear. And then you have the width of the planks in the middle. And then you have the top strike. So everything that happens between the middle of the boat and the stems are intangible knowledge that we can vary it with these sticks. If you want a more cargo boat. So if I've understood that correctly, then you do have some measurements here, but the kind of a lot of the measurements are you working out in your head and how it all kind of joins up. And you only got that through your experience. Yeah. The more experienced you are, the more tough you are in making decisions and shapes. So one of the things that is really so unique and special about these boats is this idea of the pulse, which I think translates into English as the throat. The main job this plank has is to make less of friction against the water and also to lift the boat up, cut the waves and lift the boat. So you want it to swallow the water in underneath the hull and make the boat go up and over the waves. So you start off with the plank that's three inches thick. Yes. And then literally carve out this beautiful. Yes. Some of it you can only carve within the three inches, but what we do after we carved it, we also soak it in the water for about an hour and then we are pressing the rest of the shape. So it's not, it's not a fixed shape from carving. It's also pressed. What I find so exciting about the Oselve Verkstad is that it is an established project with a sound business model. They're selling their boats all over Norway and indeed all over the world. They build traditional clinker boats in a very traditional way, but they've also found a way of building a sound future. Well, we're here on the edge of the Hardangerfjord to meet Peter Helen Hansen, who's been running a project where he has researched, restored and built new versions of the traditional Hardanger boat, a wooden clinker boat, for most of his life. When I started here 30 years back in the fall of 1994, there were still some old guys building boats around. So there were like 15 boat builders located in different places in the Hardangerfjord. So at that time and the first 15 years of my work here, I spent a lot of time visiting them and filming them, taking photos and doing interviews of what they were doing. And it ended up in writing a book, The Strandabama, which is basically what they told me about boat building in the fjord. But the good thing about it was that I was building at the same time as I was interviewing them. So we got a very good connection and I had a very good opportunity to kind of gather a lot of knowledge of the living tradition. Yeah, you did this at exactly the right time when a lot of these guys who were being brought up in the tradition of boat building, they were kind of coming to the end of, well, probably their lives. And if you hadn't done what you did, that knowledge, that intangible knowledge would have completely disappeared. Yeah, I think so. And there's so much to it. It's like, well, the forestry part of it. Where did they get their wood? What were they looking for? What qualities in the wood for the different parts of the boat? All the tools. How did they use these tools? All the methods connected to each tool. The name Strandabama, we don't know exactly when that name came, but in between the first and second world war, there was a boom to the building. So in Strandabama, the community Strandabama, they were built over a thousand boats a year. That is a staggering amount of wooden boats that were being built in this tiny location. 1,000 boats a year. What happened to those 1,000 boats? They didn't need all of them themselves, surely? No, they were exported mainly inland, going, well, both north, but most of them went probably south, ending up in selling them in Oslo. Well, basically by having apprentices here full time and pass the knowledge on. And we also like the boats to be used, of course. So we have like five new boats out here for rowing and sailing. So we have school classes here that go out rowing. We have different kind of activities in the workshop with them learning about the boat builder's tools. But the whole point to it is, of course, that the boat also comes into use and pass on the knowledge of using a boat, which is a big field as well. So the first project was Peter was building a bag, a boat with two passivors, and I was building one. Then we built one together and then a bigger church boat. And now we're building, so basically four or five boats. That's incredible. So only a year and you've already built four or five boats and on one boat, it sounds like you worked on pretty much on your own. It's actually for sale now. Is it? The first boat I built, yeah. So you can come to the museum and you can hire one of these fairings for a day or a couple of hours and you can row out on the fjord. You've got the wide open fjord in front of you. You're surrounded by mountains and there seem to be very few obstacles. So I just said that and sort of thought, well I might as well look behind me and there's a very impressive looking skerry right in the middle of the fjord. Fortunately I saw it before it was too late. I absolutely love what Peter is doing here. It seems so complete. 30 years ago he had the foresight to recognize that a tradition that was stretching back hundreds of years was disappearing and perhaps what's best of all is that he's making sure that that tradition is passed on to apprentices like Johan Atan. So the last time I went on the Hurtigruten was about 40 years ago. I remember it being a very kind of rolly sort of tub and on it there were a handful of students and a couple of farmers and the whole thing was very rusty and dilapidated. I think things have changed a bit since then. Every now and then YouTube throws up something glorious and unexpected. I came across this fascinating film from the 1970s. A boat builder in a lonely shed builds a wooden boat with an axe, a hammer and a couple of other tools using nothing but skill, knowledge and the guiding hand of tradition. This film became a kind of obsession with me and I found my way to Nordfjord where the boat builder in the film originally worked. This is fairly typical of the places that the boats would have been built. It often wasn't that there was professional boat builders. People would build boats as well as running their farms. This particular boat is from about 1850. It would have been both rowed and sailed. The point was to get somewhere, not to go sailing. So if you wanted to get to the other side of the fjord and the wind was blowing in the correct direction then it made a lot of sense to put a sail up. If you wanted to get to the opposite side of the fjord and the wind was blowing in the wrong direction then you'd take the sail down and you'd row. I'm here in the heart of Norway at Nordfjord Eid to visit another Klinker boat. But this isn't any old Klinker boat. This is the largest Viking ship ever found. She's 30 meters long, six meters big and she needs a crew of 48 oarsmen and women to power her. It's not just a Klinker boat. It's not even a big Klinker boat. This is a proper big ship. The Mikkelbust ship was discovered in 1874 by a young archaeologist Anders Laranger. When he excavated this mound he found the burnt remains of a massive Viking ship. And even though he was only 26 and archaeology was still in its infancy he had the foresight to understand that it wasn't so much the grave treasures but the ship itself that was of the greatest significance. And over the last few years a monumental project has been taking place where the ship has been reconstructed. This is the Klinker construction technique that we've become really used to. Planks, in this case pine, clenched together with nails and roves. And the planks are really wide and there's a lot of them. I'm told there's something like 7,000 nails and roves. So this is where the crew sit. That's 48 oarsmen and women. Yep, 48 oarsmen and women all rowing in time. Hopefully. But there are plans to sail her. Trees are being sourced for a mass that is a massive 50 feet long and a sail is being made. And what a sail. It's going to be 45 feet wide and it's going to be made of wool, hand woven of course by a team of weavers over two or three years. It's kind of not surprising that the sail was considered the most valuable part of a Viking ship. And when all that is put together the oceans await. Look out. I never quite got to row on the Viking boat but the next part of the journey took me to meet old friends Svein Arne and Bjorn Steiner. Bjorn Steiner lent me a beautiful boat built by his father and I spent a magnificent day on the fjord rowing in one of the Mikkelboost's tiny descendants. Okay so this is this is Svein Arne who lives next to Bjorn Steiner and he's helping me this morning get the boat out but he said that he doesn't want to come out rowing. I don't think he likes wooden boats that much. He says he's not afraid. This is where I first learned to row. When I was so young that I thought that kind of thing was just normal. After a day's work raking silage and milking cows I would row away from the farm and fish and explore the small islands dotted around the fjord. So over there towards those mountains is Møller which is the big town and when I was here in 1982 Svein Arne's father was 80 in his 80s. He was an incredible man he had lost his hand in a sawmill accident so he had one hand and a hook and yet he'd managed to build himself a house and he told me that he used to go to Møller in a boat just like this well the one I used to row and that he would sell meat and milk presumably and goods in the market and he'd there by rowing and sailing regularly and that was quite usual to do that. Tore had told me that the Forbundekusten scheme was all about encouraging young boat builders of the future and at the guide boat museum I found a very exciting example of this philosophy in action. So this is my project for the scholarship which is to build a big gate boat and been working on this one for a year and it's bigger than all of the gate boats who exist today but 200 years ago there were even bigger ones than this one. So this is the biggest guide boat that's been built since? Probably over 100 years. And what's going to happen to this boat when it's finished? First I'm going to sail a lot with it try to learn as much as possible from the process and then the museum is probably going to inherit the boat after the project is done to to take people out and learn teach people how to sail. Yeah I feel like it's been finished for a long time now but it's still something left before I can... But it'll be someday when you're out there on the fjords sailing the boat for the first time that will be a very special day. Yeah yeah. It's pretty early in the morning I just got off a bus that's taken me from Trondheim to Stadsbygdkirke and somewhere around here is the museum of Kusten Arv. Oh I can see I can see a boat over there. 830 years with boat building so we have built at that time we built 280 boats big and small. The smallest one was seven feet and the biggest one we have built in here is 62 feet. And you have good orders? We only build on orders. That's us. The boat builders here are employed at the museum Kusten Arv as boat builders. So when we count, I can say, offers and offers on boat prices, we count as if we're just building a boat. But it's also that we work at a museum and have mediation, we have an audience, tourists, school class, everyone who is involved in boat building. So in that way we spend more time on the boat than we would normally build. Einar told me that this is a boat that just came in the other day. It's a Sámi boat and it was a boat that's used in the lake and in the rivers. One of the interesting things about this boat is the question about whether to restore it or whether to build a copy. And there's very much a view that with this boat it's much better not to restore it but to keep it as it is. And if you start to restore the boat it's taking away from the history of the boat. Funnier to build a new boat. You're learning more to build a new boat than to restore an old one because when you're bending the boards and you can feel a little what the other boat builder thought about when he built the boat. I've been given a lot more responsibility and freedom than I expected. A lot of trust is put into me. Everything is so precise and so well adapted but at the same time everything is so hard to describe and put into words and put down on a page. And I just think that's so fascinating. Building boats like this you can't make a book or an instruction manual. You have to learn it from someone who knows how to do it. Because there are simply things you just have to feel and understand that it's impossible to learn without being taught by an expert. But at the same time it's about thinking about the new use of these traditional boats. Is there a big market ahead? If you think about environmental friendliness and green tourism Despite the massive length of the coastline, the Tlingit tradition stretches right up to the far arctic north. Naiden is 217 miles north of the arctic circle and 1100 miles from Oslo. It's the home of the Skolt Sami people. Even this far north there is a rich tradition of Tlingit boat building. Well this museum is about Skolt Sami. It is the story of the Skolt Sami that live nowadays in three different countries. Finland, Norway and Russia. The main goal is to tell about the Skolt Sami, get them more visibility, but also to make help the revitalize the Skolt Sami language. Boats are a key part of that culture. This is a river boat from the Naiden river. And you were telling me earlier that it was probably influenced by a lot of different kind of cultures. Yes, it's like most of the boats in northern Norway. It's a mixture of Sami, Norwegian and Kvansk, who come from Finland. And you've got the original boat in the workshop beside you. Yes. What age is that? When was that built? It's this one. It's quite new actually, built in 1962. So we don't know exactly where the measuring points were in the old boat, because we have no none of the boat builders live anymore. So we use the measure points that we know from the Norland sports, who is in the front on the where the rowers sit in the front and in the aft and one in the middle. Yeah, it's reindeer. It's from the reindeer, here from the reindeer. We mixed with tar. And that's special for a Sami boat? Yes, at least for this area. It was very nice when we first started and nobody had heard about this Naiden boat. And then we started to find this one and we started to build this boat and then people came and said, ah, I have a boat in the back. Brilliant. So we have four here. Back in the museum, Tapio told me about an even older Klinker boat, which I fell in love with. A Skolt Sami busk boat from Passvik. Passvik is now one of the border rivers between Norway and Russia. And this boat was found adrift in the fjord in the 1880s. I think that this boat is the next step from the first boats that people here used to make from animal skin, because the technique they used for making this boat, it was sewing. This boat has been sewn together. There is not one gram of metal in this boat. I understand that there's sort of talk about the possibility of building a copy of this one. Is that something you would like to see? Oh, yes. And not only me. I think everybody here, both in Sørvaranger municipality and also the neighbor counties, people would come from near and far to participate in this and if possible, to be able to learn how to make it at home in their own garage. In the museum, I saw what so much of this trip had been about. Side by side, two boats. A new, fresh wooden clinker boat being built today for tomorrow. And an exquisite craft made from hand-hewn planks sewn together with skills that stretch back to our very first adventures on the water. And now I've come to Bryggen, which is in the heart of Bergen and really was the original port. I guess I'd hope to find lots of salty characters with great stories hobbling around on wooden legs. But actually, it's kind of full of tourists like me. I started off making this film about clinker boat building, interested in looking at the heritage of clinker boat building, but also thinking that maybe it's the future. And I've got to be honest, sitting here in the port in Bergen is a bit of a reality check. Surrounded by these very expensive, very plastic boats, I'm feeling a bit silly really. You know, I kind of get it when people say, well, what are you on about, you know, replacing plastic boats with wooden boats? It's just never going to happen. And, you know, quite frankly, I think they've probably got a bit of a point. But I do hold on to one thing. If I'd been sitting here 75, maybe even 50 years ago, the whole place would have been full of wooden boats. That's only 50 years ago. That's kind of in my lifetime. And set that against the 1500 years of clinker boat building heritage. Well, that's nothing. That's just a blip. Because we cannot go on filling our oceans with plastic. We can't go on building boats that take 10,000 years to disintegrate. We need to find a material, a material that we can build boats from, that can be bent into the strange and beautiful and fascinating shapes of boats. We need to find a material that can be, that when it's kind of finished with, it doesn't wreck the environment. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could find a material that even renewed itself, where the factories in which it was produced were actually fascinating and beautiful and lovely places to go to? Where on earth are we going to find a material like that? It's the evening before I'm due to leave Norway. And it's the national day, I've come down to the opera house, which is this just beautiful and amazing collection of modern glass and concrete and steel. But nestled between the opera house and the very, very new and modern Munch museum. I've come across this incredible project. And it's just so inspiring to see amongst all of this kind of incredible, but maybe slightly oppressive modern world, that the traditional wooden boat is still there. It's really inspiring. And it certainly is the project kind of looking to the future that I was hoping to find. It's not the fact that it's old, but it's the set of knowledge that kind of fascinates me. You get close to wildlife. You use your own body. You don't pollute along the way. And you don't pollute whenever this boat is finished. That might, it might just be wishful thinking. But I think wooden boats and traditional sailing might make a comeback sometime in the future. I've had quite literally the journey of a lifetime.