Viking Connections

Orkney's culture and way of life was entirely that of a Norse earldom by the end of the ninth century. 

 At the Viking ship museum at Roskilde I noticed that many of the smaller reconstructed Viking boats resembled the Orkney Yole design, which was in turn built and used by the Hudson Bay Company Orkneymen at York factory.

The students at the museum build boats based on the archaeological evidence and reconstruct everything from longships...

...to boats carved from single logs...

...and early boat designs with hulls of expanded timber.

The Earldom of Orkney was held for the Norwegian (and later Danish) Crown until 1468, when the impoverished Christian I, King of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, gave Orkney to the Scottish Crown as part of a marriage agreement with King James III.