Enter a caption (optional)Vikings loved to brawl, with both their enemies and with each other. Viking sagas are filled with tales of even longstanding friends happy to settle disagreements with steel. But as they piled onto their longships to go pillaging, their boarding process was a good deal more civilized than the melee that is modern air travel. For one thing, their storage was one-to-one; when 30 Vikings got onto a ship, there were 30 places to store things.
Enter a caption (optional)That's because they carried their seating on board with them, and their seating doubled as their storage. Prior to boarding, the decks of a ship were bare. Each Viking plunked his chest down at his own rowing position.
Enter a caption (optional)Enough Viking chests have been found, and replicas made, that we can take a look at their design. It's both intelligent and purposeful. The first thing you notice is that the tops were rounded to shed water, and perhaps to provide a modicum of comfort.
Enter a caption (optional)The sides double as the legs, and they're angled to provide stability on the deck of a rolling ship. And unlike a typical storage chest, the bottom is raised several inches off of the ground to keep the contents dry as the ship takes on water in high seas.
Enter a caption (optional)Inside was plenty of room for Vikings to store personal effects like sunscreen, moisturizer and conditioner, plus whatever booty they collected after razing villages.
Vikings often plundered whatever they could get their hands onBelow is a replica modeled after an actual oak chest found on the Oseberg, a recovered Viking ship that dates to roughly 800 AD. (And if the chest seems too short for the famously tall Vikings to sit on, it's worth noting that Vikings actually stood about 5'7", or 1.7 meters; a thousand years ago everyone was a lot shorter, and the Vikings seemed huge in comparison. The Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan wrote that they were "as tall as palm trees," but he was probably around Danny DeVito's size himself.)
Enter a caption (optional)Here we are more than a thousand years after the Vikings designed these chests, and while we have devised aircraft to whisk us thousands of miles away far faster than a longship, we still have not been able to work out one-to-one storage. Say what you want about the Vikings, but they were not the type of folk to take up an overhead bin with one of those pointed-horn helmets.
I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.
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Onboard Storage Design: Why Vikings Never Fought For Overhead Bin Space
Thank you, everyone always thinks that, and it is fricken annoying. If someone didn't create that myth Vikings wouldn't have to correct people all the time.