The Vikings Ship in the British Museum
The Vikings were actually an ethnic group of people from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, who raided monasteries, towns, and churches for many reasons. Most of the places they attacked were located on coasts, as it was much easier to reach there. After docking their ships, the Vikings would cloud over the communities living in that place, loot and kill, and return quickly to their ships and disappear.
If you go for a British Museum Vikings tour, you would be able to see a 37-meter-long Vikings warship displayed in the museum. Nothing like this was ever unveiled in the UK. In fact, this is also the longest Vikings ship that was ever discovered. This ship is titled Roskilde 6, as it was uncovered from the banks of the river Roskilde fjord located in Denmark. The ship was excavated in 1997 when the works to renovate the Roskilde Viking Ship Museum were going on.
Royal Warship
Most of the timber used for creating the ship got decayed, but they were able to reassemble about 20 percent of the wood for the museum display. They assembled it in a stainless steel frame, which helped them to rebuild the shape and size of the original ship. It is estimated that the original ship was constructed by AD 1025 when the Viking Age was at its peak. This was the time when England, Denmark, Norway, and perhaps some areas of Sweden were unified in the reign of Cnut the Great.
The huge size of the ship and large quantity of resources used in building the ship suggests the ship to be a royal warship. The ship most probably associated with the wars that were fought by Emperor Cnut to prove his power over the relatively brief Empire of North Sea.
Vikings Exhibition
The warship has become a part of the Vikings Exhibition, which you could see during your British Museum Vikings tour. The awesome exhibition would give you an idea of who actually the Vikings were and about their huge cultural network. They had a large number of acquaintances from the Caspian Sea to North Atlantic, which was made during Vikings expansion from the homelands of Scandinavian.
You would also be able to see religious images, axes, and swords, treasures that were looted by the warlords, as well as flamboyant jewelry of made using gold and silver, kept near the huge warship display. The largest Vikings hoard ever to be discovered can also be seen in the exhibition.