Emhar Gokstad Viking Ship

And so, the entire population of 9th Century Tromso puts to sea. Was Tromso around in the 9th Century? I honestly don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised.

This is, of course, the Emhar 1/72nd scale Gokstad Viking longship, with the additional Emhar Viking ship crew. It was actually a fun kit to assemble, and I thought it offered good fit and good engraved detail. The figurehead is especially nice, but I didn't capture it close-up in any photographs. I generally find ships fiddly and hard to build, and sailing ships especially so, but as sailing ships go, this one was actually pretty easy. Not a whole lot of rigging and no ratlines, which usually drive me to fits of screaming madness.

But the lack of rigging was offset by the plentitude of crew. I count 34 crewmen (one oarsman had to be deleted because the unusual yard arrangement was in the way), and 34 Vikings is a heap of painting for someone who doesn't consider himself to be a figure painter. I don't know that Vikings were really this colorful - sources appear to disagree, and a whole load of guys wearing brown in a brown ship would have produced a sort of brown hole, if you will, that would capture color and prevent it from escaping.

The Emhar figures are made out of some kind of plastic that is softer and more flexible than styrene, but harder and more poseable than polyethylene. The mold parting lines tedious to clean up, but the poseable nature of the figures made it somewhat easier to match them to the angles of the oars than I had feared. I only broke the arm off one Viking while posing him, and was able to adjust their arms a bit after they were painted without losing too much paint, so on the whole, I think I approve of this new Emhar mystery plastic.

The sail was a very shiny and smooth vacuum-formed thing. I painted it by hand, without too much regard for coverage or straightness of line, theorizing that a real sail would look pretty sad after a few days at sea anyway. To produce a halfway realistic "billow" in the sail I had to drill a small and highly ahistorical hole in the bottom of the sail and tie it to the figurehead with a piece of fishing line, which is painfully obvious in the bottom picture. Eventually I'm going to replace it with something finer and less noticeable, but I have a lot of "eventually" tasks that I never seem to get to.

All in all, yeah, Vikings. It's cool!

PS: The odd board-like oddment is their gangplank, I believe, and I stowed it on the raised oar storage trees even though I'm not sure that would have been actual Viking practice.

PPS: I painted and am in the process of weathering the overlapped shields that the kit supplied. I may or may not install them. The instructions say that the shields were only overlapped along the wales when the oars were shipped, but I've seen models (by better modelers than me) that show them both ways. We'll see.