When you picture a Viking longship slicing through the North Sea, the image that most people keep in mind is a sleek, low‑lying hull whose wooden planks overlap like the scales of a dragon. That overlapping technique is called clinker (or “lap‑strake”) construction. By contrast, the famous English warships Mary Rose and Victory were built using caravel construction, in which a solid internal frame is erected first and the planks are then fastened to it, leaving a smooth outer skin. At first glance the dominance of caravel in later medieval shipbuilding might suggest that clinker was a primitive, “poorer” method. The reality is more nuanced. Clinker and caravel each have…

My name is Erik. I am the son of a king and a queen, but my first memories are not of silk banners or a gilded cradle. They are of the smell of damp earth, the calloused hand of a woman named Gunnhildr guiding my small fingers to plant a seed, and the rough, kind eyes of a man named Leifr showing me how to hold an axe without trembling. The story of how I came to be in that longhouse, the youngest of three children when my blood was royal, is a story of whispers and winter. It is a story my foster parents, Leifr and Gunnhildr never told…

When the first frost of winter brushed the fjord with a thin veil of ice, I—Erik, son of Akbar—stood in the long shadows of the forge, the heat licking the night air like a living thing. The clang of hammer on iron was a drumbeat to my heart, a reminder that the weight of my lineage rested not on a crown but on the steel I would soon bear. My father’s beard was still thick with ash when he first taught me to shape a haft. “A blade is nothing without its spine,” he would rasp, his voice as rough as the oak that we split for firewood. “A good…