Foundation supports the Sea Stallion with 33,000 EURO

The Augustinus Foundation just announced that it sponsors the historic Viking Ship voyage from Roskilde to Dublin.

The Augustinus Foundation just announced that it sponsors the historic Viking Ship voyage from Roskilde to Dublin.

One of Denmark’s significant benefactors of common and charitable ends, the Augustinus Foundation, enters project ‘Full-blood at sea’, and with a generous grant of 33,000 EURO helps realize the greatest feat of experimental archaeology ever undertaken.

With a complete budget in the area of  2.5 million EURO, the voyage from Roskilde to Dublin and back, needs of all the economic assistance possible.

“We are very pleased to receive the grant from the Augustinus Foundation. The Viking Ship Museum already has counted every penny twice and placed a considerable part of the museum’s resources in the project. We do that because it is so tremendously important to us to see this thing through – the voyage and the research following in its wake,” says Preben Rather Sørensen, who is the leader of the project for the Viking Ship Museum.

“The Viking Ship Museum distinguishes itself from most research institutions by the facet that we so to speak that work in the scale 1:1. When we want to know how the Viking’s build their ships – well, then we reconstruct a ship. When we want to know how the ships sailed, and what it meant for the Vikings’ ability to control an area as vast as they did – we go sailing; set out across the North Sea, round the North of Scotland and on to Dublin, the way it happens July 1st this year with the Sea Stallion”.

“Economic aid like this is a hearty slap on the back. We see the donation from the Augustinus Foundation as recognition of the research and communication; some of the trademarks of the Viking Ship Museum,” Preben Rather Sørensen concludes.

The Sea Stallion of Glandalough measuring 30 metres is the longest reconstruction of a Viking ship in the world. The 1st of July ship and a crew of 65 set out on journey of 1,000 nautical miles that no one has dared in a 1,000 years. It takes place exactly 50 years after the five Skuldelev-ships were excavated on the bottom of Roskilde Fjord. The Sea Stallion is a reconstruction of the Skuldelev 2-wreck, a war ship built in 1042 in the Irish capital Dublin, a city founded by Vikings.

By: Henrik Kastoft