The Tune Ship: Lonphort: Tuneskipet

for voice, flute, accordion, fiddle, 3 violins, viola, cello and double bass

The Tune Ship is the name of one of the three Viking longboats housed in the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo. While the other two ships in the museum, the Gokstad Ship and the Oseberg Ship, are named after where they were found, no indication is given as to where the Tune Ship's name comes from. All three ships were used as burial chambers for high-ranking male and female Vikings and were brought to land and buried with the bodies and many of their household goods on board. In Irish, a longphort is the name of a Viking settlement, sometimes only temporary - a place to moor ships while making a raid, sometimes more permanent like the settlements at Limerick, Cork and Waterford. The two parts of the word, taken independently, mean ship (long) and tune or jig (port). Tuneskipet is the Norwegian name given to the Tune Ship in the museum.

I have taken the imaginary journey of the Tune Ship as the theme for this piece, digging it out of the blue clay in which it was buried and sending it back to the west coast of Ireland, powered by oar and sail. Navigating using wave-patterns, seabirds and landmarks we reach the south west corner of Ireland and ransack the monastery on Sceilig Mhichil. We explore the battlefield where the formalised warfare of the Irish is gradually replaced by the Vikings' 'total war'. Finally, we settle down, and end up speaking 'Gic-goc' - a mixture of Irish and our native Norwegian while the Irish bards exchange ideas with Scandanavian poets, returning eventually to Oslo where a Viking queen in a red dress is buried on board.

My visit to the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo was part of a trip Aoife Granville and I took to Norway in June this year. We also traveled to Harstad in the North of Norway to meet Arvid and Knut-Erik from the Midnight Sun Trio and to experience the midnight sun for ourselves. There we found a place with many similarities to our home town of Dingle before tourism hit - a small town surrounded by mountains relying heavily on fishing. The most interesting experience for me there was watching a five-mile rowing race in small wooden boats that do not seem to have changed since Viking times. While similar in some ways to naomhog racing we see at home, these two-man boats raced for over an hour, going twice around an enormous harbour. This, more than anything, made real for me the idea that the Vikings did and could travel regularly all those miles from Norway to Ireland by sea. After all, the rowers we saw were over a thousand years out of practice and still didn't even seem out of breath when they finished!