The “Old Viking Ship“, also known as simply the Viking Drakkar, is a ruined Viking Drakkar.
Description[]
Retrieved either by Donald Duck and his nephew from an iceberg in the polar cycles, or from a final resting place in Herring, Norway where it had been buried in 920 C.E., depending on the account one chooses to follow, the Old Viking Ship was the vessel sailed by Olaf the Blue to the Coast of Labrador, in North America, in 901 C.E. He concealed a map serving as the ship's log in the hull, a fact recorded in a long-lost fragment of his saga rediscovered in 1952 by Azure Blue. By then, the Ship was one of the star artifacts exhibited in the Duckburg Museum, where it stayed ever since.
Behind the scenes[]
The Old Viking Ship and the historically priceless documents within were was thought up as a plot device by Carl Barks in the 1949 story Luck of the North. Two years later, he followed through with The Golden Helmet (released in 1952), though he did not appear to anticipate readers recalling the precise details of the Drakkar's earlier recovery, as Donald at the beginning of Helmet seems unaware of the existence of the maps and the ship is said to have been found in Norway rather than in the polar circles.