Viking longboats had shields mounted on their sides

The Viking Heart. 2021. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=pQbrDwAAQBAJ&source=gbs_api

... Their lives were dedicated to prayer and meditation, and grateful local nobles donated gifts of gold and silver and precious gems to the monastery as gestures of devotion. The monks on the beach probably didn't notice the shields mounted ... “An absorbing and humane account . . . Mr. Herman is at pains to remind us that the Viking world was never just a stage for mayhem. It was, he says, ‘about daring to reach for more than the universe had gifted you, no matter the odds and the obstacles.’ In short: We might all take our own life’s cue from the Viking heart.”—The Wall Street Journal From a New York Times best-selling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist, a sweeping epic of how the Vikings and their descendants have shaped history and America Scandinavia has always been a world apart. For millennia Norwegians, Danes, Finns, and Swedes lived a remote and rugged existence among the fjords and peaks of the land of the midnight sun. But when they finally left their homeland in search of opportunity, these wanderers—including the