ABSTRACT
Geography has made shipbuilding and seafaring essential for the Scandinavians throughout history. In a landscape where the waterways offered much more ready communication lines than most of the inland, boats and ships were fundamental tools for survival and societal development. It was the presence of water – the many straits and fjords, and the ready access to the coast almost everywhere – that distinguished Denmark from the Continent and made it part of Scandinavia. State formation was dependent on ships, as only with ships some degree of control could be exercised over the populated, coastal stretches of Norway and Sweden, and over the archipelagic Denmark.
