ΠλέωPléō

The Draken Harald Hårfagre was commissioned for construction in 2010 by the Norwegian oil-and-gas entrepreneur Sigurd Aase. The boat is built in the clinker style. Thick oak timber overlaps to form a hull secured by seventeen thousand iron rivets. The ship spans 35 meters with a 24-meter-tall mast and a 260-square-meter silk sail. It is a true replica of a Viking longboat, tested hard in heavy seas first in 2014 when it successfully made the crossing from Norway to England, and then in 2016 when it crossed the 2,800-nautical-mile span of the North Atlantic.

Then in 2025 the Draken Harald Hårfagre found an unlikely second life appearing in Christopher Nolan’s epic, the Odyssey, released in July 2026. The longboat plays the part of an ancient ship well. The deep brown timber sets the scene: the crew diligently working sail and oar, adrift in the frothy viridian seascapes. Amongst scenes of giants, cyclopes and shades the boat is a refuge for character and viewer alike as it meanders through the mythology of the ancient Mediterranean.

To further enhance the seal and protect it from Teredo or shipworm, ancient shipwrights used a method that would remain standard for two thousand years. An eyewitness account written by the ancient botanist and philosopher Theophrastus describes a Macedonian process around a thousand years after the events of the Iliad. Pitch was collected from piles of "fatwood," or resin-saturated heartwood and stumps of pitch pine. The wood was split, stacked close and sealed under earth so it would heat without burning. If flame broke through, the tar was spoiled. A slow kiln fire ran up to two days under continuous supervision, men climbing to smother any escaping smoke with soil and carrying out sacrifices for tar "abundant and beautiful." What ran out through a channel into a collecting pit was πίσσα, pitch, the product of the wood breaking down at around 300–400°C in the absence of oxygen. Similar resin was found among the cargo of the Uluburun, though as cargo rather than coating; the wreck is not confirmed to have used this method. The pitch was painted under the waterline, leaving the μέλας (melas), meaning darkness or depth, the color of the boats that haunts the Homeric epics.

The result is a firm watertight join between the two planks and a seaworthy vessel. This remained the predominant process of naval construction throughout classical antiquity, and pine tar remains a method of sealant on classic wooden boats.

The melas of the ships is a persistent theme in Homer as the backdrop to the Iliad and a symbol of the Greeks’ entrapment within the camp at Troy. Their way home taunts them for the ten years in which they, in the words of Nolan’s script, "rot on the beach." Yet their pride and desire for honor — or, in the case of Achilles, revenge — prevent them from simply boarding the black hulls and returning to a life of peace and love. Odysseus, in movie and story, returns to his black hull time and time again, yet it is fragile and held together by organic matter susceptible to the elements and fate alike.

Though Odysseus is prophesied to survive, his fate is ultimately out of his control. A juxtaposition to the scheming king of the Iliad, whose cleverness wins the Trojan War, he is now solely at the mercy of the gods. The journey home from Troy meanders through the Aegean and the Greek Archipelago, until they reach open sea. The island of Ithaca is wedged into the western coast of the Greek mainland. They should bear north around the peninsula, but the storms and great winds of Poseidon sweep them off course and he entraps them.

In Nolan’s film, Odysseus only has to prevent his men from eating the cattle of Helios, god of the sun, on the island of Thrinacia and their lives are spared. The winds blow favorably and they sail right to the beach. That favorable wind persists, however, and Odysseus and his men are unable to leave the island. For months they linger until their food is spent. The men, starving and desperate, eat the cattle and the wind acquiesces at once, allowing them to leave the island. Their thievery enrages Zeus, who sinks the ship, their final refuge, with a thunderbolt, leaving only Odysseus alive.

Greek rigging put sailors at the time truly at the mercy of the wind, and it is for good reason Poseidon is probably the most revered deity of the time. The drama and pettiness of Greek gods and Titans allegorically connect the people of the Ancient World to the forces of the natural world they cannot understand. Shelter, boat, food could all inexplicably vanish in an instant, yet they still set out to navigate these waters.

There are few metaphors more apt to describe man’s reliance on the elements than the sail, and the Odyssey is truly a story in which humanity is at the mercy of the wind.

The μελτέμια, or meltemi, is a real natural phenomenon in which a consistent northerly wind blows down across the Aegean through the summer months. This appears to be the speculated path of Odysseus and his crew, and the myth very much somehow becomes rooted in plausibility. The Mycenaean sailor would be impacted greatly by the meltemi, or a fore-facing wind on the island of Thrinacia.

Unlike most winds of the Mediterranean that would wane in the evening, the meltemi — or, as the Greeks called it, the Etesian wind — persisted at night, and it is capable of blowing strong. This presents the ancient sailor a considerable challenge in navigating the treacherous straits and channels of the Aegean. The wind is capable of elevating waves and currents, so the crude steering of these vessels, particularly at sail, became considerably more challenging.

It is largely believed that the boom-footed square rig, a large square sail bent to an upper yard along its head and laced or attached to a second rigid spar or boom at the lower yard, was the predominant rigging in late Bronze Age Greece. This enclosed the sail between the two spars. The spars made it easy to manage the sail: lines would run up the mast and the crew could easily hoist it. There are several disadvantages of the rigging. The rigidity of the boom made the rigging unable to easily spill wind by easing the sheet. The boom itself was essentially fixed, so sailors would have no means of clawing against the wind, as would be necessary both to navigate northward out of the meltemi to Ithaca and to escape their fate on the island of Thrinacia. Lastly, a fixed boom provided a literal hazard in the wrong conditions, becoming an uncontrollable lever that was compounded by the shallow-draft hulls of the boats.

The boom-footed rig is never described in Homer. At the time of writing, the predominant rigging would have been the loose-footed square rig. The large square sail would be laced in and ropes would push the top spar up the mast, allowing sailors some maneuverability. They never reference a boom, implying a brailed system, meaning that the bottom of the sail was secured by rope, or brail, which runs through the sail in rings. This allowed much more flexibility in maneuvering the sail position in a variety of conditions. Homer describes the rigging of his own era, not the one he is writing about.

The physical limitations visible in the archeological record do in fact lend some credence to the epic. It would not have been particularly challenging for one ship of a massive army leaving Troy to get blown so off course it inspired a tale told generation after generation, until being penned within the Odyssey.

Homer writes about grand men. Crew and common soldiers appear primarily as vehicles to power the heroes’ war and ships. Women are described as prizes of war, traded and used. These accessories are often devices that allow the heroes to show their virtues. In the Iliad the commoner Thersites speaks up for the Greek soldiers, insulting Agamemnon and pleading for home. Odysseus ruthlessly mocks and threatens to beat him, calling Thersites an ugly, disorderly man despised by all, enforcing the authority of the ruling class. In Nolan’s Odyssey, Odysseus is painted as a benevolent ruler trying and failing to protect his men from their fate.