Bluetooth’s Kingdom

I have embarked on an odyssey to revisit Viking Denmark decades after I first became familiar with it through editing Klavs Randsborg’s landmark book The Viking Age in Denmark (1980). Randsborg’s book was regarded as heresy at the time, but as my trip to the key places in his narrative now shows, dates may have changed, but his world of evolving civic sophistication and state formation has truly ousted the Hollywood image of Vikings as violent warmongers. Today, it is not hard to trace the roots of modern Denmark in the new museology of its major Viking Age sites. My tour took me to Hedeby, Ribe, Aggersborg, Fyrkat, Lindholm Høje, Aarhus, and the extraordinary new museum at Moesgaard. I