Bluetooth’s Kingdom

This article is from World Archaeology issue 126

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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. In these places, I was introduced to the legacies of the Viking kings Ongendus, Godfred, Harald Bluetooth, and Sven Forkbeard.

This runic stone was installed at Jellinge in the 10th century AD on the orders of King Harald Bluetooth. It includes an early reference to Denmark, saying ‘King Harald commanded this monument to be made to the memory of Gorm, his father, and in memory of Thyra, his mother – that Harald who won the whole of Denmark for himself, and Norway, and made the Danes Christian’.

Hedeby (Haithabu)

Denmark enters European history with King Godfred. According to the 9th-century Frankish Annals, Godfred made his mark in AD 808 by taking the traders from Reric, a port near Kiel on the Baltic Sea, and forcibly moving them to Hedeby. This was an inland bay at the eastern end of Denmark’s southern frontier wall, known as the Danevirke. Godfred’s action roused the Emperor Charlemagne’s ire. By this time an old man, the Carolingian Emperor raised an army and brought along with it a gift from the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid: a white Indian elephant called Abul-Abbas. Charlemagne, it would seem, perceived that Godfred posed a threat to his burgeoning northern economic strategy. The elephant died before any confrontation occurred. So too did Godfred at the hands of his peers, who sued for peace with the Franks. Hedeby, rather than Reric, outlived this political squall to become, in the 20th century, one of the cornerstones of European medieval archaeology.

The reconstructed buildings at Hedeby provide a sense of how the Viking town would have appeared, and host re-enactments and a fair.

Situated today on the bay south of Schleswig, Hedeby (or in Old German, Haithabu) lies just inside the north German border, conquered by the Prussians in the Holstein-Schleswig war of 1864. German it may be, but its ethos remains Danish. A hundred years of excavations here have filled an exquisite museum with fine early medieval treasures from the Viking Age, as well as a largely reconstructed boat. The excavations have also given purpose to a small nucleus of reconstructed buildings, associated with which are re-enactments and a Viking fair. In recent times Hedeby has justifiably won UNESCO World Heritage Site status.

Hedeby is a beautiful place – both serene and majestic, contained within an immense half-circular rampart. Much of this majesty derives from unparalleled scholarship that has embroidered a remarkable history. Few places in Europe have been studied in such depth. We know a great deal about its formative years in the late 8th century, its 9th-century early urban topography, its harbour, the arrival of Bishop Ansgar to found a church here in 849/854 (a 24kg bell was found in the harbour, but the church probably lies under the large Romanesque church near the modern car park), its episodic transformation as the town adapted to trade with the eastern Baltic and the Rus, and finally in the mid-11th century its abandonment in favour of Schleswig on the north side of the sweeping bay. Its immense rampart dates to a halfway point in its history as an emporium, to the mid-10th century. The Danevirke – Denmark’s long southern border wall – was connected to it, making the town a kind of neutral point on the frontier. The neutrality was ignored in the 970s when the Ottonian Franks seized it, only to be dislodged in the next decade by the Danish king Harald Bluetooth.

As the museum and reconstructed dwellings and workshops make clear, Hedeby is the archetypal Viking town. It served as the interface between the Frankish empire and the Danes, between the West and the East. More than any other place, its archaeology introduced us to the Vikings as merchants, traders, and peerless craftsmen, impresarios who long before Columbus reached eastwards to Byzantium and westwards to Vinland. Peace-loving citizens aside, it must be said however, that pride of place in Hedeby’s museum goes to a warship excavated in its harbour. Unlike the many other finds on display, it speaks to the Vikings we are familiar with. The maritime archaeologist Ole Crumlin-Pedersen believed that this ship was a longship of royal standard, designed for high-speed sailing and rowing in relatively protected waters. This royal vessel was built around AD 982 (following dendrochronological dating) and, judging by the wear and some repairs, must have been in service for 5-15 years before it finally sunk sometime between AD 990 and 1010. Based on its date of construction, it must originally have been commissioned by King Harald Bluetooth. Its loss around AD 1000, then, is likely to coincide with the deployment of the royal fleet, the Þingmannaleið, for the conquest of England during the reign of Bluetooth’s irascible son, Sven Forkbeard.