Sunday 25th June 2017 – Aalborg, Denmark

Our target today was Lindholm Hoje, a Viking burial ground and it was dead good. We timed our visit for the Lindholm Viking Festival when a Viking market is held. We travelled by bus with one change in the centre of the town and then walked the short distance to the site. We knew that the burial ground was to our left as we walked up but couldn’t see it, instead we spotted the Viking market and the museum first. It wasn’t raining, but could later, so we went into the market. We paid an admittance fee and were told that it also covered entrance to the museum, which was interesting as the fee was less than the standard museum entrance fee!

The market was really fun – everything Viking was on sale and there were Viking warriors fighting. Two warriors came off the battleground with one saying to the other “it doesn’t hurt for too long” – the other warrior didn’t look convinced! Lots of artisans were demonstrating their trade – weaving, tool-making, glass bead manufacture and fur skins. How, you are asking, can you demonstrate fur skin production? Well, you kill a fox, hang it up to drain the blood and then you skin it. And this happened, all in front of the public, including children. I must explain that the Danish are much less squeamish about this sort of thing than the British. Public dissections are quite popular with children and families and the Danish do not anthropomorphise animals, they are simply animals. For lunch we opted for the lamb on flat bread with a great selection of fresh herbs – we thought that this was a safe bet as we didn’t know the Danish word for ‘fox’.

We then moved on to the small, but good, museum before we headed for the site itself, on the hill behind the museum. The graveyard holds more than 600 graves from the 5^th to the 10^th century, from the Iron Age to the Viking Age. Many of the graves are simple mounds but others are more elaborate from mounds surrounded by stones, to circular and oval (female graves) and triangular and ship-shaped graves (male graves). Some of the stone settings have a central menhir (standing stone). The graves paint an impressive picture of stone patterns laid out on the slope of a hill with the older graves at the top and the more recent at the bottom. They would certainly have been much less impressive had the site not been covered in deep sand about 1000 AD and then abandoned. When they excavated the site, they discovered a field complete with plough marks and the wheel tracks of a cart and the hoof marks of the horse that pulled it.

Photos: Viking musicians entertain the visitors at the market; The dead fox waiting to be skinned; The Vikings had slaves and this young one is working for a glass bead maker – his mother, I suspect; A triangular grave with central menhir for a Viking man, the significance of the shape didn’t occur to me until I was writing this blog; A ship burial with the tallest stone at the prow; I didn’t realise that Vikings had bicycles ……. or bags from designer stores.