Roskilde was founded in the 980's by Harald Bluetooth, and became the home of the Danish royalty. The Bluetooth communications protocol that is enabling me, at this very moment, to type this blog using a wireless keyboard, was named after Roskilde's Harald Bluetooth. I am not making this up!
The Bluetooth logo is comprised of the runes for Harald's initials.
But I digress.
We went to Roskilde to see two things: the Viking Ship Museum and the Roskilde Cathedral.
Roskilde is about 20 miles west of Copenhagen, so we took a train. It was easy to figure out how to take the train - even for dumb tourists. The walk from the train station to the Viking Ship Museum is about 1 mile if you know the way. We probably walked 1.5 miles, but we got to see more than other people. Part of the walk was along a pleasant pedestrianized shopping street. Everything was closed, though, because it was Sunday.
At the Viking Ship Museum we bought our tickets, looked at sme of the exhibits, looked around the gift shop, and otherwise killed time until the English tour started. After the tour we saw a short film and wandered around the hands-on exhibits where you could make something out of wood, make rope, watch a blacksmith, and so on.
Here is what makes this museum so special:
One thousand years ago the good people of Roskilde, who happened to be Vikings, needed extra protection from invaders. Roskilde was (and still is) located at the end of a long fjord. There is an island in the middle of the fjord and there are three channels leading through the shallow water to the town. The Roskildeans made a barrier so that only one channel culd be used to approach the town. It was the trickiest channel of the three and only people who lived there could navigate it.
How did they make this barricade? They sunk a number of old, worn-out ships in the other two channels.
Fast forward about 950 years. People living in the area were aware of a blockage but they believed it was caused by a single sunken ship from the 1400's or later. In the 1960's a project was initiated to excavate the ship. To everyone's surprise, the sunken ship turned out to be five Viking ships from around 1050. The archeologists set up a cofferdam and carefully began excavating the area and documenting the location of each fragment. The wood was preserved using polyethylene glycol and a 25-year effort to piece the ships together began.
Dendochronology (dating by tree rings) was used to identify the age and provenance of the ships.
The ships are graceful and well-made. Apparently they were very seaworthy, also.
One of the things that made this discovery so stunning was the fact that each ship was very different. There were cargo ships and warships, ships from Denmark, Norway and Ireland, and ships of different sizes. They even found pieces of rope.
Since the initial excavations, nine more Viking ships have been found in the Roskilde harbor area.
Stay tuned for the rest of this . . .
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